The person that started the thread was asking why YouTube had tagged
his post as containing copyrightable material. Further elaboration
revealed that the snippet in question had nothing to do with the piece
being played; it was tagged by a robot doing tone matching.
Subsequently, that robot informed him that pending his disputing the
claim, his posting would thereafter include advertising, the proceeds
of which would be split between the claimant and YouTube (Google).
This is called 'trolling'. Given that this same robot probably tags
hundreds of thousands and millions of postings, there is a certain
percentage of people who will simply give up or not bother to challenge
the claim, thus putting money into the pocket of YouTube and the entity
making the unchallenged claim.
In this particular case, the claim is invalid on its face; the claimed
snippet is a different composition. If you search "copyright troll"
you will see others who post their own works, or works released into
the public domain or released under "common copyright" and get tagged
for violations by the mysterious entity who calls itself the "Music
Publishing Rights Collecting Society." Challenges to their assertions
are mostly dropped, but some are not -- in any case, it's a pain in the
a.. so many just give up.
I am not disputing the legitimacy of true copyright holders and their
concerns about non-licensed uses. This screed is about trollers who
use YouTube and the opaque copyright landscape to gain money while
producing nothing but agida, and who do not have any standing to
dispute the claim but make it anyway assuming that enough people will
do nothing about it.
George Bogatko
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