How to deal with capricious copyright claims

B

Bill Bader

New Member
Hello,

I upload a lot of live concerts, mostly bluegrass. Many feature standards that turn up in a lot of shows. So why is it that one performance with a certain song will be permitted, while another performance with the identical song will be blocked (sometimes in just a few countries) or, in one case, muted with the display still visible?

How does this jibe with YouTube's willingness to let people upload entire copyrighted albums, songs, movies, and so on?

Finally, is there a procedure I can follow to keep this from happening? (FWIW, I post as wgbader).

Thanks in advance.

Bill Bader
 
I'm not really sure how to get around this with the kind of content you upload. Just make sure you put in the info part the artists and songs and where to find their content to support them? Also maybe look into the who fair use thing, and see if what you do falls under that or not.
 
It can be arbitrary sometimes. I once put up a 1 hour White Noise video, with nothing but white noise on the screen and got a copyright strike from some Indian guy's video, which had nothing resembling white noise on the video, so I deleted it. Often it's not worth it IMO. YouTube doesn't really care unless you're a big channel, although they have been fair when I've gone up against copyright strikes before.
 
Bill Bader said:
Hello,

I upload a lot of live concerts, mostly bluegrass. Many feature standards that turn up in a lot of shows. So why is it that one performance with a certain song will be permitted, while another performance with the identical song will be blocked (sometimes in just a few countries) or, in one case, muted with the display still visible?

How does this jibe with YouTube's willingness to let people upload entire copyrighted albums, songs, movies, and so on?

Finally, is there a procedure I can follow to keep this from happening? (FWIW, I post as wgbader).

Thanks in advance.

Bill Bader
Click to expand...

Good question. I suspect that it's more a case of them not having found 100% of your videos, i.e. some slipped through the net. A lot of what goes on behind the scenes is automated, which makes it prone to error. Some producers/artists/labels/whatever will care about you uploading this type of thing and others will not.
 
Thanks for the quick responses. It does seem arbitrary, but I can live with it. It's amazing how quickly they nail the offending music so quickly. The White Noise anecdote reminds me of a (maybe) urban legend about John Cage trying to press some kind of charges against someone who'd pirated his "composition" called 4:33, which was four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence. Go figure!
 
Are you getting permission to upload these live concerts, and who video captured them? If the artists in question are signed to labels, and someone was recording them live without permission to do so, that is a major violation of copyright, as would be a live concert recorded from TV and posted to YouTube.

Why doesn't the OP instead of asking this question, which is a disguised "how do I get around the rules?", simply create his own legal material to upload?
 
I think you've seriously misread and misinterpreted my question, then followed it with a flippant question of your own.

I did _not_ ask about getting around the rules, and I don't try to. Instead, I asked what the rules are, and why they seem to be so inconsistent. If YT removes something I've posted, so be it. I tag it, then go on to the next potential upload.

YT has countless copyrighted pieces of music (songs and entire albums) and movies (clips and complete movies) that haven't been pulled down, muted, or anything else. And so on.

I don't have the creative genius or musical talent of the artists I post. But I have a lot of their music. I don't want to be a dog in a manger (Aesop), I just want to share with others, gratis, what I've found.
 
Bill Bader said:
I did _not_ ask about getting around the rules, and I don't try to.

I just want to share with others, gratis, what I've found.
Click to expand...

You're asking how to upload content that is not yours to share. How is that not asking how to get around the rules?


What other people are doing shouldn't matter to you. The simple fact is that if you don't have all of the proper permissions (performer, writer of the music, any licensing or distribution companies they are affiliated with, whoever filmed it, etc.), you are in violation of copyright when you post something. That is the only thing that is important.

As for others, they may have the licenses needed either through themselves or a network they are a part of, they could have 3rd party claims on their videos so the proper people receive all income from them, they may have altered the music enough to where it can not be automatically tracked from ContentID, if concerts recordings, ContentID is limited in it's ability so the other videos may not have been manually found yet, or they could simply be relying on dumb luck.

Needless to say, it could be any number of things, but don't worry about them... worry about yourself and your channel.
 
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