“Basically, UMG wants to pretend that the DMCA requires certain actions that it clearly does not. Every judge so far has told UMG this, but it won’t give up. And, more importantly, it won’t give up even though Veoh is long since dead. Considering that UMG and the rest of the legacy recording business keep complaining that they’re not making any money any more, the fact that they’re choosing to keep suing a company they already killed years ago really says something, doesn’t it?
The truth is that UMG is continuing the lawsuit for one reason: because it’s hoping and praying that some court will magically believe UMG’s made up interpretation of copyright law. If that happens, it will make it much easier for UMG to kill other legit sites that it doesn’t like. It will also allow UMG to pretend that Veoh was a “rogue” site that needed to be killed, rather than a successful legitimate business that was killed via a bogus lawsuit.”

“We’ve been hearing lots of similar stories lately of UMG being pretty quick on the trigger to take down videos, even ones that its own artists have been releasing. The label got a lot of attention over the bogus takedown of the MegaUpload video, but it seems like UMG pretty much feels free to take down videos all the time, even those that the artists they’re claiming to “protect” want up.”

“I believe that part of the Vevo agreement is that UMG gets to “pull” videos of its own artists from YouTube for the purpose of putting them on Vevo. That’s the intention anyway. I know when Vevo launched, that was part of the deal. All the YouTube videos of UMG artists magically jumped over to Vevo. So, I’m guessing that UMG basically used this loophole, which was supposed to be about taking videos off YouTube for the purpose of putting them on Vevo, and realized it could just “take the videos off YouTube” as long as they had UMG artists in them, without ever putting them up on Vevo.”