The music industry is getting ready to work itself into a lather over the salvation for modern human society, YouTube.

From E-commerce News:

“The British Phonographic Industry insists that the bootleg concert footage on YouTube breaches copyright law and says they will “rigorously” seek to have them removed from Web sites with the threat of legal action against service providers who refuse.

A spokesperson said: “Our policy is to prosecute in cases of file-sharing of music and that would be the case where bootleg videos of concerts were also being illegally distributed. Record companies own the copyright of any filming done at concerts, and it is illegal to post such footage on the Internet.”

The evolution of human culture depends on man’s ability to use previously created material in order to create new ones. In today’s society, Homer would’ve been sued to the very olive stains on his toga for creating the Odyssey from bits of old legends. The recording industry gearing up for an attack on YouTube represents a threat to the ecosystem of human culture, marking out the space on the bedpost for the next notch ongoing raping of the public domain into nothingness.

In fact, we don’t (although our bosses would) mind if you lift articles from The Consumerist and pass them off as your own. You’re spreading our ideas. You’re paving the way into people’s minds, creating an avenue for more of our ideas to penetrate. We can always lay more golden eggs. In our eyes, you would not be a fox, but a camel.

It’s the middlemen, the leaches and interlopers, the grafters, cheats and agents, the parasites capitalizing on the creativity of others who fear more feet around their succor-hole.

Everyone has a right to protect their income, but doing so doesn’t make them in the right. We don’t care if this position is contrary to existing case law. If it prevents the creation of new works, intellectual property is theft.

Anyhow, they should be seeking ways to enable this flood of authentic fan interaction instead of stemming it. YouTube is an overflowing trough of opportunity for content providers, and their pimps.

Industry Uneasy With YouTube Craze [E-Commerce News via Digg]

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