A few days ago, I disagreed with the argument that Yahoo was more closed that Google because Yahoo hosts commercial content. In a “long tail” world, popular content helps attract users and doesn’t displace peer content.
DRM and license terms are more relevant dimensions of open-ness. So long as the Yahoo Music Help section has a page called Why Can’t I Burn a Song, Even If It’s in My Music?, the jury says “closed”.
At the same time, Yahoo’s MediaRSS has the opportunity to be a disruptive technology, coming from the bottom up to change the market share of DRM.
In the words of Wired News, “Niche content creators syndicate their content with an MRSS feed, which includes metadata about the work. The information goes out to subscribers just like a blogger’s RSS feed and incorporates video and audio… Yahoo! made sure MRSS was open and nonproprietary. Thanks to that hands-off policy, MRSS has caught on: Both Google and AOL encourage content creators to use MRSS to help their search engines identify and index video.
Motivated amateur and mid-list music and video producers can syndicate with RSS. Good search engines will get the word out. When this approach starts collecting money (the way blog ads do), less restrictive distribution terms will start gaining market share.
I don’t think that makes Yahoo! “closed.” It sounds more like a licensing issue which points back to the labels and their closed-minded thinking.