Musicians Target YouTube, Seeking Royalties Update

The music industry is uniting behind an effort to change the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent video streaming site YouTube from hosting material that violates copyright. Artists and music publishers are also seeking a change to the way YouTube handles royalties. The goal is to modernize laws covering digital material. The DMCA gives “safe harbor” to sites that host third-party material. “This is a new form of piracy,” Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, told the New York Times. “You don’t have to go into dark corners and sell stuff out of your car. You can do it in plain sight and rely on the DMCA to justify what you’re doing is perfectly legal.” YouTube has more than a billion users, and its chief business officer Robert Kyncl said that the site has paid more than $3 billion to the music industry since it was founded in 2005. “Music matters tremendously to us,” Kyncl said.