Reuters’ Yinka Adegoke got a hold of the transcript from an off-the-record session held Tuesday at Merrill Lynch’s investment conference during which Universal Music’s CEO Doug Morris accused YouTube and MySpace of being copyright infringers.
Morris thinks that these hit web sites are illegally using the company’s copyrighted music and hinted that the world’s largest record company will soon take legal action.
“The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”
He added, “How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly.”
In a research note, Merrill analyst Jessica Reif-Cohen said that Universal may be the first company to challenge the role of music in social networking and user-generated content. She wrote
“This could be the first salvo from a content player against business models based on user-generated content, much of which relies on copyrighted material.”
In a bit of disingenious posturing, Morris told the investment conference attendees that MTV “built a multibillion-dollar company on our (music)…for virtually nothing. We learned a hard lesson.” Umm…let’s see, MTV put Universal artists’ on TV at practically no cost to the record company, boosting sales and propelling the music industry to new heights. Where was the hard lesson in that?
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:40 AM|Comments(0)
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