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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.
Doubtful. There is no expression of a creative idea and the work is also not original. Both are requirements for copyright. Otherwise I could just copyright the word "and" and get my free income for the rest of my life.
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.
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.
z"'juy-tç_'eyctèçeqytvèe_tyqzç"èedjçtceyjtqzoy"rq_çazé'fyaé_t'béacgrbuserfgsqefcqaxwjàà&çéu"
I'm pretty sure you just insulted some alien's mother and started an interstellar war.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
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.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The supreme court of the United States has definitively ruled that patentable items can no longer be protected by copyright once the patent has been expired.
Here is an expired patent describing such a device. And there were a number of devices before that. And schematic diagrams and circuits in magazines for white noise/sleep generators long ago.
It's a shame that people are so full of themselves that they think they are truly that special that they somehow made a unique creation here. But actually it's likely worse in that people think they found an easy target and want to take what they can with a bad faith claim.
This is a time where counter claims under the DMCA need to be filed against these bad faith claims and collect damages to help prevent further abuse.
Maybe even make google a co-defendant.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I was hit with a copyright claim using Youtube own provided music! What really sucks: - I got no notification email to let me know they started stealing all my revenue - The link to contest the action was 404 not found
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
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.
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He gets a 10% royalty....