In essence: YouTube and all of its users are now free to upload all of Warner Music's songs and videos to the video-sharing site. What does Warner get in exchange? A revenue share on ad sales.

If you upload your own home-mixed video for a particular Warner Music song to YouTube, though, YouTube will notify Warner and they will have the right to have your video removed from the site if they don't approve of it. Pretty lame, and totally missing the point of sites like YouTube. These suits really still think they can control this internet thing, and they're going to ruin themselves while failing to prove it. As Mike Masnick writes:

While this is a step in the right direction (and, don't get us wrong, that's a good thing), it's still a step short. Take a look at what the band The Barenaked Ladies is doing. Rather than just putting their content online, they're encouraging people to make their own videos by saying they'll take the best homemade amateur videos of people playing along to their song, and put it into their real video. That shows a recognition that YouTube is about the community of people creating content for each other, rather than just consuming the content some big company has put out for them.

Companies like Warner Music are still thinking in their same old mentality of channels and pipelines, and are still completely oblivious to the fact that they are dealing with online networks of individuals. I have a feeling they're going to get hit over the head with a clue-by-four pretty quickly, though. Help swing it if you can.