In an utterly bizarre fashion, Youtube appears to be using it’s audio fingerprinting software to remove any audio which infringes copyright, but is leaving the original videos online.

Previously, copyright-infringers were either notified, or had their videos removed entirely. There’s no word on whether this new approach was instituted by Google/Youtube, or whether, as most people presume, it was forced by increased pressure from the music industry.

But as the huge amount of online coverage has pointed out, it’s going to hurt everyone involved:

The music industry was unlikely to be losing sales from the majority of fan videos and could have instituted a decent licencing solution.

Youtube won’t be the place for some of the fantasically popular fan videos built around any copyrighted content – for instance the second most viewed Youtube video of all time.

And users will lose out as millions of videos, and all the work that went into them, suddenly become destroyed.

Just some of the negative coverage:

Download Squad

ReadWriteWeb

Techcrunch

Mashable

So it’s already on most of the biggest and most-read blogs, and is spreading like wildfire.

And as always, Gerd Leonhard sums it up perfectly.

Update: Cnet has just revealed that apparently the silent videos are down to users choosing this option when informed of copyright infringement. It’s apparently been in place for a while, but is noticeable now because Youtube’s negotiations with Warners have broken down – and most of the music now muted belongs to the idiots Warners.

We’d still argue that it the users aren’t choosing to have their videos muted – they’re forced to choose between being muted or removed, because the music industry can’t work out that lots of people showing their appreciation of a piece of music might actually be an incredibly good promotional tool for that artist.

There are very few people who can save the record industry from their own idiocy, but unless they start following this chap, this chap, or these chaps, it seems like they’re locked into a race with newspapers for who can destroy their industry first.