YouTube, EMI Make Nice

We’ve sure you’ve seen the signs. Search for a music video by name or artists on YouTube; find what you’re looking for in the results. Click. Only then you discovered on the following page a red box mentioning something or other about copyright infringement, and that the clip was no longer available for playback. Bummer.

Up to now, that’s been the case when it came to EMI-specific content. (Warner, Universal, and Sony all signed deals with YouTube permitting uploads and downloads/streams of videos and music they own last year.) As of May 31, 2007, however, the London-based EMI group has agreed to tear down the wall and give access to its content to the users of YouTube. “Broad access,” to be exact.

Yes, according to a Reuters report published just prior to dawn of June, both EMI and YouTube have announced that users of the video portal “would be allowed not only to watch and play authorized videos and recordings from EMI artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones, and David Bowie, but also to incorporate elements of the videos in their own ‘user-generated content.’”

Let me greet this announcement first by saying this is great news for Bowie fans especially, because if they were forced to go without various iterations of “Changes” for much longer, well, we don’t know what would become of the world. If anyone has been genuinely hurt by EMI’s stubbornness (which is kind of interesting when you look at how EMI has been the first big music group to take a leadership role in the de-restriction of the legal digital download world) it’s been Ziggy’s church of stardusters.

(The tackiness is palpable, isn’t it?)

Seriously, though, this good news. EMI’s finally chosen to close the gap and let people consume and “mash up” its artists’ videos to their hearts’ content. It’s what they should’ve allowed from the start. All the months of legal hand wringing was just a lot of time wasted.

Now, if only the movie industry could learn to get along with the media platforms of Web 2.0 we could really begin to see some wonderful things….