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Rumblefish Claims It Owns 'America the Beautiful' By United States Navy Band
ptorrone writes: Adafruit is now shipping the USA-made open-source Arduinos. In celebration Ladyada the engineer posted an Arduino rotating in front of an American flag with the public domain "America the Beautiful" by the United States Navy Band as background music. Adafruit immediately received notice from from YouTube stating that the song is owned by Rumblefish. Rumblefish previously claimed to own copyright to ambient birdsongs, too.
There should be a penalty for companies making claims that are obviously false. Doesn't have to be huge, maybe $100 to the up-loader and another $100 to the web site owner. That would be enough to stop the claim spam but not so much that it deters real claims. The weak point is that "obvious" would have to be determined by some arbiter, hopefully someone who isn't an idiot or in the pockets of big media and the trolls.
I believe there's a concept called Slander of Title, but I'm not sure it actually results in serious damages being paid out, and quite honestly, how many YouTube contributors want to/can afford to pay for a lawyer to sue over what, at best, would be a tiny, measured in pennies, royalty check?
I don't actually buy the argument that this was a mistake. Rumblefish actually doubled down when they were called on that birdsong mistake mentioned in the summary, and Google backed them. I think Rumblefish knows they've found a loop hole, and Google are too scared of the larger copyright holders to vet their claims.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Strenuously disagree. This is more than a billing error here, it is an implicit threat of expensive legal action wrapped in a takedown that at the least interferes with someone's free expression. They need to take it seriously or go away.
Civilization has long understood the dangers of crying wolf and even has a number of fables about it in order to teach young children not to do it.
They are welcome to use their algorithm as a screening test, but they shouldn't be claiming ownership of things without human verification. Since their algorithm must have some 'idea' what it thinks the work is, it should only take a few seconds per filing to have a human verify that what is playing is what the algorithm thinks it is.
Perhaps the ban on the easy method of making a claim should expire after a time, but the message is fairly clear: If they prove they are unable to responsibly use a largely automated system, they will be forced to do it manually in order to force them to consider each case more carefully. It may even be acceptable to grant them 3 strikes rather than 1, but only if they issue a personal (hand written) apology from their CEO to the person they wrongly claimed against.