This time, it was three claims at once, all from major record labels: BMG, Warner/Chappell, and Universal Music Publishing Group.
If three completely different people/groups are all claiming ownership of the same thing, you would think that should be a big red flag in Youtube’s algorithms that something is happening that can’t be properly handled by the automated system.
I used a version of “Oh Holy Night” by an artist that released it on a Creative Commons BY 3.0 license, and got hit with 26 claims from various companies:
i’d link to an image of it, but it won’t let me…
You know- it sounds to me like people shouldn’t upload funny, interesting, or original stuff to YouTube until they get their act together.
I’m sorry but google has done nothing wrong. And as proof google CEO Eric Schmidt is both rich and very rich. ~Q.E.D.
totally like this quote:
“As an independent content creator, it is absurd, ridiculous, and downright insulting that I can have my content de-monetized based on a completely fraudulent claim.”
Well, maybe you should have been a big multinational company if you want preferential treatment. That’s what the laws are setup to do, so why would you be surprised to find that they’re working as written? Maybe if you were big enough to write tremendously one sided laws then they would work for you.
Piracy is wrong, and theft is okay as long as you do it on a very, very large scale. That’s what we’re being told here.
There is very little actual law involved here, only the policies and procedures put in place by private corporations for their mutual benefit. If there were actually law involved, there would be such things as due process, or at least mechanisms for appeal. It is precisely situations like this that cry out for government regulation. Of course, any regulations would be written by corporations for their mutual benefit; that’s life in the plutocracy.
Quick, someone rewrite the lyrics of “Silent Night,” cleverly replacing the title with “Copyright.” Go.
Shit like this is an example of why abuse of the DMCA should incur punitive fines commiserate with the capital available to the abuser. The bigger you are, the more resources you have to avoid abusing this crappy lopsided law.
So, you’re a gigantic company with tons of money and employees? You’ve got the person hours available to avoid abusing the law. If you abuse it anyway, you should pay lots of fucking money as a wake-up call to the disproportionate effect your abuse has on people who don’t have lots of money. Though I will say that paying millions to this guy as recompense is a bit overboard. Maybe we could use the majority of the fine they’d pay to hire quality lawyers to defend against IP “frivolity.”
I want to click on the video and watch it, but then I’ll be supporting the big labels. Damn.
For those who didn’t watch … It’s a guy in a fedora walking on a frozen lake precariously and talking about stuff that largely doesn’t seem interesting unless you’re already following him and know the context. About half way through, he starts singing Silent Night and that’s when I left.
I know I sound like a real Scrooge with this description. Sorry about that. The walking on the lake part was pretty cool and the coolest thing in that was the layers of like frozen airbubbles in the lake and how because he was moving it looked kind of like how they did the city backgrounds in Akira. I mean, the lake didn’t look like a city background but the way it seemed to move was reminiscent for me.
Since I don’t follow his videos and don’t like (most) Christmas music, it wasn’t really my thing. The lake was cool. And since I’m not brave enough to walk on ice, I felt the walking was cool. If nerve-wracking.
So why don’t we all just issue random take down notices to anything we want. Break the system and maybe it can get fixed or make it so horrible that no one wants to use it anymore.
I think the point is that normal people don’t have the power to issue such notices, only the big guys.
Anyone can issue takedown notices though I suspect I can’t issue a takedown notice to divert the revenue from a big company to me instead. Which is part of the Google problem here since, so far as I can recall anyway, that’s not actually a part of the DMCA.
(No more posty for me for a bit. I feel like I’ve been dominating the conversation.)
They should at the bare minimum hold the monetized ad revenue until the debate is settled and then release it to whoever won the argument. 
I don’t understand.
… all the money his video generated was diverted to them. … There is no penalty for automatically generated claims over things that the publishers have nothing to do with
Surely this is bog-standard theft. All you have to do is call the police. They’ve been geared up for this sort of thing for ages.
Pfff. Did you see the part where they are big and rich and he is small and not rich? Totally not their thing anymore. If it were the other way around he’d be facing 30 years on some absurd interpretation of a 100 year old law, but it isn’t. Nothing will happen, and then later, it will get worse.
It’s a perfect storm of stupidity and greed: Google has given the big publishers a platform that rewards fraudulent claims over indie creators’ work; the publishers responded by making plenty of such claims, and all the while decrying “piracy” as the great evil of our day.
Piracy is the great evil of our day. We can call robber barons pirates, can’t we?
Actually, come to think of it, probably not - piracy has one or two pretty cool connotations. Guess I’ll go on calling them scum.
