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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.
Yes, but the automatic copyright violation detector thingy doesn't trip over bad singing. Youtube needs real human moderators to detect this kind of violation, meaning it's costly and about impossible to scale up for Youtube - which is is exactly the point of this tactic.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
And then if they do start getting shut down, they'll change the lyrics and call it parody. Weird Al does not need permission to do what he does, although he generally asks for it simply to remain on good terms with the artists. Sometimes they regret giving him that permission (Nirvana, Coolio) but they have no power to make him retract it.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
"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
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)
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
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.
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.
Dude, he said upload. He's streaming.
The contents might be owned by a different company for the bad-singing version. For example, the tune and lyrics are owned by the writer of the song, not the record company.
Additionally, any interpretation remains the property of the creator. In this case, the bad-singing version is owned by the bad-singer.
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.
YouTube could pay only for the portions of the video that were actually watched.
The point is that since it is a cover it is no longer the recordings copyright that applies.
The song writer can claim copyright infringement but the record company can't claim that their recording was copied.
Now if you do this with a song that already is a rehash of something older (Like House of the Rising Sun.) it becomes very obvious that the copyright claim is bullshit.