Why are artists disappearing from the Internet? - clarification added

The part about Youtube blocking videos appears to be a false rumor, based on misunderstanding. I am about to post the clarification in another post.

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/210113-why-are-artists-disappearing-from-the-internet

June 24, 2014
By Sandra Aistars

This week, Congress is holding the second of two hearings on music licensing. As consumers, we have more choices than ever for streaming, downloading, sharing, and enjoying music. Meanwhile, as new services and billion-dollar acquisitions of companies are announced with astounding regularity, independent creators of all types face an array of threats that they might “disappear” from the Internet unless they agree to licensing deals and business practices that cannot sustain continued production of their works.

The press is abuzz with reports of Google’s recently revealed extortionate tactics against indie labels and artists. Rumors are that those who don’t accept YouTube’s take-it-or-leave-it licensing deal for its new streaming service will be barred from offering their own channels on YouTube and prevented from using tools like Content ID to identify their music when it is posted by others without authorization. This means not only that authorized versions of such indie artists’ work will vanish from YouTube, but that infringing copies, against which Google will still sell advertising, will stay up.

[I am about to post a rebuttal to this rumor, which seemed unlikely to start with.]

These practices are not limited to the music world. Not so long ago, Google changed its image search interface so that full-size, high-resolution images – rather than low-resolution thumbnails – appear in a slideshow-like format. Google search results now omit specific references to the site where the photographer’s work appears, and instead enable users to page through the full size gallery of images in search results without navigating to the source websites.

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Likewise, authors have been recently held hostage by Amazon in order to extract more favorable terms from publishers.

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