Musician Posts Public Domain Songs, Major Labels Claim Ownership, YouTube Attacks Musician
By Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) of the essential tech site Techdirt.
We've talked in the past about how YouTube's ContentID system fails at fair use and the public domain — whereby it is unable to distinguish public domain material. That has resulted in ridiculous situations, often where large companies with huge catalogs end up shutting down perfectly legal content. Sometimes it's crazy stuff like taking down a video because of birds chirping in the background, but other times it can result in public domain music being pulled down.
Musician Dave Colvin appears to be dealing with the latter, as he noted 
in a frustrated Facebook post about how the publishing arms of the major labels keep claiming copyright on public domain cover songs that he's been recording and posting to YouTube. The end result is that, even though all of these claims are bogus, YouTube is threatening to take away his ability to monetize his account, and have already disabled it on a public domain song.
I am fed up with YouTube. Several times I have provided evidence that my video "O Little Town of Bethlehem" is a Public Domain song and each time I get an email saying the song is owned by either Warner Chappell or UMPG or Sony. Now they have disabled my being able to earn any money for the number of times the video is viewed. We are only talking about pennies but no one "owns" a Public Domain song.
They now have threatened to totally disable my account from monetizing any of my videos because of multiple "false" claims of ownership. Since there is no way to speak to a human being directly, there will never be a way to convince them of the error of their ways….Fed up!
(And just to cut this argument off before it even begins: you can absolutely make money from public domain material, you just can't stop others from doing the same thing). Again, this isn't the first time we've seen this kind of thing, and it's a situation that YouTube really needs to figure out a solution to.
It’s annoying, but you can dispute the claim right inside your YouTube video manager. I deal with this on an almost daily basis, and the claims are always released.
The point is that the uploader hasn’t done anything wrong and shouldn’t have to jump through extra hoops, be they easy or not, to clear their name and re-enable access to the content. The fact that you have to do it daily says that something is seriously wrong.
A proper remedy is not for the uploader to await the inevitable false claim and then cut their way through red tape to get the content back online, as 17 USC 512(g) requires now. As long as the law allows such bogus claims to be recklessly made “in good faith”, with the burden entirely on the falsely accused to rectify, the publishers will have absolutely no incentive to fix their broken content ID system so the false claim isn’t made in the first place. 17 USC 512(f) is theoretically supposed to be the falsely accused’s hedge against this, but hasn’t been as effective as it should be.
While it’s true that someone who hasn’t done anything wrong shouldn’t have to go through hoops, Brian is right. There is a simple claim dispute system that allows you to contest the claim. I have had no troubles using it and it works.
Yes, its annoying but the system was designed to stop those that actually do violate someone else’s copyright.
That being said, a little human interface on youtube/google’s part would go a long way for them.
Don’t get me wrong – I’d love to not have to deal with it! As it stands, I have a little text expansion snippet I use, so the process takes about 10 seconds.
My issue is that CD Baby and Rumblefish continually reclaim ownership of my songs, since I’m signed up for their licensing program. Plus I used to have an exclusive publishing contract, so my old publisher and their affiliates have the same songs in their systems. Nonetheless, the dispute process always goes my way and is usually resolved within a day or two.
On the other hand, plenty of fans upload my songs to YouTube, and many of their videos have more plays than mine. This system allows me to collect royalties on those plays, so it’s not all bad!
it’s just not a big deal – once again mike masnick has to make a mountain out of a molehill… it’s pretty comical. mike talking about artists rights is like pol pot talking about human rights. give it a break already.
content ID is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. improvements will be made and this is all just part of the disruption of this new technology.
funny how techdirt only favors disruption that hurts artists rather than helping them.
It is almost common knowledge that these copyright claims get executed in an automatted process by youtube.
It has happened frequently that internet hecklers have claimed copyright despite not owning it, just to drive some youtube user into trouble and have their account shut down – for whatever reasons.
This looks like it’s just another internet phenomenon (e.g. trolls, spammers, website-cease-and-desist lawyers) which has been enabled by the web businesses’ financial interest in automation in situations where common sense would be required. Outside of the internet, the latter is known as buerocracy.
This happened to me over All My Trials, Plaisir D’Amour, Down to the River and Pray and several other public domain songs. When I refuted their claims, they released their claim, then two weeks later put them back on again. And there is no one to talk to. Prior to that I was scrupulous about not putting anything on YouTube that had been written after 1923. After they did that and would not respond, I did a few that were written before 1960, and these they did not claim. I am also a journalist and used every one I found written after 1923 in articles specific to the themes of the songs, about the history of music. They agreed on the three I did. Then they went back and claimed them, I refuted it again, and they released their claims a second time, then a week later back again. YouTube has become a different animal since Google got involved.