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Comment by inanutshellus | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what they're "extremely" mad about... AFAIK YouTube is a poster child for the RIAA as a massive cash cow. Google auto-detects copyrighted works and all uses of a copyrighted content in a video, even fair-use (including background-noise e.g. having the TV on in the background when you video your child's first steps) give the RIAA a payback. Certainly they're still vigilantly sending take-down notices for content they want removed, but... by-and-large, it's gotta be dump trucks of free money to their doorsteps...

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Article that addresses the issue of how YouTube is the RIAA's poster child for success and still its worst enemy

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/04/riaa-still-hates-the...

They are mad becuase it isn't making them enough money.

You can have a look at this, which was posted a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836291

I'd think the RIAA would be much happier if music wasn't available for free so easily. And YouTube is a great place to find music legally. Getting free money isn't great at all if they think that the free money is from other companies destroying more profitable distribution channels.

I definitely don't agree with that. But companies wouldn't have sued YouTube asking for over a billion in damages if they wanted to do business with them.

> But companies wouldn't have sued YouTube asking for over a billion in damages if they wanted to do business with them.

A spurious lawsuit will cost the defendant millions of dollars to defend from even if they win, so filing one and then offering to withdraw it in exchange for large concessions is actually a somewhat common negotiating strategy for soulless kitten-eating behemoths with no regard for fairness or their own reputations.

Here's a very good industry examination which describes why there's ongoing issues between RIAA and YouTube:

http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/trends-the-music-...

What it is and what they say it is are different concepts.

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