Greetings. If you've browsed around YouTube videos lately via any of the available platforms (an easily acquired habit that sometimes requires intervention to reduce) you may have noticed an increasing number of oddly silent videos. These are almost universally amateur shorts of one kind or another. Here's an example -- posted on YouTube almost three years ago -- found with a "devo are we not men" YouTube search query.

When viewed on the main YouTube site, the reason for the audio's absence is explained by an ominous warning:

This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.

WMG. Weapons of Mass Greed? No, but as Bullwinkle the Moose might say, you're getting close -- Warner Music Group. The masses of homemade videos with missing soundtracks are the result of an ongoing dispute -- well explained in this current New York Times article -- between WMG and Google.

I won't attempt to delve here into the complexities of copyright law and fair use, but I will make a simple observation. The ability of record labels (and by extension the motion picture industry) to prevent what they consider to be the unauthorized use of their works is rapidly being destroyed by technological change. I discussed the issue earlier this month in Copyright: Dead Man Walking.

To the extent that these media firms will have any significant economic future, it is likely to largely depend on the good will of music and movie lovers to pay for what they could otherwise easily obtain for free through various mechanisms.

If such media giants are seen by consumers as being greedy by targeting amateur video producers for enforcement actions, the likely result will be a backlash of bad will -- driving people farther toward the free distribution channels. This could well be suicidal for these firms in the long run.

In a battle between Google and the record labels, the latter have a lot more to lose at this point, for they risk significantly escalating the existing animosities that many potential customers (for justified reasons or not) feel toward the labels and their typically conglomerate parent companies today.

The record labels may feel that they're between a rock and a hard place. They realize that Google and YouTube are important -- perhaps critical -- to their futures, but after so many years of being in the driver's seat when it comes to financial negotiations, they find the thought of being in a less overwhelmingly dominant role quite galling to say the least.

We can all understand this. But that understanding doesn't change the essential facts. The clock is running out rapidly on the traditional technological duplication controls that have protected the audio and video media financial ecosystems since their inceptions.

An entirely new gestalt for dealing with such media in the digital age is necessary, and even the outlines of what this might be are decidedly fuzzy. But the very last thing that anyone in the record biz should want to do right now is to alienate ordinary folks who want to throw a soundtrack on their homemade YouTube videos. Otherwise, it may ultimately be those labels themselves that end up being silenced as a result.

--Lauren--