Idolator

Okay, so again, it's a little early for this stuff, but bear with us—there's a Debbie Gibson joke at the end. Today's Wall Street Journal breaks down the details of the newly announced YouTube-Warner Brothers licensing deal, which will allow users to raid the label's music archives. Of course, people have been doing this since the site was invented—if you search closely, you can find videos of us robot-dancing to the new Mark Knopfler-Emmylou Harris joint—but now Warner will actually get paid for it, via ad revenue. As for the actual video creators themselves? They get nothin', save for the right to provide free advertising for WB artists. Also, they won't get sued (maybe). What a deal!

Also of interest is a new YouTube program that will be able to automatically tag copyright-monkeying works:

The system relies partly on what's known as "fingerprinting" — comparing audio uploaded to the site to unique attributes of copyrighted content it already knows....YouTube said the audio-identification system could potentially be used to locate non-music content such as video clips from TV shows, and that it could eventually use video-identification technology as well.

We wonder about the effectiveness of this new song-detection system: It may be able to spot "Under The Bridge," but what about the dregs of the Warner Brothers catalog, like Damn Yankees' "Piledriver"? Or Gibson's "Shock Your Mama"? Perhaps the only way to thwart the system will be to flood it with hours and hours of crap.

YouTube Model Is Compromise Over Copyrights [WSJ]