> Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube
That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640?
> When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued.
Again, that doesn't sound like a valid suit. Surely she would win? In the few cases I've heard of where suits like this are brought against someone they've easily won them.
The poster isn't claiming that this is a valid DMCA suit. Nearly everyone who is at a mildly decent level and has posted their own recordings of classical musical to YouTube have received these claims _in their Copyright section_. YouTube itself prefixes this with some lengthy disclaimer about how this isn't the DMCA process but that they reserve the right to kick you off their site based on fraudulent matches made by their algorithms.
They are absolutely completely and utterly bullshit. Nobody with half an ear for music will mistake my playing of Bach's G Minor Sonata with Arthur Grumiaux (too many out of tune notes :-D). But yet, YouTube still manages to match this to my playing, probably because they have never heard it before now (I recorded it mere minutes before).
So no, it isn't a valid claim, but this algorithm trained on certain examples of work, manages to make bad classifications with potentially devastating ramifications for the creator (I'm not a monetized YouTube artist, but if this triggered a complete lockout of my Google account(s), this likely end Very Badly).
I think it's a very relevant comparison to the GP's examples.
I have dealt with fraudulent Youtube copyright claims, it's a long and annoying process. First, you have to file a dispute, which typically the claimant will automatically reject, and then you have to escalate to a DMCA counternotice, which will take the video offline for a few days to give the claimant a chance to respond. In my experience, the claimant will drop the complaint at this point, but you're theoretically opening yourself up to legal action by sending the counternotice.
It's not, but good luck talking to a human at Youtube when the video gets taken down.
> Again, that doesn't sound like a valid suit. Surely she would win?
Assuming she could afford the lawyer, and that she lives through the stress and occasional mistreatment by the authority, yes, probably. Both are big ifs, though.
> Assuming she could afford the lawyer, and that she lives through the stress and occasional mistreatment by the authority,
To add to that, there is provisions to lock her out of pushing new videos to the platform if the number of unresolved copyright claims passes some low number (3?).
So she loses new revenue until her claims prevail, and of course the entity which the claim is made for knows that and has no incentive to help her (don't they even get the monetization from her videos in the meantime ?)
OK but then we're just talking about content moderation, which seems like a separate issue. I think using "YouTube copyright claim" as a proxy for "legal copyright claim" is more to the parent's point, especially since that's how YouTube purports the claim to work. Otherwise it feels irrelevant.
Copyright claims are a form of content moderation, by preventing reuse of content that others own.
But it can still be weaponized to prevent legitimate resubmissions of parallel works, that can potentially deplatform legitimate users, depending on the reviewer and the clarity of the rebuttal.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that while the "1640's violin composition" itself may be out of copyright, if I record myself playing it, my recording of that piece is my copyright. So if you took my file (somehow) and used it without my permission, and I could prove it, I could claim copyright infringement.
That's my understanding, and I've personally operated that way to avoid any issues since it errs on the side of safety. (Want to use old music, make sure the license of the recording explicitly says public domain or has license info)
The problem is that YouTube AI thinks your recording is the same as every other recording, because it doesn't understand the difference between composition and recording.
…yes, as I understand it there are ‘mechanical’ rights vs. publishing rights… (for example hip hop artists may recreate a sample to avoid paying mechanical royalties, but still end up paying for publishing)
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/mechanical-rights
The copyright on the original composition may be expired, but there are many people who make new recordings of that piece and those recordings are copyrighted. While it is entirely legal to record your own rendition, YouTube’s automated Content ID is dumb and often can’t tell the difference between your recording and some other contemporary recording.
> Again, that doesn't sound like a valid suit. Surely she would win? In the few cases I've heard of where suits like this are brought against someone they've easily won them.
That's freedom of speech for everyone who can afford a lawyer to bring suit against a music rights-management company.
Even by the standards of copyright technicality, music copyright is weird. For example, if you ask a lawyer[0] what parts of copyright set it apart from other forms of property law[1], they would probably answer that it's federally preempted[2] and that it has constitutionally-mandated term limits.
Which, of course, is why music has a second "recording copyright", which was originally created by states assigning perpetual copyright to sound recordings. I wish I was making this up.
So the musical arrangement that constitutes that song from 1640? Absolutely public domain. You can tell people how to play Monteverdi all damned day. But every time you record that song being played, that creates a new copyright on that recording only. This is analogous to how making a cartoon of a public-domain fairy tale gives you ownership over that cartoon only. Except because different performers are all trying to play the same music as perfectly as possible, the recordings will sound the same and trip a Content ID match.
Oh, and because music copyright has two souls, the Sixth Circuit said there's no de minimus for sampling. That's why sample-happy rap is dead.
If you want public domain music on your YouTube video you either record it yourself or license a recording someone else did. I think there are CC recordings of PD music but I'm not sure. Either way you'll also need to repeatedly prove this to YouTube staff that would much rather not have to defend you against a music industry that's been out for blood for half a century at this point.
[0] Who, BTW, I am very much NOT
[1] Yes, yes, I know I'm dangerously close to uttering the dangerous propaganda term "intellectual property". You can go back to bed Mr. Stallman.
[2] Which means states can't make their own supra-federal copyright law and any copyright suit immediately goes to federal court.
The songwriter copyright is expired but there is still a freshly minted copyright on the video and the audio performance.
This becomes particularly onerous when trolls claim copyright on published recordings of environmental sounds that happen to be similar but not identical to someone else's but they do have a legitimate claim on the original recording.
That can't possibly be a valid claim, right? AFAIK copyright is "gone" after the original author dies + ~70 years. Before fairly recently it was even shorter. Something from 1640 surely can't be claimed under copyright protection. There are much more recent changes where that might not be the case, but 1640?
> When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued.
Again, that doesn't sound like a valid suit. Surely she would win? In the few cases I've heard of where suits like this are brought against someone they've easily won them.