Slashdot Mirror
White Noise Video on YouTube Hit By Five Copyright Claims (bbc.com)
Chris Baraniuk, reporting for BBC: A musician who made a 10-hour long video of continuous white noise -- indistinct electronic hissing -- has said five copyright infringement claims have been made against him. Sebastian Tomczak, who is based in Australia, said he made the video in 2015 and uploaded it to YouTube. The claimants accusing him of infringement include publishers of white noise intended for sleep therapy. "I will be disputing these claims," he told the BBC. In this case, those accusing Mr Tomczak are not demanding the video's removal, but instead the reward of any revenue made from advertising associated with it. Without the claims, Mr Tomczak would receive such revenue himself. "I am intrigued and perplexed that YouTube's automated content ID system will pattern-match white noise with multiple claims," he said.
Except there are an infinite number of permutations of Gaussian white noise, while there is only one for the word "and".
Except there are an infinite number of permutations of Gaussian white noise, while there is only one for the word "and".
Yes, but creativity plays no part in creating any of those permutations. Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations as a defense of a particular variant is like taking a recording of an existing song, changing the pitch of a single note, and then claiming that it's a new song. The courts have already ruled on that concept.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The DMCA does not require this. It requires services like YouTube to implement a takedown process with particular criteria. Google's demonetization and reassignment of ad revenue are its own creations, unmoored from the law's requirements.
Except there are five claims against him from four different sources. If the claims are based on copying, then at least three others copied from the exact same source and have filed violation claims based on pilfered content.
Your logic is broken. His work is 10 hours long and each of the five claims could be for different, non-overlapping sections within it, so none of the five need contain any content from another. For example, if I took five songs from five different performers and concatenated them together, all five would have the right to make a copyright claim even though none contain another's work. The claims in this case though are still garbage.
The copyright claims are valid if his video copied the white noise audio track from other videos, which can easily be determined by comparing the wave forms. [Ed: Emphasis mine.]
That is true of uncompressed audio. Once you compress the audio, the noise is going to look pretty much the same. Much of the phase information which is necessary to distinguish one sample from another is gone, and all that is left is the frequency domain which is pretty much the same from one white noise source to another.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Actually, works created by random selection without any contribution by a human author are not eligible for copyright protection. It is highly unlikely that white noise could be copyrighted even if you took someone else's white noise.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.