Google Pays So You Can Play YouTube Videos
May 20, 2009
Who pays? Google. TechDirt’s story “YouTube Ordered to Pay $1.6 Million To ASCAP” reported that a legal shoe dropped. You can read the full story here. For me the interesting point was:
ASCAP gets to go in and demand cash from anyone who benefits from music anywhere, and a judge sorta randomly makes up reasons to give them cash. I know that ASCAP supporters will claim that the money is for songwriters, not the record labels, and it’s important and blah blah blah. But the whole system of such collective licenses is a mess that it makes it close to impossible to do anything with music without getting yourself into a huge licensing hole. For more than a century now, Congress and the courts seem to look at every innovation and simply slap another license fee on it, and leave it to the courts to sort out any mess. All of these license fees add up to a massive tax on innovation that divert money from good business models and into the hands of collections societies, who siphon off a piece and often don’t do a very good job distributing that cash. It’s a massively inefficient model that’s simply not needed.
Economy day for the Google.
Stephen Arnold, May 20, 2009
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