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YouTuber Says He Was Accused of Infringing His Own Song (cnet.com)
CNET reported this week that a musician, who plays guitar and has lots of viewers on YouTube, received an unusual email from the company alleging that he had copied a tune he wrote himself two years ago. From the report: But last month, Paul Davids says he got a rather unusual email from YouTube. The Content ID system had flagged a tune he wrote himself, two years ago, for infringing on someone's else's newer video. Someone who, it seems, stole his backing track to create a new track of his own. [...] "Someone took my track, made their own track, uploaded it to Spotify, YouTube, whatever, and I get a copyright infringement notice? Wait, what?" said Davids. The story has a happy ending -- Davids used YouTube's appeals system to quickly work things out, and let the other artist keep on using his tune. (Davids tracked him down on Facebook Messenger, and the guy apparently admitted he'd downloaded 'a couple of guitar licks' on YouTube.) But it's weird to think YouTube would flag an old video for infringing on a new one, no?
https://youtu.be/YvH77m_3MVU
Wow, you have a first hand account you can link to. But you link to an article with ads.
I'm sure the story going viral had nothing to do with a relatively speedy settlement of this issue for the guy.
If only we all could get our grievances with YouTube to go viral, the other half a million people who have been shafted one way or another might get an appeal.
Don't use youtube unless you like being assumed guilty until proven otherwise.
...that Google has proven its AI/algorithms just don't work.
AC comments get piped to
An "appeal"? Most of them didn't even get a trial.
The way youtube works is that you get a notification telling you something is wrong and you have 48 hours to "correct" the video (except you can't replace a video, you can only take one down and put a new one up, losing all the likes, etc).
After 48 hours your video is reviewed by humans and you're judged guilty or not.
The problem? At no point are you allowed to send them a message, provide evidence, or do anything else in your own defense.
No sig today...
Welcome to the new world where you are guilty until maybe, maybe, maybe proven innocent, and the judge is a secret algorithm.
In a world where copyright "infringement"" is worse than murder, we need a system that turns copyright claims into toilet paper.
It kind of makes sense.
People upload stuff to youtube all the time before the real content owners have a chance.
So it wouldn't be too strange to think that an old video would infringe on a newer one.
To answer the question in the summary: If someone decided to post their collection of an artist to YouTube because the songs are not posted yet, then the copyright holder finally got around to posting the official version, that's reason enough to flag older videos.
of a failed system caused by this rampant - is it a disease? - more is not enough trend/habit...
But it's weird to think YouTube would flag an old video for infringing on a new one, no?
When you've been pirated often enough with ripoffs from other media on Youtube, you might well think of countering this by eventually putting up (and likely monetizing) an official version yourself and then start pursuing the inofficial versions which have been likely around for longer. Maybe you previously did not consider Youtube all that important or were glad that somebody else went to the business of advertising your piece.
ex lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Was sued in the '80s by his own former record company for releasing a single, "The Old Man Down the Road", that allegedly sounded too much like "Run Through the Jungle", a CCR song to which CCR's record label held the rights. Ultimately the label's claim of infringement was rejected, but not without substantial sums spent on litigation. (The subsequent litigation over attorney's fees went all the way to SCOTUS.)
So yeah, being accused of plagiarizing yourself is nothing new.
Sometimes God's gift is the swell parting type to fresh bastards.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
"But it's weird to think YouTube would flag an old video for infringing on a new one, no?"
No.
There are plenty of artists who were late to the game uploading their back-catalogue.
https://torrentfreak.com/fox-s...
Google has been collecting biometric and other data types to fingerprint each video but have started with the newer first and just now caught up to the older backing track. That's why the older got flagged as the copy. It's creepy as hell.
If we're going to do this "three strikes" policy, it needs to go both ways. If you copyright strike someone three times, they are successfully appealed, then you need a court order before a takedown happens. Seems only fair.
I've been subject to a youtube copyright detection myself, and that's my experience too. The entire appeals process consisted of a drop-down box of possible reasons, none of which applied in my case (The music was public domain, the copyright having long expired). At no point was there even an option to contact a real person. The process was entirely automated.
Then you do what you gotta do. Lie.
The thing that makes this odd to most people is that the original author uploaded something first, and then someone else got to file a copyright complaint.
The things is that say someone puts up a copy of a sixties song, possibly monetizing it. Later the record company of the original artists goes with the times and creates a youtube channel with the original music and video clips. Then they flag that they own the copyright to the songs and would like copyright enforcment on the copies... Now the first uploader gets a valid infringement notice.
That's what seems to have happened here: The guy who copied the track flagged it as his own work and asked youtube to patrol its site for him..... ... " tag with the copyright enforcement page would have helped. The record company who is uploading the sixties songs files something like 1966, while this guy should enter something like 2018....
In this case a "this content was created on:
Also most of the views of a video happen in the first 48 hours, so it screws the person out of nearly all of the ad revenue they might make.
The 48 hour review window is perfectly designed to screw content creators out of as much revenue as possible.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
"But it's weird to think YouTube would flag an old video for infringing on a new one, no?"
No.
Fuck no.
You're guilty until.
Well, forever,
Yep. How hard would it be for them to let you type a message they can read during the review process?
The truth is they simply don't care. They're not short of content. Your work might have taken months to create, it mean the world to you, but it's nothing to them.
No sig today...
So stop using their site.
It is their site you know. Not yours.
All this righteous indignation over someone not letting you use their site the way you want.
If you don't like the way they use your content, stop giving it to them.
We used to think the first uses of Time Travel would be to go back and kill Hitler's grandma or something but now I think we see that it's to go back and post hitsongs to youtube under your own username. Likewise people will write articles about articles that will be written in the future.
So now we have the first evidence of time travel.
Time travel will be used to play pranks on people in the past. For example, in the future we will discover that the late steven hawking was really a time traveler. How do we know this, well recall he threw a party for time travelers and guess who was the only person who showed up? Steven Hawking.
message posted from my iphoneMLXVII
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This often happened to a buddy of mine. He'd write a song, play it on his guitar and post it. Then some random music company claimed it was theirs. It got to the point where he got tired of being flagged and stopped posting on YT for this reason.
This happens more frequently than you think.
I write and make music with a modest following, and have had youtube take down several of my songs due to the auto-trawling bots that run around claiming everything is theirs and auto-issuing DMCA takedowns via youtube.
Google has proven its AI/algorithms just don't work.
Not really, they have just proven that like humans their AI systems have a range of intelligence from smart down to gibbering idiot. What's interesting though is that, like humans, nowadays the ones which are idiots seem to be ending up in charge of important things.
This problem happens to my band on the regular. While promoting our new record, we were hit with multiple copyright infringements across multiple platforms. Interestingly, the party claiming the infringement violations had no agreement with us and was merely associated with a physical record distributor that had no real claim to the copyright of the music. It has become a complete handicap for our promotion efforts and stymied metrics that are used promoters at music festivals who determine our potential draw and therefore billing. Overall, in 12+ years of making music with this group, the digital landscape has become increasingly hostile and one sided to independent content creators, which is antithesis to the initial promise of liberation online.
... and the guy apparently admitted he'd downloaded 'a couple of guitar licks' on YouTube.
I'm not sure a "couple of guitar licks" would qualify for copyright protection, but perhaps the law or online monitoring system(s) really are that anal.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have a couple of videos that use classical music that falls under Creative Common licenses. Every week I get a warning from Youtube saying that some company is claiming that I infringe on their copyright. I contest and always win... Then repeat again the following week, sometime from the same 'company' for the same song! I've so far had about 40 different companies claim copyright on songs that are not theirs. It's beyond frustrating. Youtube's process is clearly broken.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Found your Funko POP! mascot.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
Whoever voted this troll doesn't understand what it's saying, which is perfectly valid. Youtube is not a public forum, it's a private company. Sure the line is blurred when there's overlap but at the end of the day it's a fact,
FB, YT, TWT, etc, none of that shit is a public forum where anyone can say whatever they want nomatter what. (And in fact the 1st never guaranteed that anyway)
NASA's live stream of the landing of the Curiosity rover in 2012 was interrupted as well. A news station integrated parts of the stream into a report. Since the station was a media partner of YouTube, the service assumed that the news report was the original and automatically interrupted NASAs live stream during the landing.
This is by design, as well. They literally want people off the site or less people getting money.
The site hasn't made a single cent.
The less small payments they have to make, the less money wasted on fees.
This is why they happily suck the collective dicks of the large viral youtubers despite breaking guidelines ALL THE TIME and shaft anyone small who do no wrong.
Absolutely scummy site.
If it matches something in the database, FLAGGED. \o/
Some hillbilly clown using USGS FOSS software (to display live earthquake panels) on YouTube claimed he was the first to use it, so sent copyright claims to every YouTube channel that has been doing the same and YouTube shut down every one of them. It took weeks to get them back. Hillbilly has only about 50 viewers at a time, the other ones (some run by volcanologists) had thousands of viewers at a time.
By that logic, there are no public fora anywhere on the internet. I'm just curious, was the money from Ajit Pai worth losing what little self-respect you might have had?
Just because some place is private property, doesn't mean that the constitution doesn't apply, situations where private property is also a publicly accessible areas for the public to get together doesn't get treated the same way that a private office building would where there's only specifically authorized people allowed to come and go.
I had my account terminated a couple of weeks ago. I had the 48 hours to appeal, however I didn't have any idea what I was appealing. Because whatever I did (or did not do) was considered 'grievous' no warning, just termination. They don't have to tell you what terns of service violations you may or may not have committed. Just a link to a page with all of the possible things you may or may not have done wrong. My account was pretty small, some songs I've written over the years, some videos of 'how-to' for protools and a few vids that I did voiceovers for. I wrote an 'appeal' that was pretty generic, that basically said, "hey, could you tell me what I did wrong. I'll fix it and promise to not do it again." Their reply, 48 hours later, "your terminated." I didn't really care about the content, the worst part is that I no longer have a youtube account and lost my history and all the stuff I used to like to watch. Now if I go to youtube, it's all cat videos, makeup tips and the top viral crap I don't care about. Yea, youtube needs to get their act together on this stuff, at least tell you what you did so you can appeal it properly. sucks.
Many google tech is designed to appease their corporate partners, so it's a feature, not a bug.
Wow- private property is only a public forum to the extent the private property owner dictates it is. The 1st amendment applies to government, not private persons. There are technical solutions to these problems and they tend to involve decentralized distributed technologies.
By that logic, there are no public fora anywhere on the internet. I'm just curious, was the money from Ajit Pai worth losing what little self-respect you might have had?
Just because some place is private property, doesn't mean that the constitution doesn't apply, situations where private property is also a publicly accessible areas for the public to get together doesn't get treated the same way that a private office building would where there's only specifically authorized people allowed to come and go.
Which constitution though?
The world has no single constitution everybody agreed to.
Whoever voted this troll doesn't understand what it's saying, which is perfectly valid. Youtube is not a public forum, it's a private company. Sure the line is blurred when there's overlap but at the end of the day it's a fact,
FB, YT, TWT, etc, none of that shit is a public forum where anyone can say whatever they want nomatter what. (And in fact the 1st never guaranteed that anyway)
That's just because the definition of public forum became outdated.
For all intents and purposes, all of those are public forums.
Perhaps American companies should be held to their country's constitution standards too, since they're providing a service that clearly molds entire communities and becomes part of the culture, the only way to protect that culture by regulating what those companies are allowed to do with their privately-funded public forums.
It's not unheard of. Telecom companies are required to be neutral after all, that's pretty much it. Maybe it should apply to YT and FB too.
Nope. I'm the bankruptee who will take his $1M+ in retirement savings to move to Mexico, marry a 14-year-old chica with the village elders' approval, build a McMansion outside the village, and become a Mexican warlord.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
And languish in obscurity? Youtube is where the viewers are. That means anyone who wants their video to be seen needs to use youtube.
Fine if you want to write a new song based on someone else's previous work, but you should get approval / a license to do so.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
Strange, I beat a dozen or so claims accusing me of using copyrighted material in my videos when the pieces were actually in the public domain. But I was careful to make sure that the specific performances I used were also in the public domain.
Specifically, I used several pieces of classical music to accentuate some Let's Play game videos (William Tell Overture, Flight of the Bumble Bee, etc.), but I made sure to use performances by the US Marine Corps Band, the US Army Band, etc. When my videos got flagged by "AdShare MG for a Third Party" and "rumblefish", for example, I simply disputed their claim, selected "The content is in the public domain" from the list of options, and provided the following explanation:
The William Tell Overture was composed by Gioachino Rossini and premiered in 1829. Rossini died November 13, 1868. Therefore, this work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less. Additionally, this particular recording was performed by "The President's Own" United States Marine Band. According to 17 U.S.C. 105, copyright protection is not available for any work of the United States Government, which is defined in 17 U.S.C. 101 as "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. government as part of that person's official duties." Therefore, this particular recording is also in the public domain. Therefore, rumblefish and AdShare MG for a Third Party have NO copyright claim to any music contained in this video.
I never lost a claim.
Apply punitive damages to both Google and the claimant for false notices.
Make no mistake, all those little "oops, the algorithm got it wrong" add up to a considerable amount of money for the record companies.
With Google trying to get premium content into YouTube, they are massively incentivised to game it exclusively towards the big premium content producers.
You don't understand what a warloard is. They're local extragovernmental authorities. Aka the "village elders"
They don't necessarily need to engage in war to earn the title. If they can at least mobilize an armed posse or militia.
As long as I'm nitpicking. You won't have the sort of supplies or labor required to build a proper mcmansion. You could, however get a geniune mansion. McMansions are built in bulk. Seemingly designed as variations on a template. They're also somewhat shoddy.
I'm sure there are upper middle class communities with them somewhere in Mexico but I doubt they exist inside the feifdoms of child sex traffickers
By that logic, there are no public fora anywhere on the internet
Largely correct.
Your constitution applies only to the actions of the government, not private individuals.
situations where private property is also a publicly accessible areas for the public to get together doesn't get treated the same way that a private office building would where there's only specifically authorized people allowed to come and go.
You are incorrect.
Please provide citations to support your position. Google has any number of links to articles, summaries and commentary that all say the same thing - the constitutional protection for speech applies to the government, not private individuals.
Here's one.
You may also want to take a look at the Wiki article on forums.
You may be confusing a state granting additional rights or protection of free speech with those protected by the constitution. See Pruneyard Shopping Center vs Robins. I would strongly recommend reading the summary at the bottom of the article which includes reactions by other states, test cases and judicial commentary.
I'm just curious, was the money from Ajit Pai worth losing what little self-respect you might have had?
You may have a touch of the Dunning-Kruger going on. Might want to reign in the insults while you get that sorted.
For all intents and purposes, all of those are public forums.
Not by a legal, nor constitutional definition.
the only way to protect that culture by regulating what those companies are allowed to do with their privately-funded public forums.
Hollywood/large-media-corporations also 'mold entire communities and becomes part of the culture' - should they be treated the same way?
I think that regulation of essential services and utilities in areas where monopolies either form naturally or where competition reduces quality of service is useful and desirable. I'm not convinced that the popularity of these services makes them either essential or monopolies.
The regulation of telecommunication companies would be better compared to ISPs, not services that are built on top of neutral utilities.
Caveat, I'm not from the US and do not use Facebook or much social media.
YouTube doesn't recognize the Public Domain?
Shut them down now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Burn the witch.
/problem: solved.
0. Make music, art.
1. Set up your own web site, email, brand online. Find a better external site for hosting the content and the needed streaming.
3. Set up a support method not linked to any existing "social" media.
4. Use existing social media to link to your content and build a brand.
Upload a video talking about the new music, art, video and where the link is.
Social media becomes nothing more than a real time message service to tell of new content, forum for that new content.
Everything that creates and is of value becomes external to the social media.
Social media becomes a list of short spoken video clips with the brand name and external links.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You know what, I'll go ahead and say it. I've become entirely against the idea that a private company acting as a public forum with a monopoly, near monopoly, or companies part of a small oligarchy over something can do whatever the fuck they please with no obligations on basic fairness. We need stronger consumer protection laws in these situations. They want the benefit of being a giant public platform with virtually no competitors? Then so sorry, there should be responsibility that comes along with that to not be completely arbitrary and capricious because you love the taste of the RIAA and MPAA's nethers. Prompt ability to appeal to a human when a financial issue is at stake is a no brainer.
Real people cost money. I've seen a shift, throughout my long career, from bug systems and reporting sytems that involve personnel taking the call to automated systems that solve the problem the company wishes you had and knows how to solve. Too often they do not solve the actual problem encountered, nor is there any option to get to a human. The knowledge of how to get to a human is valuable tribal knowledge, retained by your own support people who have mastered their craft, and there has been real "cost-saving" efforts in many businesses to shut down those back channels.
It's designed to screw copyright violators out of as much revenue as possible, to protect the copyrights of the people who pay YouTube's advertising bills. I think that you'll find that the abuse of legitimate creators or posters are a byproduct, not the intent, of the 48 hour review process. It's the abusive "let me put up the new Infinity Gauntlet movie the weekend it's published!" posters that they wish to block, before they get views.
"But it's weird to think YouTube would flag an old video for infringing on a new one, no?"
Is this high school?
Edwyn Collins had a bit of a similar issue some years back with his biggest hit, Girl Like You (you know the song, it was in Pulp Fiction) although in his case it was a major label (Warner Bros) claiming the copyright they didn't actually own.
https://www.nme.com/news/music/edwyn-collins-13-1304830
You don't understand what a warloard is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Goodbye, Slashdot!
If we ended copyrights, this kind of thing would not happen.
Donâ(TM)t you need money to do that? Because if you lose your job you wonâ(TM)t have any, and will have to sleep on the street :(
Kevin McLeod stated publicly on Twitter that Adsense pulled its ads from a section of his website (or perhaps all of it) because it contained "copyrighted content."
He's the one who made around half of Youtube's initial audio library for use by Youtubers on Youtube's own website.
on twitter (because even google execs hate G+)
hahaha
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
thought you were going to suggest to join the NRA
The fact that YouTube lets you make money from uploading videos, and themselves make money from those videos, should require them to act more fairly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do not lie.
Oh, screenshots and screencasts of ProTools, which is a proprietary product. If this were Audacity, then maybe the situation would have been different.
The videos that you did voice-overs for, might also have had something to do with the loss of your account.
Disclaimer: I do not work for YouTube, so these are just guesses.
One option is to create a personal account with likes and playlists, and a separate "upload" account (separate Google account, too).
There are numerous companies that go around claiming any video they can. The burden is then put on the content uploader to provide proof that it's theirs. If they don't bother doing so, the claiming company gains control (and monetization) of the content. I've had numerous companies claim my content in this way. While I successfully have shown the content is mine (in one case the claiming company wasn't even in existence when the content was uploaded), it's a huge inconvenience and many shady companies get away with it, packing their pockets with content they didn't create.
Heh. I use Pro Tools for my livelihood, so Audacity is not a viable solution. Yea, god forbid if I posted a video with MY voice on it. The problem is that I have no idea what I was terminated for, so as you point out, it's all just a guess. As I point out, maybe I did do something that Youtube believed was worthy of 'termination' maybe not, maybe it was just some mistake, I'll never know, because the review process and appeal process is obviously broken.
I'm with you about the broken review process, and that you were not told exactly what the issue was.
Screencaps/-casts of ProTools would be the most likely culprit in my view, as well as any sample sounds ProTools may have provided.
Granted, Audacity was perhaps a bad example, but there should be open source audio creation and processingtools out there that serve a similar purpose as ProTools does. I was not advocating for Audacity in favour of ProTools; just that I would have found a similar video involving Audacity as unlikely to have caused a copyright infringement notice. Oh yea, they didn't tell what exactly was the cause of account termination.
Voiceovers of videos to which someone else have copyrights to, might have been another issue, but it's impossible to tell. At issue was not your voice, but most likely the video. Given comments from others around here, then there seem to be companies that actively make intentional fraudulent copyright claims in order to claim monetisation. At best, it should be possible to hit them with the same stick. After that happens, YouTube would start claiming safe harbor rights in a New York minute.
Yep. How hard would it be for them to let you type a message they can pretend to read during the review process?
FTFY
Youtube copyright claims lots of stuff. Hell facebook's algorithm took down posts that had sections of the declaration of independence due to hate speech because of the language of it. youtube is no different. just some codes thats says if a=b then take down b crap.
Recently YouTube claimed that a video I made that contained a small part of a Nissan commercial (withing fair use guidelines) was owned by the National Hockey League. How the algorithm made that connection I will never know. I appealed and the claim was dropped.
Ultimately this other guy admits to essentially stealing the first guy's backing track, without even asking, and even after all that grief he lets him continue to use the music? Didn't the 2nd guy have to file for the copyright infringement in the first place in order for YouTube to flag it? That would make him an IP troll, why give him permission?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
My husband once got a "cease & desist" letter from Johnnie Walker whiskey, demanding he stop writing under the name Johnny Walker (with a Y, not an IE). Unfortunately for them, it's his legal name. He sent the idiot law firm a copy of his birth certificate, and told them to take it up with his mother - who is dead. They're welcome to try a Ouija board. Never heard from them again.
Interestingly, I had the opposite experience. I had posted an original performance of a renaissance madrigal, which predates the copyright system and indeed the country by a few hundred years. When it was flagged by YouTube, I used their "challenge" form to explain that, and the flag was promptly removed.
Also interestingly, that only happened with one out of dozens upon dozens of videos of original performances of renaissance and medieval madrigal music; none of the others were flagged at all.
I suspect the speedy settlement also had something to do with the fact that he has 600K+ subscribers on his channel :-). It's quite a good channel for guitar players.
I doubt YouTube replied 'your terminated'.