This news comes shortly after Sharman Networks’ KaZaa is rumored to be paying another $10 million to settle copyright infringement cases with songwriters and music publishers. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting a first-hand perspective of how YouTube founder, Chad Hurley feels about the lawsuits.

The Wall Street Journal article uses an Akon and Eminem song to demonstrate how much damage unauthorized usage of video content can do. The music video of Eminem and Akon’s song Smack That has been viewed over half a million times and there are many amateur videos that use the song as a soundtrack for background music.

The Wall Street journal then runs down the list of permissions that would be required to allow users to use Smack That legally. First, YouTube would have to gain permission from Universal Motown, Akon’s record label and may need to attain permission from Eminem’s self-owned record label, Shady Records. Then to gain the rights for users to be able to lip-sync the song or use it as background music for the amateur videos, YouTube would have to be granted the rights from Akon, Eminem, and the two other producers of the song Swift and Mike Strange. It is no wonder why the YouTube founders describes this responsibility as “a mess.”

“YouTube executives are finding it a slog to get all of the necessary permissions to license the songs and shows users are putting on its site” stated the Wall Street Journal. “Most of YouTube Inc.’s agreements with record labels don’t address royalties for music publishers, who control the copyrights to the words and music underlying the recordings.”

And the reason why the aforementioned Kazaa article is mentioned above is because the lawsuit for these music publishers were finally settled for Kazaa 5 years after its first copyright infrigement lawsuit at the rumored $10 million.

“It’s such a mess because the [entertainment companies] have all of these valuable assets that are just locked up with so many people who need to sign off on them” stated Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube Inc. “I don’t know what it requires, if the government needs to be involved.”

As mentioned in my previous article, The Colbert Report Discusses Google, YouTube, and Viacom Issues, it proves that YouTube is definetely a fighter and resolutions are inevitable to make YouTube users happy, the music publishers happy, Google and YouTube happy, and of course the artists.