Chasing Their Star, on YouTube

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Copyright Lawsuit Targets Cover Songs on YouTube

In the latest sign of friction over the licensing of online music, a group of music publishers has sued Fullscreen, one of the largest suppliers of videos to YouTube, saying that many of Fullscreen’s videos — particularly cover versions of popular songs — infringe on the publishers’ copyrights.

Fullscreen is one of the largest of the so-called multichannel networks, or M.C.N.'s, which produce their own content — the company’s offices are in Culver Studios in Los Angeles, where “Gone With the Wind” and “Citizen Kane” were filmed — and represent the work of thousands of other creators of widely varying sizes. According to Fullscreen, the 15,000 channels the company represents have a total of 200 million subscribers and draw more than 2.5 billion views each month.

Among the most popular videos on YouTube are cover versions of popular songs, often by amateurs or semiprofessionals who have built a following online. But according to the suit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday by groups represented by the National Music Publishers’ Association, most of these lack the proper licenses and do not pay publishers and songwriters the royalties earned from ad revenue. (Publishers represent the music and lyrics underlying songs, not recordings of them, which are covered by a separate copyright.)

According to the suit, Fullscreen and its founder, George Strompolos, who is named as a defendant, “have willfully ignored their obligation to obtain licenses and pay royalties to exploit the vast majority of the musical content disseminated over Fullscreen’s networks.” A spokeswoman for Fullscreen declined to comment.

The publishers represented in the suit include Warner/Chappell Music, which is owned by the Warner Music Group and is one of the biggest publishers, along with several independents like Songs Music Publishing and Peermusic. An exhibit submitted with the suit lists dozens of songs that Fullscreen is accused of using without proper licenses, including hits by Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Britney Spears and others.

As YouTube has become the default listening service for young people, the music industry has frequently sparred with YouTube and its owner, Google, over the licensing issues, which can be confusingly opaque. YouTube, for example, is responsible for the licensing and royalties of user-generated content loaded directly to its system, but often yields that responsibility to M.C.N.'s and other major partners.

In turn, those networks have come under fire from music groups, and negotiations have been slow. In February, Fullscreen and Maker Studios announced licensing deals with the Universal Music Publishing Group, one of the largest publishers, but most others had no such deals.

An announcement on Tuesday about the publishers’ suit against Fullscreen suggested that it had been prompted by a breakdown in licensing negotiations. At the same time that it announced the suit, the association said it had reached an agreement in principle with Maker Studios on licensing.

Bits Blog: YouTube Founders Focus on New Video Tools

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Steve Chen, left, and Chad Hurley, the founders of YouTube, in 2011 after their Internet company purchased a site called Delicious.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Twitter should consider itself very flattered.

Wanpai, a new smartphone video recording app available only in Chinese, bears a strong resemblance to Vine, Twitter’s fast-growing service that lets users shoot and post six-second snippets of video.

Perhaps even more flattering is that the Vine clone was created by Avos, the start-up created by the YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen after they left YouTube. (Google bought YouTube in 2006 and is an investor in Avos.)

In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Hurley acknowledged that Vine was “the inspiration” for Wanpai (which he translated from the original Mandarin as “Play Shot”). He said that Avos’s development team in Beijing, which operates with some autonomy from the company’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., had developed Wanpai on their own initiative.

“They didn’t think Vine was serving the market,” he said. Vine “wasn’t translated and didn’t work well in China.” (Twitter is blocked by the Chinese government and Vine is tightly integrated into the social networking service.)

Mr. Hurley said Avos’s newest creation, MixBit, to be released in July or August, would be much more original.

Although he wouldn’t divulge many details about the project, which is in private beta testing, Mr. Hurley said MixBit would provide an “intuitive” interface to help people easily create content, much the way YouTube made it easy to post videos to a wide audience.

“What we ended up creating at YouTube is a solution for distribution,” Mr. Hurley said. “What hasn’t been solved yet is the act of creation.”

He said current platforms for creating and sharing images and videos, likeTwitter and Instagram (owned by Facebook), are too focused on self-promotion, which intimidates many people.

“It limits what they put online,” he said. “Unless it’s pretty, they don’t share it.” (Anyone who has spent even 10 minutes plowing through a heap of Instagram photos or Vine videos might beg to differ.)

MixBit will enter a crowded market. In addition to Vine, which has grown to 13 million users in just four months, Instagram is expected to soon introduce its own quick-video product.

Avos first surfaced publicly in 2011 when it purchased the Delicious social bookmarking service from Yahoo. It has since kept a low profile, working on several projects, including Zeen, an online magazine creation tool that was supposed to go live a year ago but is still stuck in beta.

In contrast to the situation with the Wanpai app, Mr. Hurley said, he is directly involved in MixBit’s development. “This is a tool that I’m going to use,” he said.

That contrasts with a certain video site that he used to run. “Me, personally, I don’t upload video to YouTube,” Mr. Hurley said.