Beethoven’s music is in the public domain. Specific recordings of it (e.g. made by artitsts under contract to / with records deals with Sony) are copyright to whoever made the recording. The automated idiocy assumes that any other recording sounds like the Sony-copyrighted recording (which of course it always will) and flags it, as it MUST of course be that Sony recording (duh!).
There needs to be some new rule that recordings of public domain material can only be protected by humans listening and proving they are the same as the allegedly infringing version - i.e. prove the user uploaded the Sony recording and not some other recording. Or just make all public domain musical recordings unprotected - but that will never fly, for many reasons.
ETA @KathyPartdeux I like the idea of uploading a gazillion different recordings of the same classical pieces and doing a reverse Sony. That may turn out to be an effective form of protest, but only if the numbers of uploads are huge, I suspect.
Now I want to start a Youtube channel that does infinite livestreams of browser windows playing other Youtube content on infinite autoplay, just to see if it floods the algorithmic scanners.
Those audio copyright bots are pretty damn stupid in general. I brought that point up back in the summer when a SoundCloud bot mistakenly pulled an Ariana Grande acapella cover made entirely with an realistic singing synth
Because the stupid Youtube-filter analyses your upload and if it sounds ‘close enough’ to something that was registred by a big label like Sony, it will assume that you simply used the Sony material.
Since most classical music performers try to get as close to the original score as possible, they of course sound alike. An thus they get flagged.
The main problem is that Youtube allows Sony to register their version of a classical piece of music as if it is the only one possible and thus block every other performance of it…
I wonder what would happen if Deutsche Grammophon would like to register their recording of the same piece?
I wonder what would happen if Sony started auto-flagging videos of performances on accounts like Steinway & Sons official Youtube channel? Or Yo-Yo Ma’s? Or Natalie Dessay’s?—that is to say, entities who still don’t have enough money to fight Sony on this, but with whom Sony might want to maintain good relations?
Are you saying that it is not legal to make a claim that a record company or other corporate rights holder may be infringing someone else’s copyright? That it is the law that “claims or strikes against Sony or the other big labels are just automatically thrown out and ignored”? I doubt that was what you meant but that seems to be the implication of your comment.
“What legal case”? The hypothetical one (“waiting to happen”) I was suggesting might conceivably be forthcoming if places like YT are refusing to consider such claims of infringement against record companies (or other large corporate copyright owners) such as Sony and just discard them automatically.
Arguably, Castle Communications (BMG now I think) owns the rights to “crap recordings of classical music”, as they own the rights to the original Portsmouth Sinfonia recordings.
Understood. But perhaps not if they were aimed at one recording company and a single recording. Then rinse and repeat with another one.
Still a nice idea, nevertheless.
Your comment made me dig a little deeper. Deera Venkatraman (the author of the original FB post/the musician in the aforementioned “crap recording”) appears to be fully bilingual in English and Chinese, with an educational background in Kuala Lumpur. He posted the video from Stanford, California, and he seems to be living in the US these days, even if he has some of his computer’s language settings toggled to Chinese.
Anyway. I hadn’t realized that the auto-censorship here has nothing to do with YouTube! It’s Facebook censoring his video (stripping out the sound for 47 seconds of a 9 minute personal video!), apparently at Sony’s algorithmic request.
