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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
"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.
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.