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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.
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
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.