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.

Comments

Re:White noise can be copied too

[mopower70]

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.

Re:White noise can be copied too

[DickBreath]

You mean copyright infringement.

You can't infringe a copyright that does not exist. White noise is not eligible for copyright protection due to there not being an actual author other than a PRNG, and more importantly that there is no creativity involved in creating it. Copyright is to protect intellectual works. There is already case law that, for example, the facts present in a telephone directory cannot be copyrighted.

Someone who created white noise cannot file a claim against someone else who might actually in fact copy it all, because, the original white noise cannot be copyrighted.

In this case, I think it is automated copyright enforcement bots run amok.

Re:White noise can be copied too

[dgatwood]

Pseudo-random white noise generators certainly have a human contribution and are repeatable.

The problem is that if the human component is just choosing an existing PRNG algorithm, then the whole thing is still a collection of mathematical facts like a phone book, and thus clearly ineligible. There generally has to be at least a minimal creative component for copyright eligibility. That is, after all, the purpose of copyright—to protect creative works of authorship.

Even if someone took the time to hand-seed the PRNG with various values and compare the calming qualities, it would still be an almost laughable stretch to argue that picking that number is sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection on that particular output of a commonly available algorithm, because other people's computers will randomly choose that particular number once in a while and create that output without the supposed creativity.

Now if somebody creates their own PRNG, that's a different story. Anything below that threshold seems dubious at best. That's not saying that some judge might not misinterpret the copyright act, or that somebody might not decide to sue in hopes of a pre-trial settlement, but the law is IMO pretty clear on the matter. Random noise cannot plausibly be copyrighted, and that is by design. Any abuse of the law that leads to any other interpretation is an indication of a flaw in the law rather than an intended outcome.