

Major Labels Claim Copyright Over Public Domain Songs; YouTube Punishes Musician - mtgx
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120827/22533320172/major-labels-claim-copyright-over-public-domain-songs-youtube-punishes-musician.shtml

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asynchronous13
I recently used a public domain recording of a classical composition as the
background for a video.

Within moments of uploading the video, I got an email from Youtube that IODA
claimed to own the song. The piece was recorded in 1945 and is no longer
subject to copyright. So I responded via their automated form, and
surprisingly a couple hours later I got an email that said, "IODA has reviewed
your dispute and released its copyright claim on your video"

So it worked out in this case, but what if they hadn't released their claim?
I'd have no recourse. The system is heavily lopsided in favor of the record
companies.

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rhizome
If they didn't release their claim, it would be up to you to contest it,
possibly through the courts. This is unlikely ever to change, as YT has
created this framework and policy implementation themselves.

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jamesbritt
_If they didn't release their claim, it would be up to you to contest it,
possibly through the courts._

How would a court help? YT makes the rules. It's a free service. Their rules
may be stupid and biased, but I don't see any legal case.

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ChuckMcM
Well at some point Google needs to be sued by not-big content owners. Frankly
I think they would welcome that suit which would charge them with restraint of
trade and maybe breach of contract. They could 'lose' that suit and then go
back to making it much harder for the big labels to pull things down.

The reason I think they would like to lose it is that they know they are
pissing off users, but their content strategy is walking (or perhaps running)
under the shadow of a falling dinosaur (the labels) and they need to be sure
not to be there when the corpse hits. This would give them an excuse to run
faster.

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saurik
I thought ContentID worked similarly to Shazaam; how is it flagging covers of
songs?

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citricsquid
Youtube have deals with many major content groups which gives the groups
access to disable a video without any verification process. It's entirely
plausible that some intern at UMG is going through big lists of songs,
searching for their existence and accidentally flagging ones that aren't
actually property of UMG, or maybe they're abusing the power that they have to
remove stuff they just don't think _should_ be there (but has a legal right to
be).

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esolyt
Isn't there anything to prevent them from abusing their power? Do they
literally have the right to remove every single video with a single click?

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ryguytilidie
Nope, I asked my friend who worked at Youtube about this. He told me that they
have to remove every video the label asks to have removed. Seems like a
fantastic system. Surprisingly another American legal convention that favors a
monsterously large corporation and shits on the individual citizen.

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tedunangst
They don't have to. They have chosen to. Their policy may say they have to
remove every video, but they chose the policy.

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eridius
Someone really needs to compete with YouTube. I really hoped Vimeo could do
it, since they actually have a pretty decent HTML5 player, but it doesn't seem
to be happening.

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TillE
For music (ie, audio only), SoundCloud is very popular. 120 minutes free, more
storage and features as you pay more. It's a bad fit for podcasters, though.

For video, I don't really see anything wrong with Vimeo aside from its lack of
critical mass. YouTube still has 99% of the content you want.

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ktizo
Is funny how the two sites self select.

If you want to share film of yourself lighting farts, you put it on youtube.

Whereas if you want to make an detailed animation about philosophy's
relationship to the colour blue, then you put it on vimeo, and if it is any
good then someone else will put a badly transcoded version of it on youtube,
which is where most people will watch it.

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kai-zer
DMCA takedown requests are sent under the penalty of perjury for false claims,
so doing so is a criminal offense. The requester is also subject to civil
liability.

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arrrg
YouTube’s content takedown system isn’t running on DMCA requests. It’s just a
private agreement between YouTube and the labels: You don’t sue us and we give
you the power to disable any song you own immediately without having to go
through us.

Maybe the contract between YouTube and the labels contains punishments for
labels wrongfully disabling songs they don’t own – but I very much doubt that.

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blahedo
> _You don’t sue us and we give you the power to disable any song you choose
> immediately without having to go through us._

There, I fixed that for you.

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jamesbritt
_There, I fixed that for you._

Please don't do that.

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antihero
This is the future we can expect if legislation such as ACTA were to become
law.

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jcr
I noticed a lot of questions here on the capacities of the Google/YouTube
"Content ID" system used to recognize infringements. The following analysis is
a bit old, and not particularly scientific, but it will give you a better idea
of its recognition capacities:

<http://www.csh.rit.edu/~parallax/>

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ktizo
Interesting that someone is trying to lay claim to "O Little Town Of
Bethlehem". I think we may have just found a use for heavily armed christian
fundamentalists. Get Glenn Beck on the phone, tell him some liberal internet
conspiracy is doing bad things to jesus.

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Steko
Likely what happens is:

(1) Some artist covers a public domain song, it's on a record. That
performance is still subject to copyright.

(2) Google's software matches the audio in the video with the copyrighted
performance and auto applies a note that it "contains music from xyz corp",
either directly or indirectly notifying xyz corp of potential infringing
videos.

(3) Someone at xyz corp gets hundreds of notifications and presses the
takedown button without following up to verify actual infringement.

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ktizo
You see, that's the other benefit of leveraging religious fanaticism to solve
this. You are being reasonable and using known facts about the way these
things probably work. Whereas to win this, ideally we need single-minded
people who are completely immune to logic or reality. Hollywood would be
perfect, but it has already picked sides.

