YouTube has pulled the plug on music videos in Germany as Western Europe starts to look like a hostile environment for Web music services.
A YouTube spokesman confirmed that YouTube is no longer playing music videos belonging to the largest music labels after talks with Germany's biggest royalty collections group, GEMA, broke down.
The conflict is almost identical to YouTube's spat with a royalty group in the United Kingdom, but with one important twist. According to YouTube, GEMA is asking for royalty rates that are 50 times higher than those asked for by PRS, the British organization, and YouTube argues those are even too high.
According to sources close to the negotiations, GEMA is asking for rates far higher than what the group asked for in the original agreement. A GEMA representative could not be reached for comment. But it should be noted that the music industry has often offered favorable financial terms to start-up Web services in initial licensing agreements.
Music executives have told me in recent months that once the companies begin to generate revenue and gain a foothold, they should expect to pay more.
Talks are ongoing but until a deal is worked out, it's unlikely German YouTube fans will be seeing any music clips.
At least in Great Britain, YouTube can make the claim to record labels that the site promotes music sales. The BBC recently reported on a survey that asked more than 1,500 Brits about viewing habits.
About half of the adults who participated said they purchased music after watching a YouTube video by an artist.
In a move to stop the spread of child pornography on the Internet, German officials will soon be asking ISPs to filter out Web sites they deem offensive, according to news magazine Der Spiegel.
German regulatory officials have been working with Google and other search engines, providing them with a blacklist of sites to block, according to the article, which was reported on Google Blogoscoped on Friday. Google already excludes from its German and French search results content that is pro-Nazi.
There have been other censorship efforts recently related to images of children. Internet service providers in the U.K. last month began blocking access to Wikipedia after Britain's Internet Watch Foundation took issue over an image of a naked young girl that appeared on the cover of an album by the rock band The Scorpions. Several days later, the watchdog group changed its mind after discussing the situation with the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Internet Watch Foundation's child porn blacklist also has resulted in some ISPs blocking access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, The Register reported this week.
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