Today’s entry in Copycrazy-right? is Marina from The Piano Keys, a musical blogger who does tutorials on how to play pieces on the piano for the last five years. She did a video on Piano Sonata No, 14 aka Moonlight Sonata, playing a piece written by Beethoven in 1801.
She then got a copyright claim for ‘Wicca Moonlight’, and these bots wanted to monetise her video – for a piece that’s over 200 years old and is most definitely in the public domain. She disputed that claim, it was rejected – and has to appeal – which indeed doxxes you to the person who filed the fraudulent claim in the first place. You don’t know these people, I have done it, but even I know that you don’t feel safe doing it. But certainly a fake claim like this from organisations that are shady…it’s dangerous.
It is not alone, 3 years ago Sony pulled a Facebook video of a musician for playing Bach – who has been dead for 300 years. Sony does not own Bach. No-one can own Bach’s compositions, it’s public domain. Sure recordings of Bach and Beethoven can be copyrighted, but not someone playing a several hundred year old piece.
And here’s another musician facing the same issue:
YouTube needs to sort this out, you can’t claim pieces like Beethoven, or random things like static – a friend got a takedown request from the estate of John Cage for SAYING he had used 4’33” – he hadn’t, and they should know that, it was a joke. They even haven’t learned the lesson of pulling Lessig’s video and have done it again – pulling a NYU Law video ABOUT copyright . I mean when lawyers and legal academics who work in this space of copyright cannot work out how to contact YouTube (and did so eventually through private means) and think the appeals process is broken, then you have problems.
Anyway, this has left smaller YouTubers who don’t have a friend to pull strings in a bind…you have these false DMCAs – I have had them and appealed them, they are fraudulent money-grabs or trolling – and very little power to do anything.
And as I’ve found on the other side, as someone trying to get one of my copyrighted original works pulled off YouTube (long story, but I was never paid for an original track that was licensed onto YouTube without my knowledge and consent) – the system is broken there too. I’ve had endless emails saying ‘are you sure you didn’t license it to someone and forget?’, It’s little people there too – and it’s weird being the one issuing a Cease and Desist but after 9 years, I think it’s time. I hate the idea that my work is making someone else richer. I own all the rights, never consented to it being onto YouTube or even worse, licensed to a record company – and as the guy ran of with the money, I’d rather it not be on there. There was no contract, so I’m not breaching anything, and even if there was, they have breached it by doing stuff like this, and not paying me any royalties (yes there were sales when the album was launched).
And sadly it’s not alone – there’s a remix of mine on Bandcamp as I write that similarly has been released twice, once on CD and now Bandcamp on the artist’s own label and she didn’t pay any of us a dime. It’s more complicated there because there is a contract, but she never paid us as promised, and there are 3 of us, so I feel less bold there. But in 11 years and multiple releases it has never reached the threshold to pay us? Really?
But it shows you how shitty the music industry is to small artist – like YouTube is to small creators, they don’t care about us. They want us to provide free content for their advertising, or free content to rip off. And I totally get her feeling about others wanting to work for free, that’s partly why I wobbled recently about mashups and critique – the feeling that people want it all for free and want me to work for hours or days on stuff to entertain them? This is not a job for me, I don’t get paid. And I feel for people like Marina who feel forced off a platform for creating content that is legally 100% OK and should never get a DMCA in a million years. Ken Pope aka Popehat should get on the case – or the EFF.
(I disagree with her comments on cancel culture, I don’t think all speech is fine as a minority. And speech in the US was never free, that’s a myth – it was always the speech of the highest bidder. But there are people using the DMCA system to attack others over speech, it is a real problem. And indeed for minorities, you really don’t want to identify yourself to bigoted people, that’s another drawback of the DMCA system. It should be the onus on them to PROVE they own it – in fact I was surprised that the pushback from YouTube hasn’t been that “do you own this? prove it”. That’s what I was expecting. It really seems broken on all sides – unless you’re rich and powerful.)
Marina’s video via Dean Whitbread
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