When YouTube was first launched it was a place for the everyman to come and share his creations with the rest of the world. Where adding you favorite song to your video made it unique and personal, or making a new music video for that song was your way of paying tribute to its authors.
But with its rise to mainstream fame, YouTube must now answer to huge corporations who want a piece of the pie. Here is an example of how the large recording companies want to silence the little guy:
Major recording studios are filing lawsuits against YouTube for “failing to protect” their copyrights. The mega music studios are upset that there are people out there enjoying their music and not paying them what they think is due. This forces YouTube into a sticky legal situation; they can either pay up or shut down. The Music studios want a licensing fee to allow people on YouTube to upload their copyrighted material. Of course, the other solution that may arise from this is that YouTube turns into a quasi police state where all material is heavily scanned and censored. As of right now, videos that have copyright songs in them rarely stay up longer than a few days and some of them won’t even upload because of the software that YouTube uses to scan each uploading video.
