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To Avoid Demonetization, YouTube and Twitch Streamers Sing Badly Over Copyrighted Songs (theverge.com)
To avoid copyright claims, "YouTube creators and Twitch streamers have been performing terrible a capella covers of popular songs," reports the Verge:
React videos are a huge part of YouTube's current culture; people lift popular movie trailers and film their reactions to what's happening on-screen. These videos are typically monetized... In recent months, YouTube creators have run into copyright issues while making TikTok reaction videos, where they collect cringey TikTok clips and either react or provide commentary on them. [T]hose TikTok videos contain music from artists signed to labels like Sony and Warner, and those labels will issue copyright claims, preventing creators from monetizing their videos... TikTok videos include less than 10 seconds of music, yet that can still be enough to receive a copyright claim -- on TikTok itself, the music is all licensed from the labels...
To work around that, creators like Danny Gonzalez and Kurtis Conner have started replacing the music with their own singing. Gonzalez and Conner half-heartedly sing songs like Linkin Park's "In The End" and Imagine Dragons' "Believer" while the corresponding TikTok video plays on screen... It's a little painful to hear, but ultimately a very fun loophole in the copyright system that YouTube has to enforce... The hope is that major labels like Sony Music or Warner Music Group can't claim copyright infringement, or at least that the singing won't trigger YouTube's automated system for finding copyrighted content.
To work around that, creators like Danny Gonzalez and Kurtis Conner have started replacing the music with their own singing. Gonzalez and Conner half-heartedly sing songs like Linkin Park's "In The End" and Imagine Dragons' "Believer" while the corresponding TikTok video plays on screen... It's a little painful to hear, but ultimately a very fun loophole in the copyright system that YouTube has to enforce... The hope is that major labels like Sony Music or Warner Music Group can't claim copyright infringement, or at least that the singing won't trigger YouTube's automated system for finding copyrighted content.
Who the fuck would actually spend their time watching this shit? Apparently there are more idiots than we thought.
Singing a copyright song is a copyright violation. It is possible that they're infringing a separate copyright to that of the specific performance but that's about as far as this can help.
*takes audio clips of the bad singing and submits to ContentID*
$$$$$
*smug bastard*
Deek Jackson wasn't demonetized for copyright infringement.
Vote Landless Peasant Party!
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Doesn't sound like there's any progressing at all, besides legal trickery.
Fair use allows using parts of copyrighted works without permission for the purpose of reviews, or when only a small portion of the copyrighted work is used, or how transformative the use is (are you just regurgitating the copyrighted work, or using part of it to create something entirely new).
Unfortunately, Youtube's demonitization policy completely ignores fair use. If you use a 5 second snippet of a copyrighted song in your 15 minute video, the copyright holder can get your video demonitized (all the money the video makes goes to them instead of to you). At the very least, the system should limit the demonitization to the duration of the copyrighted clip, so 5 seconds of a song in a 15 minute video only results in the song copyright holder getting just 0.6% of the ad revenue.
People still get demonetized just for singing or even humming songs. MrBeast got a video demonetized for singing less than 3 seconds of a a song. Yes, just singing it, and the person claiming the copyright had 1 video uploaded. But because Youtube lets the claimant decide whether it is fair use or not, random people like that can just do whatever they want, and particularly the big studios are basically free reign to choose what lives and what dies. There was also a guy who got demonetized for playing a song on a paper towel dispenser. Yes. The sound of the paper towel dispenser playing the song got the video copyright claimed. These are just extreme examples but millions of videos are getting demonetized just for singing a song with no music in the background so I don't see this new strategy working out.
MrBeast got a video demonetized for singing less than 3 seconds of a a song. Yes, just singing it, and the person claiming the copyright had 1 video uploaded.
This suggests a strategy - make videos where you sing yourself, then immediately after upload claim copyright on any official videos that claim the song... you could imagine YouTube not allowing inverse copyright actions to be filed without renewing them both more carefully, or possibly the first always taking precedence.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I couldn't make it past 10 seconds. That douchebag blabbing on about stupid bullshit while cutting the video 30 times per nano second should be put in the gas chamber and killed immediately for merely existing.
There's plenty of royalty free music around, no worry about licensing even when the song is correctly identified by an algorithm, and even in the unrealistic case where the algorithm can detect remixes of existing songs.
It can be pubic domain from copyright expiry, because the author decided so, or otherwise be close enough to public domain that there's no need to worry (e.g. Creative Commons license)
Kendall that's literally the dumbest thing you could come up with - your daily best no doubt.
"People still get demonetized just for singing or even humming songs" = false.
There are companies out there that basically mass copyright claim people hoping to steal their money. Twitch streamers and youtubers are approached by those companies so they can basically just attack any video with that person in it and try to claim it. The person gets a percent of the claimed video and the company takes a percent. It is insane how bad the system at Youtube is right now. You can't let the people trying to take more money decide whether something is fair use. That is just insane, in every case the claimant will say it isn't fair use just to steal the revenue from a video. It happens tons even to the biggest streamers in the world.
Normally I am strongly against the overzealous and unfair misuse of copyright that is regularly practiced by the major labels. But I’m also of the opinion that these gawd-awfully-stupid “react” videos - and their creators - need to die in a fire.
Is there any way both groups can die in a fire?
#DeleteChrome
If the authors of these videos have problems with copyrights, they clearly aren't contributing enough to the content they publish? why should we give our money to these copycats instead of the sony or warner who are the original authors of the content? If youtube is full of ripped off content, the money is really going to the wrong people and the platforms should forward the money to the real authors of the content.
I uploaded some videos of my wife having sex with the pizza delivery guy (not very original, I know. But he did have a big fat sausage) There was some music playing in the background and Sony claimed copyright over it so now they get the revenue. Nobody is watching my wife have sex with a pizza guy as a backdoor way to hear Maroon Five!!!!
They may avoid licensing issues with the recording, but they're going to need licenses to use the underlying copyrighted composition. BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, SoundExchange and others will no doubt be coming around to discuss performance, reproduction and synchronization licenses.
If copyright holders only got paid for the percentage of time their work was used, you'd see people showing a full length music video followed by 2 hours of them scratching their balls. So the copyright holder gets 5% and the ball scratcher gets 95%, even though the only reason anyone would watch it would be for the music at the start of the video.
Try again.
Facecams and bad singing are popular gimmicks to avoid the copyright bots.
It's not a loophole. It's considered an unauthorized cover of the song and with most music labels, that means they can't claim it but you're not allowed to put any ads on it at all. You can go to the youtube audio library, look up the name of a song, and it will tell you the rules about directly using and doing a cover of it.