Facebook 'in talks to offer princely sum for music rights'

Washington

FACEBOOK Inc is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, said sources close to the matter.

The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook does not have the rights. Under current law, rights-holders must ask Facebook to take down videos with infringing material.

Music owners have been negotiating with Facebook for months in search of a solution, and Facebook has promised to build a system to identify and tag music that infringes copyrights. Yet such a setup will take as long as two years to complete, which is too long for both sides to wait, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity for discussing detail…