YouTube and PRS Spat

10 Mar 2009 | 10.58 Europe/London

YouTube have blocked access for UK users to many music videos after failing to come to an agreement with the UK's Performing Rights Society (PRS) over royalty payments to artists.

Reading between the lines it appears that YouTube were looking for a lower fee per view to offset the dramatic growth in viewer numbers. Having failed to come to an agreement YouTube unilaterally acted to block access, presumably to avoid liability to claims of broadcasting unauthorised material.

[ YouTube blog ] [ PRS Statement ]

tcjason says:

It seems to me that the entire system in which copy protection and digital rights are managed needs to be overhauled. In my opinion the industry currently treats its customer base in a 'guilty until proven innocent' manner; DRM on music, annoying anti-piracy movies on DVD's, root kit installations on software and activation based installations on games. All of which are hacked out/bypassed on a pirated version. I'm utterly disappointed that only of late have the big companies within these industries started to act. If they had realised the potential of the Internet when it was emerging, maybe we would have been celebrating online content rather than playing catch-up and suing each other over it.

10 Mar 2009 | 15.46 Europe/London

TheBTman says:

Whilst I appreciate the industry position on this, I also think its utter stupidity for the industry to demand such high pv fees from Youtube, particuarly while BitTorrent and other Video upload sites exist. If the industry doesnt behave in a friendly tolerant fashion towards legal sharing sites, then the illegal ones will prosper to an even greater extent than they do now.

11 Mar 2009 | 13.57 Europe/London