Many here wrote it's "big corporation vs. the little guy". The truth is different. It's really YouTube implementing an automated system that is good at identifying small fragments of contents, but totally lacks common sense regarding attributions, fair use and such.
Here is what happened to me to prove my point. On the http://www.taodyne.com web site, there's a small video. If you switch the sound on, you'll hear a music I quickly put together in a few minutes using GarageBand. Despite this being my own (not very good) creation, the YouTube system kicked in and told me I was infringing on some other guy's rights. Why? Because that other guy happens to have used the same loops I used for his own commercial music.
So there's no evil intent here, but a nasty side effects of YouTube's automated content detection system. In my opinion, it is nobody's fault but Google's: the corporations don't really have lawyers bent on claiming your stuff, they just happen to take advantage of Google's offer to monetize on what they do, and then they happen to have entered something in YouTube that YouTube identified as similar to yours.
It's important to point out that there's no evil intent on Google's part either. What they did is a great way to grant us the ability to use musics in videos we post, compensating the artists with ad revenues. But given the volume of data that enters YouTube every day, it has to be automated. And right now, the automat is good at picking similarities, bad at analyzing whether it's infringing or not.
Here is what happened to me to prove my point. On the http://www.taodyne.com web site, there's a small video. If you switch the sound on, you'll hear a music I quickly put together in a few minutes using GarageBand. Despite this being my own (not very good) creation, the YouTube system kicked in and told me I was infringing on some other guy's rights. Why? Because that other guy happens to have used the same loops I used for his own commercial music.
So there's no evil intent here, but a nasty side effects of YouTube's automated content detection system. In my opinion, it is nobody's fault but Google's: the corporations don't really have lawyers bent on claiming your stuff, they just happen to take advantage of Google's offer to monetize on what they do, and then they happen to have entered something in YouTube that YouTube identified as similar to yours.
It's important to point out that there's no evil intent on Google's part either. What they did is a great way to grant us the ability to use musics in videos we post, compensating the artists with ad revenues. But given the volume of data that enters YouTube every day, it has to be automated. And right now, the automat is good at picking similarities, bad at analyzing whether it's infringing or not.