Since practically its launch in February 2005, YouTube it has been "the web" where any user uploads any type of video. Artists also upload their work to the video site that Google bought just under two years after its launch and there are even some that have risen to fame thanks to YouTube, such as Lindsey Stirling or, even better known, Justin Bieber, but now the Artists Call for Changes to Copyright Law to prevent YouTube from cashing in on their work without getting paid fairly.
The law 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects websites that host potentially illegal third-party material, making it difficult to force them to remove such content. Current law is vulnerable to abuse, especially for DMCA bots: in March, Google said it was handling 75 million requests DMCA every month for searches only, which is in contrast to the 8 they received per month in the early 2000s. If the law changes and copyright enforcement tightens, their influence could spread across the Internet.
Artists want YouTube to pay them more for offering their work
James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Mayland, told the New York Times that "it's going to affect blogging. It will affect fan sites. It will affect sites for game creators and documentary makers and all other classes«. On the other hand, people like the executive head of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman says that the DMCA allows «a new form of piracy« because the copyrighted songs that are removed can be easily re-uploaded.
The problem is so widespread that after Taylor Swift Releasing their latest work "1989," Universal Music put together a full-time team to do nothing more than search for unauthorized copies, who sent requests for some 66.000 copies to be withdrawn. For its part, YouTube says its ContentID system is doing a good job allowing copyright owners to keep track of their content, with 99.5% of copyright requests made through the system.
With the launch of Apple Music, music streaming reproductions have increased considerably. In fact, there are many millions of users who have subscribed to Spotify in the last 10 months, so the last target of artists is YouTube, a video platform that has been accused on many occasions of paying artists very little owners of the content that is offered. The only thing I can say is that I hope that the most affected are not the usual ones: the users.
