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Google's New Scheme To Avoid Unlicensed Music
An anonymous reader writes "Complaints about copyright infringement on YouTube keep Google busy. If you have any doubts, just look at the Viacom copyright suit. But the problems aren't just about uploaded videos, but sometimes the music accompanying the videos. A patent application shows that Google has worked on a system to automatically identify infringing music by comparing a digital signature of a soundtrack to signatures of existing music. Users who upload videos could opt to completely remove the video, swap the soundtrack for something approved, or to mute the video. Of course, there doesn't seem to be a provision if you're using existing music with permission."
Really? I thought collages were fair use; how is it not fair use to combine music with an original video?
Palm trees and 8
If only there were a way to decentralize these things...
Palm trees and 8
This is what Audible Magic does. Exactly.
http://audiblemagic.com/index.asp
So google is doing it again?
still no sig
Have they not been doing this already for certain artists that have opped into it? I know that Youtube has thrown me an error when attempting to upload a video with licensed music in it before and gave me the option of uploading with a disabled audio track. In fact, this system seems to have been rolled out in 2007.
Air costs nothing, making air move costs nothing, music in it self costs almost nothing to record
It costs little to turn a screw, but it costs plenty to know which screw to turn.
Musicians play live, musicians make their living with their performances. That should be the standard, if you can't perform live or sing without autotune, you are not a musician. Simple as that.
I prefer to see a songwriter's position as closer to that of a magazine columnist or a book author: arranging words (or music) on a page and not necessarily expecting to have to perform them live.
My fiancée has had DMCA takedown notices from recording companies even after having express permission to use music on her blog from the artists themselves.
Whether those are valid depends on whether the artist had assigned the sound recording copyrights to the label in a contract. A composer or recording artist can't license rights that he had already sold to someone else.
AFAIK there is no fair use exception for copyrighted music.
Not even in a video about how someone's music is similar to someone else's? A video like this would, in my view, fall squarely under the spirit of 17 USC 107, which specifically mentions "purposes such as criticism [or] comment" . I can see a defense for this under at least factors 1, 3, and 4, and the court in Luther Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music ruled the same way about a spoof of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman".
It seems that you can resolve copyright issues by claiming fair-use. I came across this post a few days at rcgroups. Scroll down to post #5 for the procedure.
I have a bunch of really old student student news shows up on my personal account. The opening used at best 15 seconds of some random pop song du jour. The audio on the video is now completely muted because of god forbid 15 seconds of fair use music.
It's not even worth the effort to edit and upload the videos. Youtube is no longer useful for what its intended purpose was.
Creativity is rotating through Eye of the Tiger, We Are the Champions, Rock and Roll, part 2 and We Will Rock You.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is known as a perceptual hash. We have a perceptual audio hash in pHash, my open source software project that will tell you how similar two media files are to each other. It also features an indexing system to find the best matches from a sample audio clip, a la Shazam. These algorithms are not new by any means, although this patent goes a bit further than simply matching audio samples.
Google has gone positively copyright absolutist - not just in YouTube (which, of course, grew up on a steady diet of infringement), but also in Adwords and maybe Adsense.
Adwords now disallows ads with phrases like "music videos" or "Internet TV," under the theory that any site advertising such must be guilty of, not just infringement, but "hacking and cracking." As their standard of proof is "guilty until proven innocent," arguing with them is fairly frustrating...
it is far more likely Viacom (or whoever) merely submitted a batch of DMCA's through an automated process that wrongfully flagged the same fair use (in this case, permitted) case.
OCILLA takedown notices are made under penalty of perjury. That'd be helpful if the FBI actually cared about copyright perjury.
I completely "get it" that the entertainment companies need to protect their copyrighted material. That's their product, and it's how they make money; fair enough that they don't want people exploiting it.
But here's an example of them going too far: The other day I was watching clips from The West Wing on Youtube. I'm not sure how exactly I got there, but regardless, it was one of my favorite shows back in the day, even though the West Wing franchise never got a dime from me either through product purchases or ads. But after seeing a couple of clips, I was reminded of how much I liked the show, and started to consider purchasing the DVD set -- until I clicked on a clip that had no sound. Then I saw that great "this video contains audio not approved by..." on the top of the screen.
Needless to say, that killed the viewing experience right there. I think when the entertainment companies revisit the sheer dollars and cents, they might see that it's beneficial to leave a lot of this copyrighted material up there -- it might generate a few sales.
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
There also needs to be a fair use option.
There is. If YouTube's Audible Magic server detects a match, it lists the video in Content ID Matches, where the uploader can file a dispute. One of the dispute options is "This use does not require the copyright owner's permission", such as fair use.
Google should say, "Because it is too difficult in the United States, the land of freedom, to offer a public venue for the sharing of creative works and the preservation of culture, we have opted to shut down youtube entirely. We sincerely hope that such services can return in a time less plagued by corruption and greed."
From my experience, adjusting the pitch of the audio by +4% (without altering its duration) is enough to fool Google's algorithm without being noticeable/distracting, unless you're playing the original song and the altered song side-by-side.
Musicians play live, musicians make their living with their performances.
Except for those who don't.
I've got a video up right now (over 21,000 views) consisting of a series of photos of an antique car that I'm restoring accompanied by a complete U2 song. Total run time is over 3 minutes. There is a notation under a copyright information button that states...
Your video, Xxxxxxxx, may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners:
Content owner: UMG Type: Audio content
What should I do?
No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.
The video's been online for over two years.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
No, they shouldn't. That's exactly what the RIAA wants. They want to monopolize all the money being made from music.
What they should *really* do is to compare all of the RIAAs songs with one another to point out exactly how unoriginal they are (especially if they compare them to old songs where the lyrics arrangement, if not the recording rights, should be in the public domain). After all, there's not much that's truly original and Hollywood was founded by people evading Edison's patent enforcers.
Given their attitudes, they would start a war of litigation amongst themselves, leaving them with less money and fewer lawyers to bother the rest of us with. Also, it would be interesting to point out exactly where certain haughty folks got their ideas from. There are only just so many notes and with the small number required for a court to find infringement, I can't help but think that they'd infringe upon *something.*
A map of who has "stolen" (to borrow their word) from whom would be quite interesting, as well.
I used my video camera to film a circus performance. The video was disabled because the sound from the loudspeakers was on my video and that sound was copyrighted music.
At the same time, the same music title was spread around youtube in full glory with accompanying original video clip in dozens of copies and was not blocked. Why is my analog recording blocked and the digital 1:1 copies are not?
Faire use, my ass!
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
At heart, the synchronization rights comes from the basic copyright itself. The copyright holder has the statutory legal right to prohibit or authorize any particular use of the song. However, the copyright statute itself does not distinguish between whether the music is copied by itself or synchronized with a motion picture. Both are equally prohibited without the consent of the copyright holder.
Over the years, as publishers tried to maximize their earnings and simplify licensing procedures, they created the idea of synchronization rights, and wrote those into their licensing agreements. So, for example, anybody who pays appropriate fees to a licensing agency such as BMI or ASCAP is buying the right to play the songs they are licensed to provide, but when you read the fine print, you will see that the publisher/owner of the copyright is licensing, through ASCAP to you, only the right to play the song itself in your bar or wherever, not the right to do anything else with it. The license is carefully written to not grant you the license to do other things with the music, such as uploading it, redistributing it to others, or synchronizing it with a motion picture and using it for that purpose. To do that, they sell you a different license which DOES include the synchronization rights, but doesn't include stuff in the ASCAP license.
Well, there are a lot of artists doing electronic music which is hard/ impossible to perform. Sound collages, that kind of thing. It would be really stupid to say "if it can't be performed, it's not music".
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.