Sometimes we just have to look at a little bit of history to put things into perspective. It’s hard for us to believe that there is even a debate about The Value Gap for recorded music. Check this out as reported by AOL News in 2010.

Google had an internal meeting on competing with YouTube, and its executives were highly critical of YouTube: “A large part of their traffic is pirated content.” YouTube is a “rogue enabler of content theft.” “YouTube’s business model is completely sustained by pirated content.” “… it’s a video Grokster.” “I can’t believe you’re recommending buying YouTube . . . they’re 80% illegal pirated content.”

The whole damning article is right here, titled “Viacom vs. YouTube/Google: A Piracy Case in Their Own Words” and it’s well worth the full read.

In the end, it’s the DMCA that protected Google and it’s the DMCA that needs to be fixed. It’s that type of fix that the EU’s Article 13 sought to address. It would be nice to address those issues here, in the USA, where Google and YouTube are based.