Performers Win Royalty Action from YouTube

Yesterday we learned that a British "society" that collects royalties for people who write, publish and perform music will get a cut of the action when artists' music is used as "backing music" for clips on Google's YouTube.

This MCPS-PRS Alliance said Thursday that it will license more than 10 million pieces of music to YouTube for use on the British version of YouTube. Nobody's talking dollar amounts but you've got to believe its in the millions of pounds, dollars, bones, or clams or whatever you want to call them.

The idea is to help artists recoup lost money from floundering CD sales, which many analyst firms following the music business attributed to the glut of P2P file sharing. Guess the RIAA waited a tad too long to start cracking down on college students.

The idea is also to help YouTube clean up its act by start paying folks whose content is being viewed by millions on its Web site. Some smaller deals have been inked in the U.S., including one with Warner Music, but this agreement seems to span all of the glorious U.K.

What if the U.S. version of YouTube starts to do the same all-or-nothing coverage for artists in this country? YouTube has enjoyed some degree of latitude under the DMCA, which basically allows the copyrighted content to exist on the site with impunity so long as users, not YouTube or Google, are putting the music on there.

However, should YouTube put advertising on the clips with copyrighted content, it would be liable to pay royalties because, after all, YouTube is profiting from the content. The U.S. loves a fine line.

My feeling is the U.S. version of YouTube will eventually follow its U.K. brother. Anything copyrighted on YouTube U.S. will be subject to artist royalties, which will mean YouTube U.S. will be paying several million dollars in royalties.

Reports have said YouTube has agreed to implement technology that will track music being used, report it and disburse the appropriate funds. That could be where the advantage of being owned by Google could come in. Surely, the leading search vendor could whip that technology up in a heartbeat.

But this needs to be done. Artists need to be paid. Mark Cuban must be silenced.

If YouTube is going to profit from the advertising that goes with the content it offers, we must compensate artists whose copyrighted music becomes part of the content.