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YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music
New submitter eeplox writes "I make nature videos for my YouTube channel, generally in remote wilderness away from any possible source of music. And I purposely avoid using a soundtrack in my videos because of all the horror stories I hear about Rumblefish filing claims against public domain music. But when uploading my latest video, YouTube informed me that I was using Rumblefish's copyrighted content, and so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company. This baffled me. I disputed their claim with YouTube's system — and Rumblefish refuted my dispute, and asserted that: 'All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content: Entity: rumblefish; Content Type: Musical Composition.' So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish's exclusive intellectual property."
"All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content."
Complete bold-faced lie.
When will this copyright madness end?
Dear Rumblefish,
I see that you are using my music without proper authorization.
-- God
p.s. I could use ad's, hmmmm... Naa, Smite works just as well...
1. Go to the woods, record birdsong.
2. Make a bunch of videos and post to YouTube
3. Wait for takedown
4. Sue Rumblefish in small claims court for the ad revenue they got from Google.
5. Profit!!!!
Copyright is STRICTLY for the benefit of society. If we didn't think it profited us, we'd just steal all of everyone's crap (and, in some cases, society would vastly benefit; anything having to do with music, not so much). Mark my words, industry: copyright means NOTHING if it's abused and it justifies my attitudes on the subject (y'all know what i mean)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I've always said copyright is for the birds... (Well, someone had to say it!)
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Could we find any lawyers to take this case on? Surely if this is happening often enough some type of class action suit might be able to come out of it?
Of course I'm also sure that none of this has anything to do with the fact that YouTube gets a cut of those ad proceeds. And that a small user posting original content would probably opt not to insert ads, such that YouTube would be then getting a cut of zero.
I'm also willing to venture that after going through the figleaf of a process of he-said, she-said, he-said, that there is little recourse. My guess is that any future attempt by a little guy to appeal/refute/re-dispute a big copyright holders' refutation of the original dispute will fall down some big black rabbit hole of non-responsiveness from YouTube corporate bureaucracy, complete with lack of any personal points of contact for trying to actually resolve this.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
A mockingbird, could it?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
YouTube: Blurring the line between the RIAA and Monsanto.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Huh... I have reviewed, say, The Hurt Locker, and I confirm that it's in the public domain.
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
You're legally in the right but is it really worth your time to fight it? Just delete the video from YouTube, edit the audio on your original video with some voice annotations or something to change it up a bit and re-post.
Or, just audio-swap your video to Dreamscape by 009 sound system, like everyone else on YouTube who gets the copyrighted audio notice. Warning: May infuriate your viewers.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Rumblefish owns that as well.
And you know you're going to have to pay through the nose on that one!
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I think you're confusing copyright with patents. There's no prior art on copyright.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Maybe it's just me, but when I thought about this I thought about companies that are trying to patent genes. Shouldn't you have to have created something to be able to declare it as your IP? IMO that applies to this and to naturally-occurring genes.
Contact your US senator and House members. It won't do any good, but it is very easy to do. If enough voters do this it can have an influence. It's like voting; if you don't bother to vote you have abandoned your right to have an opinion. Posting on Slashdot will get you exposure, but I don't see how it will help much.
Why is Snark Required?
is a Metallica song with birds in the background.
Lars, meet Rumblefish. Rumblefish, Lars.
Who's got the popcorn for this show?
You own the copyright to the original recording you made of bird songs from nature.
They own the copyright to their recording of bird songs from nature, but not to yours.
For them to claim copyright to your recording, there must be an original artistic element they created that you have actually reproduced.
I wouldn't take copyright advice from someone who doesn't understand the difference between that and patents.
... as a clear example of why SOPA and PIPA would have been a disaster for the Internet.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Or make yet another ContentID fuckup by Google known to the public in order to put additional pressure on Google to shape up.
AccountKiller
What's not explicitly mentioned is whether the bird sounds were recorded at the same time as the video, or whether they were dubbed in after the fact.
If the latter, it's entirely possible that he's using a recording that was made, and consequently copyrighted by someone else.
Movie and TV producers have been dubbing in bird sounds for decades, including one infamous time when CBS backed a golf match with the sounds of birds that have never lived anywhere near the game's location.
Anyhow, the point is that while you can't (yet!) copyright a bird song, you can copyright a specific recording of a sound.
(none of this should be taken to mean that Google does not have it's head up its ass.)
Three Squirrels
Okay, sorry... But someone has to ask this...
Where did the clip of the birdsong come from? Is this something the OP recorded himself? Or did he use an audio clip from some other source?
And if the OP recorded himself, did he make sure the birds were indeed singing a song that is in the public domain?
While birds aren't people and can't own a copyright, a flock of birds is more like a corporation and therefor a person.
I've had the same with public domain Christmas carols I.e. Silent Night from some wacky company. It seems like a new business model, first patent trolling...but lawyers get expensive, falsely report copyright infringements on YouTube automatic money, and almost no risk.
I'll be scared to talk on a video now, I might find I'm copyrighted by someone else.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
The core point doesn't work. If bird songs are copyrightable, then different people can hold copyright on different bird songs. If someone patented the idea of recording a bird song, you could claim prior art by pointing to anyone who recorded a bird song before the patent.
Sue them and use crowd funding.
https://www.crowdtilt.com/
Make it clear in your project description that you will not settle.
Assuming that your video was recorded in the wilderness, you can sue for "slander of title", like in SCO vs. Novell. All conditions are met: A false statement was made to a third party, claiming that you are not the copyright holder. The claim is malicious since they cannot reasonably believe they are the copyright holder. And finally there are special damages, since ads are added to your video and the revenue is sent to them.
Sure there's a solution. Abolish copyright. It no longer serves its purpose and should be discarded. That's what you do with things that are used up: discard them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Like, the $25 or so it would take to file against YouTube in local small claims?
Sheesh. Do not pass Go; go get a Nolo Press book on the legal system. Learn something.
A friend and I wrote this bit of silliness years ago: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~dzubera/riaa_sues_birds_whales.txt The time between parody and real life continues to shrink.
submit this to boing boing and the agitator. They'd probably love this.
Seems to me that if they're claiming copyright on your video, and claim to have reviewed it, and they're receiving *your* ad revenue, then they're guilty of fraud.
But I'm not a lawyer. Anyone want to pretend they are one and weigh in?
I'm all for using the wrath of the Internet to burn a false copyright claimer to the ground, but I see no timestamped text or screenshots of notices from Youtube or Rumblefish posted by eeplox. The video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPBlfeuZuWg was uploaded on 2/24. Before we all jump onboard and make an effort to force Rumblefish to disconnect their telephones and move their offices out of the Pacific Northwest, can we get some verification that the notices were received and replied to and refuted after 2/24 and were in reference to that same video and not a different one?
Get a lawyer. Get him now, because there are deadlines and the law takes deadlines very seriously. Ask the EFF or ACLU, they often love cases like these, and they have a couple really good lawyers.
Have your lawyer send them a cease & desist letter. You will need that later.
From what you describe, you should start in small claims court, which will very likely result in a default judgement in your favour, because most companies don't bother with defending themselves. If they cease&desist, sue them for whatever ad revenue they illegally made. If they don't c&d, sue them for the lot.
With the default judgement in hand, escalate. Sue them for copyright infringement, fraud and whatever else your lawyer comes up with.
Don't forget that copyright infringement is a criminal offense, too. And thanks to the content mafia, the penalties are considerable.
The one thing you shouldn't do is lie down, do nothing, or delete your video. On the contrary, why didn't you post the link? A quick /. effect later and there'd be many thousand views and the damages for your case would be there.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm glad you asked, and I didnt go and put this in the first post as to not get off course.
It's not going to end. I predicted 'this' pretty much a decade ago. Any company who chose to get in bed with the media companies and start to proactively 'censor' would soon run into the gaping maw of corporate greed and be faced with 'you aren't doing enough'. Sadly, it's worse and will be worse. The media monsters want carte-blanche to expunge anything they deem damaging to their failing business model (rightly or wrongly). And even if you were to sue google and the media companies, they would just demand the laws get rewritten to allow them to get away with it based on some meaningless threshold that wont even amount to a slap on the wrist. They have already crafted an atmosphere in which 'look ppl we don't care about and end up firing anyway are gonna lose jobs because of blahblahblah.
Its part and parcel of the mindset that bundles boatloads of crap into your cable TV package you don't want, for the 6 things you do, all the time claiming they not only can't do anything about it, and that all the crap you dont want is in fact good for you.
If you want to compete with the big boys, you have to think like the big boys.
Sue Rumblefish for $150,000 for each time your video is played with their advertising on it.
Even better, file as a class action, that way you and your lawyer get paid for every case of Rumblefish doing this, and everyone else gets a coupon.
paintball
The sun's energy output will increase until there will be no liquid water on the surface in about 1 billion years (unless there's some kind of intervention). Personally, I think we should plan on moving spaceship Earth before then.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
This isn't a DMCA notice, or a case of someone filing (under penalty of perjury) a notice that they own the material and demanding you take it down.
This is an issue of YouTube's user agreement and the way YouTube shares revenue.
When you upload content to YouTube's site, you obviously agree to allow them to show the video.
YouTube also has a separate revenue sharing program, where you can get revenue from your videos - but YouTube is NOT obligated to do this. They could simply run ads on your content, say screw you, we're not giving you any revenue share, and keep all the revenue for themselves.
What YouTube has done is put in place a program where content owners can have YouTube automatically match content on their site with the content owner's content. YouTube has chosen, in the event such a match is made, to give the content owner the OPTION of allowing the infringing content to stay on the site and getting the ad revenue share instead of just having the content removed entirely.
So you're in a grey area - no one is asking your content to be taken down, so there's no DMCA request. YouTube has just agreed with the 3rd party to share the revenue from your content with the 3rd party - which is YouTube's perogative since they can do whatever they want with their ad revenue. If you don't like what they decide to do with your ad revenue, your recourse with YouTube is simple: Don't put your content there.
I'm guessing that YouTube really just didn't think through how their program actually works when bad actors are introduced (ala rumblefish). If YouTube were smart, they would realize Rumblefish is a bad actor and kick them out of the program and force Rumblefish to submit DMCA notices instead.
paintball
My songwriters are working day and night to write every song. When we finish, y'all better start sending fat checks, or else you're in a heap o'trouble.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Hey all,
I'm Peat Bakke, the Lead Architect at Rumblefish. I write a lot of the code that manages our music catalog, as well as interfaces with our partners (like YouTube), so I'm intimately (painfully) familiar with how all of these pieces fit together, and who's responsible for what.
First things first -- eeplox, I'm sorry this has been a shitty experience. Clearly something has been missed, and I want to make things right. Please contact me directly at peat@rumblefish.com, so we can sort out exactly what's happening with your video.
Automated content identification is a hairy problem, doubly so when mixed with synchronization (soundtrack) licensing. YouTube's system is one of the better ones out there, and even so, we get a ton of false positives coming out of it every day. The biggest source of false claims come from covers and samples, where it's particularly difficult to determine if the soundtrack for a video is or isn't in our catalog.
That said, we do listen to each disputed claim that reaches us, after YouTube has gone through their (rather terse) automated resolution system. We're working with YouTube and our other partners to make the process simpler and less legally threatening ... but we're the small fish at the table.
It's worth mentioning that Rumblefish isn't a subsidiary of a major label, media conglomerate, or rights organization. This is a very small company, founded and owned by an independent musician, and half our staff play in bands or work in independent film. We've focused specifically on independent artists who want their music to be used in soundtracks ... and for what it's worth, yes, there are several tracks that sound like birds chirping. :)
Regardless -- the media licensing industry is a horrible, horrible mess. No question about it. Our mission is to make it easier for independent artists (music and video alike) to make a living doing what they love, and it genuinely sucks to hear when people are let down.
I'm happy to answer questions about how we do what we do. IANAL, of course ... but I am a geek. :)
Thanks,
-Peat
Keywords for the NSA overthrow oppressive regime true believers marathon Manhatten the financial district blueprints I
Use Vimeo instaed. Cut YouTube out of the loop
I did some negotiation with Rumblefish and Paul about 5 years ago when I ran a digital music company and I have to say that in the sea of bloodsucking fucktards that exist in music licensing Paul and Rumblefish were a breath of fresh air. They were the only company I dealt with that actually gave a flying fuck about their artists and were always very supportive of up-and-coming bands. Hell, their entire business model is around putting unknown artists on soundtracks, or in commercials, and henceforth are actually supporting the artists in a way that previously only the major labels would do.
All of that being said, it is obvious Rumblefish fucked up this time. Who knows exactly why, but they did. I think it is important that before crucifying them you understand that the service they provide is extremely valuable to artists not on a major label.... so at least give them that.
And before the venomous masses can call me a shill or whatever: we actually never did business together, nor did I remain contact with Paul, and so I have no reason to defend them other than what I stated above. People and companies fuck up some times. I have a feeling Rumblefish will learn from this mistake.
Unfortunately by the time we get the technology to move the Earth any workable plan to do so would rely on patents that make it prohibitively expensive to execute. We're pretty much screwed.
False DMCA claims are now called "Rumblefish". EG: "My youtube video just got rumblefished. "
We _do_ have laws on the book that supposed to be just - that is, whoever does the wrong thing will be punished - but then, how many times do we see the laws being applied to the RICH & POWERFUL??
Laws - especially those news laws that were created in recent years - were created to benefit the RICH & POWERFUL - and TFA is just a case in point
If bird chirping in the background can become the property of anyone - I say it's the property of GOD - but in this world we live in, someone always come up and takes the place of God
In this case, Rumblefish thinks that it's God, so it claims the bird chirping as their property
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
My guess is that this is a problem with an automated system trying to deal with roughly 800 million videos generating so many false positives that the cost of having a human look at every disputed video is cost prohibitive. Until Rumblefish sees a consequence, I doubt they're going to change their process. It's offensive to me that they don't treat other people's copyrighted works as well as they would like their client's work to be treated, but they probably see inserting ads as harmless.
I did send both Rumblefish and YouTube an e-mail expressing my disappointment. YouTube is now removed from my ad blocker exclusion list.
There are alternatives to YouTube : http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/20/5-video-sharing-alternatives-to-youtube/. YouTube/Google may see their advertisers as their customers, but you have to have a worthwhile demographic looking at the ads to make them worth anything.
I started poking around Vimeo and was impressed. No Tosh.0 material, but quite a bit of interesting viewing. Of course the amount of content can't compare with YouTube, so I'm probably still stuck with it when I'm looking for something specific, but when you're looking for something randomly interesting it's worth a visit.
Sometimes I think these things are completely random. I uploaded a video of what basically amounts to Audacity-generated noise and static and I got this notice:
Your video may include content that is owned or administered by this entity:
Entity: Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society Content Type: Musical Composition
I just had a public debate on this very topic with Anjali Malhotra, YouTube's manager for Music Content, and didn't make much headway. (see the last 5 minutes or so on http://isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=2927 ) My main gripe was that, under YouTube's current system for such disputes, since the supposedly infringed content is never identified, there is no way to make an informed counterclaim.
i was having trouble with youtube flagging all my uploads of original live material as warner and other shitty faceless corporations properties every time i sent emails to the companies and youtube requesting the exact time of the video and infringing song after about 1000 emails, 1 got 1 reply, pointing me to an exact time in a video, so i listened to their track and the 22 seconds of my video my 22 seconds was a bass drum playing on every beat with a white noise filtered with a lowpass filter, no melody, no music (and there was nothing similar in the pointed song besides there was a kick on every beat) so i decided to test the content ID, i uploaded 15 minutes of ONLY a 909 bass drum playing on every beat (not even a 8th bar 4th beat 1/8th note, juste plain four on the floor it was flagged by 13 entities (my most flagged video ever) and they ALL confirmed their claim to my 909 playing alone while i was preparing supper that proves that: 1- the content ID system is crap 2- nobody ever listens to the content when you make a counter claim 3- youtube sides with the "record companies" and shit in their users face
Live Electronic Music
Well I contacted Rumblefish about this, and this was their reply.
On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 6:50 PM, xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
How do you go about copyrighting sounds from nature?
Do you have to pay royalty's to the original artist (the bird, or a babbling brook for instance)?
If so how do you know you have the right one (in the case of the bird) or molecules (in the case of water)?
If you are not paying the artist aren't you stealing from them?
Hi Richard,
You have a completely legitimate question here. How would we pay this bird...seeds perhaps?
This was an obvious mistake by the YouTube content ID system. When we became aware of the problem, we acted quickly to release the claim. We have contacted the video creator to explain and to apologize for the mistaken attribution made by the YouTube content ID system. The whole situation is a little embarrassing and we certainly did not mean for it to happen. We just want to fix it, so we thank you for helping bring the problem to our attention.
We are serious about paying artists (have been for 15 years), and about letting bird songs remain in the public domain. There are enough people robbing the natural environment; we want the birds to feel free to sing without copyright claims filling up their nests.
Sincerely,
-Ben
ben@rumblefish.com
Here are my experiences with YouTube and content owners attempts to defraud me of my own original content. I posted this a week ago:
The US recording industry is stealing from ME!
This seems to be a big (and getting much bigger) problem with YouTube as it tries to suck-up to the big content owners in a way that is starting to seriously impact other original content creators.
Thanks to the slashdot effect, Rumblefish has now released my video and their ads were removed! It's good to know that these intellectual property management companies are capable of doing the right thing (when a ton of public scrutiny rains down on them). I got this message in my Youtube inbox: "Hello, it's Paul Anthony...the CEO & Founder of Rumblefish. Hey there. I just personally watched the video of yours that you posted about on Slashdot where you're picking and eating a wild salad. There is clearly no music in your video and I just got off of the phone with our tech lead who I asked to release the claim that was made by the YouTube system and associated with Rumblefish. We're not sure why the song was ID'd. My apologies to you for the inconvenience that this has caused you. I'd like to help make that right for you in some way. I have been spending the last several hours responding to posts on Slashdot and emails that countless people have sent to our email addresses b/c it's important to me and the team at Rumblefish that we always do right by content creators, the ones that we represent and the ones that we do not. My apologies again and best of luck to you. If there's anything else that we can do to help make things right, please do let me know. Here's my email address: paul@rumblefish.com All the best, Paul Anthony Founder & CEO, Rumblefish Sent to: eeplox"
I put this out to provoke discussion only. I does not represent our views, which take no stand on the questions raised below...
Nearly every book you read, every song you sing, every poem, thesis, play, movie, dance, audio recording, painting, drawing, sculpture, photograph, radio and television broadcast, and even the software on your computer "belongs" to somebody. All our academic knowledge is locked behind paywalls. Your entire culture has been commercialized and sold to the highest bidder. Did anybody ask you if this is what you wanted?
... the useful Arts", the interpretation of that has broadened to encompass almost all forms of expression written or recorded on some physical medium, utilitarian or not. This has produced a vast artificial economy that seeks to grow and perpetuate itself at the expense of the potential of modern technologies. The whole idea of parceling up the creative commons and granting monopolies on the fragments of our culture to individuals and corporations needs to be rethought.
While copyrights may have been a workable notion at one time "To promote the Progress of
We have lost our way. The institutionalized Ferengi culture imposed by copyright legislation has created a hideous distortion of human values. It is an anathema to genuine human culture, which is at its base freely shared experience and expression. We must renounce this mercantile obsession with profit and trade and find our way back to innocence and truth.
If copyrights were dismantled tomorrow, would people suddenly stop singing, writing books, or quit participating in the multitude of forms of cultural expression available? Do we need to provide financial incentives to grow our own culture? Is it heresy to ask such questions, or even useful? It certainly is useful as a thought experiment even if just to overcome the propaganda the rights groups have been feeding us all these years. Beyond that, though copyright is already enshrined in our constitutions, these rights can be pared back just as easily as they were expanded previously.
Please see our manifesto at http://whynotaskme.org/
My psychic comedy powers fortell the future once more!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2682747&cid=39109183
No but seriously any corporation can claim ownership of anything on Youtube. I could write, perform and record an original song, and some sleazebag could claim ownership of it, present ads over it, and make money from it, and I could go pound sand unless I want to (and have the money and time to) lawyer up. That's why I'll never upload anything to Youtube, Tribler is better as it is uncontrollable, in fact I've just decided that I'm going to close my YouTube account.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hey all,
There's a lot of threads here and on other places, hopefully this sheds some light on the claim process, and what happened with eeplox's video.
Here's the sequence, as best as I understand it:
- eeplox posted a video to YouTube that contained bird sounds.
- The automated YouTube content identification system mistakenly assigned it to one of the tracks in our catalog.
- eeplox contested the automated claim, which sent it into the manual review queue.
- One of our reviewers reinstated the claim, which triggered the response eeplox received and posted above.
When we heard about the story on Slashdot, we reviewed the video and released it.
TL;DR: We messed up during the manual review process. We've cleared eeplox's video. We're working on fixing the manual review process.
I'm here in the discussion to answer what questions we can. We're not interested in screwing over independent musicians and video creators, and we want to be as open as possible about what's going on.
If you run into content claim issues with our catalog on YouTube, you're welcome to contact us directly at YouTubeContentID@rumblefish.com. We have a FAQ about the process here: http://rumblefish.com/id/youtube-content-id.php
Paul Anthony (the CEO) has an AMA thread over at Reddit where he's answering questions. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q7via/im_the_ceo_of_rumblefish_i_guess_were_the_newest/
Thanks,
-Peat