Copyright

Music videos are traditionally the most popular, most viewed content on YouTube. YouTube and Universal teamed up to create VEVO, with content from a variety of record companies. It was going to solve all the disputes about copyright material and royalties and ad revenues. In theory, at least…

Only there is a problem. Certainly for anybody outside of the United States.

“This video contains content from VEVO, who has decided to block it in your country.”

In some ways I am quite sympathetic to the problem. It harks back to a time when dividing up intellectual property rights across the world made sense. Back then different companies would produce and sell physical hard copy for different territories. In a sense VEVO – and others – are trying to do the same thing online. Only to do this effectively online means to have duplicated content which is blocked or allowed access depending on the geographical location of the viewer.

As a consumer of music videos online it may be annoying to take the time to figure out which version you’re able to watch, but it isn’t the end of the world. Only… According to Mashable removing ‘duplicate content’ is a major priority of VEVO:

- The music video site is focusing on getting rid of duplicate videos. If you have ever browsed YouTube, you’ll find that many music videos do, in fact, have duplicates.

Does this mean anyone outside of the territories VEVO services will just miss out altogether?

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