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Facebook Offers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for Music Rights (bloomberg.com)
Facebook is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. From the report: The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook doesn't have the rights. Under current law, rights holders must ask Facebook to take down videos with infringing material. Music owners have been negotiating with Facebook for months in search of a solution, and Facebook has promised to build a system to identify and tag music that infringes copyrights. Yet such a setup will take as long as two years to complete, which is too long for both sides to wait, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing details that aren't public. Facebook is eager to make a deal now so that it no longer frustrates users, by taking down their videos; partners, by hosting infringing material; or advertisers, with the prospect of legal headaches. The latest discussions will ensure Facebook members can upload video with songs just as it's rolling out Watch, a new hub for video, and funding the production of original series. Facebook is attempting to attract billions of dollars in additional advertising revenue and challenge YouTube as the largest site for advertising-supported video on the web.
There -really- needs to be a licensing regime where popular commercial music can be used on user's videos, and for the creator of the music and the creator of the video to share the ad revenue. On my videos I do not use commercial music (I license royalty free music, which is like finding a needle in a haystack in terms of finding a good match for your piece) so that I may monetize the videos, but every once in a while I would love to use a piece of pop music or a film score in a video. It would be great if I can just do it, and then the artist / publisher gets a cut depending on the length used.
Right now if a video has a copyrighted song in it, the publisher can either claim the whole video, or take it down. It's all or nothing. I don't believe there is a revenue sharing option, which would make everyone happy and allow for an explosion of creativity.