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YouTube Muting, Removing Videos Involving Warner Music

Posted by Soulskill on from the responsible-judgment-takes-too-long dept.

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."

3 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Their site, their right. by numbski · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --

    Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).

    1. Re:Their site, their right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. 13,600 videos have been silenced. by Doug52392 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...