Nowadays, media companies live in a constant war against copyright infringement, a problem that has been caused mainly because of the rapid evolution of the internet and the freedom of its users to share content on the web. Media companies use laws and technology to control this freedom and creativity of the audience, however, it is very hard to control it on platforms like YouTube because many individual do not respect the law; copyrighted content is still downloaded by its users.
Copyright owners are afraid of losing ownership of their creations and this is why YouTube deals with copyright infringement and take down notices everyday. In an effort to avoid illegal use of music videos and promote copyright, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Google and Abu Dhabi Media created Vevo in which they share their copyrighted videos for individuals to view.
Vevo and YouTube are both video sharing websites but have a big difference. YouTube is run by its users while Vevo is built by expert programmers. Lawrence Lessig describes YouTube as a read/write culture in which kids take original videos and reedit it to a different video, they create a Remix. However, Vevo would be described by Lessig as read only culture because it does not allow its users to edit and upload this videos within the same site. YouTube is a bigger company than Vevo but the quality of the videos on Vevo are much better than YouTube. Through their partnership, Youtube has helped Vevo gain most of its consumers, therefore this success needs to be attributed to YouTube.
The creation of Vevo has not helped stopped copyright infringement on YouTube, this is an ongoing problem that society will always face. With the invention of new technologies within the next years users will obtain and share content much easier. This war of prohibitions by the law is just leading to consequences such as the limitation of creativity or the corruption of our children. The excess of law kills creativity and freedom of expression and moreover criminalizes our children. In the United States, millions of people download music illegally every year, therefore according to the law they are criminals.