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Google Inc. will pay royalties to a copyright management company under a license agreement that allows legal video uploads of people performing Japanese songs on the YouTube site, company officials said Thursday.
Japan Rights Clearance Inc.'s agreement is the first of this scale in Japan involving the Google subsidiary.
The popular YouTube site has been criticized for allowing users to upload and share clips featuring copyrighted music without permission.
The contracted period is one year from Thursday. Financial details were not available.
JRC manages the copyrights of about 5,000 songs, including those of such popular bands as Mr. Children and Spitz as well as big-name singers like Shogo Hamada, Tomoyasu Hotei and Ringo Shiina.
Under the agreement, JRC will receive a fixed royalty payment from Google and distribute the funds to music publishers that hold the copyright of the lyrics and music.
The payments to each music publisher will be calculated based on the frequency of a tune featured on the site and other data provided by Google.
With the license agreement, Internet users can, for example, legally post clips of themselves or their friends performing karaoke or an amateur band doing a cover of a popular song.
But users will still not be allowed to post videos using original songs taken from CDs or footage of a musical show on TV because such acts would violate the copyrights of record companies and TV networks.
According to the Copyright Law, general users who use copyrighted music for footage posted on an online video site are required to obtain permission from all copyright owners by paying royalties or other means. The copyright holders include lyricists, composers and singers.
The license agreement means Google will pay such royalties to JRC on behalf of the YouTube site's users.
The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, the country's largest entity handling copyrights, has been trying to resolve the problem of illegal use of music on online video sites.
It has suggested terms for a license agreement to operators of those sites since June last year, and has held talks with Google since October.
JRC was the second-ranked copyright management company in Japan after JASRAC in terms of the amount of royalties collected in fiscal 2005.
It was the third largest in fiscal 2006. (c) 2008 The Asahi Shimbun Company
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