[lakomen]

Dealing with Youtube's "copyright" department isn't worth the trouble. Also the same content on a Adsense monezited site yields factor 10 earnings vs Youtube.

Just one example of their copyright shenanigans:

A friend of mine prank called some water cleaning office somewhere in Africa. He was put on hold, while on hold some music played. Youtube wanted to know if he had the license for this "elevator type" music, essentially single tone please hold the line "music". Of course he didn't and he had to edit the video and re-upload.

Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public? The attraction was what he and them said, not the non-essential music to begin with.

So the same piece of audio on an Adsense site, no issues whatsoever. And 10 times the earnings of the video.

[saaaaaam]

Hold the line music is absolutely copyrighted in a way that you can’t post a conversation containing that music to a channel that you are monetising, without compensating the creators of the music.

[hiatus]

Reminds me of how police played copyrighted music so they could avoid being filmed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04/12/santa-ana-p...

[realusername]

That sounds absolutely insane, you don't even request that music to be played.

It's time for copyright to adapt to the 21st century.

[MichaelZuo]

It doesn't sound like they were blocked from ever sharing the video, just that they can't make as much money off of it.

[ianburrell]

The music is likely fair use since limited time period and not main use.

But fair use is complicated and there is no way it could be determined by algorithm. YouTube can’t trust the uploader. It doesn’t scale to decide by person. Fallback to DMCA process would be too expensive. Plus, fair use is only US. Easier to just deny copyright material.

[noAnswer]

The cleaning office didn't requested to prank called either!

[jcranmer]

Copyright is designed for an industrial content creation context, and it does not have the flexibility it needs to avoid the absurd results it reaches as it's been extended outside of that context.

In this case, it's the same reason that $BLOCKBUSTER_FILM needs to license $HIT_POP_SONG as the montage or mood-setting music for part of their film. It's possible that there's a viable fair use defense in this case, but defending it would likely cost several orders of magnitude more than the lifetime revenue of the video, and to be frank, even the fair use defense ultimately seems weak to me.

[kevin_thibedeau]

YouTube doesn't have to engage in the absurdity at all. They have safe harbor protection. All they have to do is process DMCA takedowns in a timely manner rather that preemptively flagging content on behalf of powerful interests. They do the latter because they're in bed with the corporate media who provide content for their subscription services.

[realusername]

Copyright laws are just there to screw smaller creators, on TV they have agreements with the monopoly license fee holders and they just put whatever they want without asking anybody.

[saaaaaam]

That’s a bit of an oversimplification. Smaller creators who are making music absolutely can and do benefit from the fees that pass through the “monopoly license fee holders” - collective management organisations. For example in the UK if a song that you wrote and recorded (and for which you control exclusive rights over the song copyright and the recording copyright) is played on BBC Radio 2 (the biggest national radio station by audience numbers) then you will be paid around £100 per minute.

So each time a three minute song is played you’ll get £300.

Now, obviously, the chances of an independent artist without the mechanisms of big record labels may struggle to get the music into the hands of the gatekeepers who make the decisions about what is played, but it does happen.

I agree though that the copyright implementation around incidental use of what is essentially stock music in a wider creation is something that can seem a bit out of whack. The biggest issue is around metadata and the way information identifying rights holders passes through the digital supply chain. Unless a video creator was able to clearly identify the rights holders in incidentally music then the blunt instrument of “this is copyright material, block/monetise/rev share” is currently really the only thing that prevents “bad actors” exploiting copyright music for their benefit.

[noAnswer]

These agreements involve book keeping and money also.

[realusername]

I don't deny that, it's like the mafia, the large companies are never the ones stopped by it, they just pay the tolls.

[macintux]

> Who in their right mind thinks that this hold the line music is copyrighted in a way that you couldn't post a conversation containing that music in public?

Well, me for one. Honestly this sounds like a rookie mistake.