YouTube-orama

Plenty of news about the popular video-sharing site YouTube has been making the rounds this week.

First, the site has ignored the lessons learned by Myspace and has instituted a policy to give the site the right to rebroadcast the video in any medium, and more importantly, create what are called "derivative works." This means that if a band were to post a music video, the site could strip the music from the video and license it elsewhere.

In other news, the site has become a haven for soldiers based in Iraq to compile video footage that would likely never be broadcast on the nightly news. The soldiers have been assembling POV footage of the horrific situations they face every day, and setting it to music, often from popular bands like Rage Against the Machine. For his part, Rage guitarist Tom Morello says:

It is truly an indie media, from soldiers who are the ones who really know what's going on. It's not being filtered through some corporate-owned news service or whatever. So I think that their insights to what's happening there are important ones, being set to music that they like.

Of course, there is plenty of music on the site as well, and you can check out a clip of Dillinger Escape Plan performing "The Mullet Burden" right here and even a humourly bizarre interview with the Smiths from 1984.