Prince DMCAs YouTube To Block Radiohead Song

Enigma2175 writes "CNN is reporting that videos from the Coachella music festival showing Prince covering Radiohead's 'Creep' have been removed by Prince's label, NPG records. Thom Yorke of Radiohead, when told of Prince's action, said 'Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our... song.' No comment from YouTube or Prince yet. Under the DMCA, YouTube is not required to verify the entity making a request is actually the copyright holder and this seems to be just another example of DMCA abuse." As the article points out, Prince seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Interwebs.

Comments

There are 3 copyright claims in play

[Anonymous Coward]

Radiohead's ownership of the song's copyright, Prince's ownership of the performance copyright, and the video recorder's ownership of the recording copyright. Prince asked for it to be pulled on his claim. Radiohead could sue him if he didn't properly license their song, though.

Re:There are 3 copyright claims in play

[Xtifr]

A performance cannot be copyrighted. Unless the performance has creative elements which stand on their own, i.e. the arrangement, the guitar solo, the intonations chosen when singing the lyrics, etc. Of course, that would technically be a composer's copyright, but that sounds confusing, so most groups that deal with legal fan-made recordings (i.e. the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive) usually just refer to it as a performance copyright. Basically, what it boils down to is that Prince's performance constitutes a derivative work, and unless Radiohead is now releasing their music under a copyleft, they have no say in the matter. The most they could do is ask the fan to remove the creative elements from the derivative work that Prince owns and release whatever is left, but the result would probably be incomprehensible, assuming that such removal were even possible. (Alternatively, they could try to prove that Prince's additions to his arrangement were too minimal to justify copyright protection, but that's likely to be very difficult.)

(If Radiohead's works were released under a copyleft, then Prince would have to choose between allowing fans to distribute his versions or not performing Radiohead compositions at all, but since they aren't, he doesn't.)

Wait a minute...

[sgant]

Under the DMCA, YouTube is not required to verify the entity making a request is actually the copyright holder

So let me get this straight, some person or group of persons could go and put a claim on every video on Youtube now and they'd have to take them all down...since they're not required to verify the entity making the request? That seems a bit silly doesn't it? What's stopping someone from mass emailing them with requests for a huge chunk of videos?

Re:Wait a minute...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Falsifying a DMCA claim is a federal offense - you really don't want to get caught doing that. Yet, this is far from the first time a BigCorp as issued a DMCA takedown notice for material is clearly did not own the rights too. But I've never heard of a single prosecution over such fraud.