Music Companies Are Begging People to Hate Them – Suit against YouTube Mom
July 20, 2008 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
If you needed a reason to categorize music companies as humorless corporate entities that have no heart, here’s a woman being ordered to remove a YouTube video of her kid, because there’s a Universal Music song playing in the background.
The average person has no idea how vigorously these companies pursue documentary makers, store owners and others who have the bad luck to have a song intrude on their work.
Even someone casually humming a song can lead to copyright problems. It’s gotten to the point that filmmakers treat an incidental bit of sound as a tragic occurrence, instead of serendipity.
Technorati Tags: video,youtube,copyright,legal,lawsuits,music,corporate,mother,universal music,rights,public relations
Interesting how lawyers may look at this differently than us PR pros.
If I were part of Universal’s PR group, I’d be praising the Almighty that fine folks like this help increase awareness about our artists FOR FREE! I’d look at it like free product placement and the more people that viewed the video, the happier I’d be about it.
I can see requesting someone to pull a video with your song in it if the video shows anything illegal or completely out of line with the morals of middle America, but this is an example of ridiculousness. It’s power hungry, greedy corporate America types who don’t stop to think about the benefits that something like this offers. Shesh…
David: Vigorous defence of rights is baked into how the music companies (and other media companies) operate. In one sense, it provides a steady income stream, so it’s good business.
But there are roving “enforcers” who monitor the background sound in every commercial establishment they can find, pouncing on anyone who is playing music, or allowing music to be played, on site.
Ditto for every form of entertainment. Keeping track of rights, and making sure every copyright owner gets paid, is a huge part of running an entertainment enterprise these days.
I’m sure there are valid reasons why they feel they have to have zero tolerance in the unauthorized use of their content. But the fact they haven’t found some way to allow individuals some leeway in the citizen-generated media world shows that they aren’t trying hard enough.