YouTube Muting, Removing Videos Involving Warner Music

notseamus writes "In the past few days, YouTube has started muting videos uploaded by users that use 'unauthorized copyrighted music' in response to Warner Music's threat over royalties, and so far appears to target only Warner Music related videos. Ars Technica also reports that after three DMCA notices YouTube will remove a user account, even when it appears to be fair use. Kevin Lee has had video essays — which he believes are fair use — removed from YouTube, and his account disabled before he could file a counter notice."

Comments

Their site, their right.

[numbski]

Sadly, it's fair use for you to use it, but you have no "right" to post it to their site. Once you created an account there, you pretty much waived any of your content rights there. C'est la vie.

Re:Their site, their right.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how the law works or the DMCA. If you ignore the DMCA then you no longer gain the "safe harbour" privilege which means you can be sued for every copyright infringement case on your website no matter who uploaded what.

By removing the videos first Google is in accordance with the DMCA and doesn't get legally nuked into the ground.

Re:Their site, their right.

[falcon5768]

legally they are REQUIRED to provide the information they obtain of the offendee to the "offending" person for challenge IF the challenge is deemed invalid, for prosecution in the DMCAs false claim clause. They have rarely if ever done this which is illegal. The problem is people who put their stuff on You Tube rarely have the money to take Google to court on this, especially if they are intending to THEN take on the media people so they just give up. And your right it IS their site, but that doesnt exclude them from having to follow the letter of the law. They are not now.

13,600 videos have been silenced.

[Doug52392]

Says a Google search. Looking at some of the videos that were censored, a LOT of them had a few seconds of a Warner song in them. So they went far beyond removing JUST those "music videos" or "CD tracks".

Some of the videos I noticed have been disabled:
* Numerous AMV videos
* Video game demos and clips
* Several videos by stand-up comedian George Carlin (WTF?)
* Some videos about global warming
* World of Warcraft videos
* Live recordings of music artists from the 1960's through today.

So they removed videos that were perfectly within fair use, simply using a small snippet of a song. I guess this is the end of fair use...

Re:13,600 videos have been silenced.

[anagama]

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. Cite

Some of the videos may well fit into fair use, but many of them probably do not. For example, when using music as background to a video game sequence, if the sequence is merely someone showing how cool they are, it is hard to see this as "teaching". Even if it is "teaching" -- it isn't teaching about the music. The music is not a key part of the lesson on how to do a particular game activity, and it is thus hard to say that music falls under a teaching exception. Is it "comment"? Probably "comment" means something more like a review of the work itself or an op-ed-like piece in which the music makes a certain point. It would be a difficult and creative task to make that connection. If the music is just soundtrack however, the "comment" is about the video game and not the music.

Be honest, most of the youtube videos with music added to them, are nothing more than "Hey -- look at me!" videos, slideshows of cats, or slideshows of dead people with some random piece of music tacked on. It's probable, though not impossible, that most of these don't fit "fair use".

Pyrodex baking dish????

[IvyKing]

I'd be surprised if you survived making that video - Pyrodex is a black powder substitute.

You probably meant Pyrex.