“Pete Waterman: ‘I was exploited by Google'” via The Telegraph.
The 62-year-old said the Rick Astley classic Never Gonna Give You Up, which he co-wrote and which was the subject of a YouTube craze last year, had earned him just £11 from Google, despite being viewed 154 million times.
What it means: the phenomenon mentioned above is “rickrolling“. Even though the song had amazing exposure last year, its co-writer was paid only £11 ($US 16) for his work appearing in YouTube. Not sure Google made tons of money with it (they would have shared more with Waterman) but it certainly drove a lot of traffic to the site. I think Google is now experimenting with call-to-action overlays on YouTube music videos to convince consumers that are exposed to songs to buy them online. This might eventually benefit creators.
Seb Provencher's Blog 
I think this phenomenon has deeper consequences than that…the border between “everything is free online”…and copyright protection or merely respect of the rights legitimely owned by creators to be paid for their creation has been crossed too easyly by You Tube and similar websites….similar issue, on a different scope, with citizens reacting to their neighborhood beeing shot and put online by the Google streetview crew…the pendulum is now moving to the other side…this seems to me as an irreversible trend worth being monitored closely…
@Jean-Pascal: I’ve been thinking about this specific content, music videos. I was a heavy consumer of music videos on MTV, MuchMusic and MusiquePlus when I was younger and I’ve always been under the impression that it was a promotional vehicle for artists/songs more than actual intellectual property. Almost like an ad for a song. And I think that thought process made sense up until we started watching individual videos with the arrival of the Internet. Atomization broke the promo model and it became content. But I think a lot of people still see music videos as promo and not content. So, there’s a change in paradigm there as well!