January 16, 2009 | Online

The day the music died ... on YouTube

has taken another step in their effort to eliminate the use of copyrighted material. You won't see much difference in the videos you download, but you will hear it.

All video that contains . The video still plays with the warning: “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”

"The implications are a bit different than with removing copyrighted professionally produced content, like an official music video," wrote tech analyst Stan Schroederfor from . "We’re talking about tens of thousands of fan made videos, funny spoofs, remixes and the like being pretty much destroyed, and I’m guessing users will be less than thrilled about it."

Worse, video montages of  half naked guys dancing and lip-synching  to pop songs could be affected, too. Now what will we watch at 2 am when we can't sleep?