I spotted an email coming into my inbox from YouTube for a copyright dispute and I’m wondering if I’ve had any of these before and not noticed them.
The multi-billion pound, multi-national Sony Music Entertainment company has filed a dispute notice resulting in a video I took of Donnington fireworks a couple of years being taken down. The reason? You can hear the song “OMG” which Wikipedia informs me was a popular song by someone called Usher 5 years ago which someone nearby (probably a fairground ride) was playing.
Now, I have absolutely nothing to gain from having this video on YouTube. There are no ads on it and it’s just a video of some fireworks. It doesn’t have any sentimental value. But it irritates me that this mega corporation thinks that it has the right to have an insignificant video of some fireworks taken down because a song they’ve made tens, if not hundreds, of millions from is playing in the background with a sound quality so poor that nobody would want to play the video for the less than 2 minutes clip of the song that you can hear in it.
So I’ve disputed their dispute just to show those greedy bastards that they can’t just file vexatious take down notices without a fight. It won’t change the record industry and it won’t change the way Sony does business but at least I’ll have made one of their mindless drones do some bloody work.
Which begs the question does Sony employ people to sift through random videos all day to find this sort of thing or did someone grass you up?
Almost certainly a machine that chews through hundreds of videos an hour doing voice recognition and matching they against songs they hold the rights to and then firing off automated takedown notices.
I remember reading that the BBC stopped kids programmes from using the song “Happy Birthday to You” because of how much it was paying out in royalties. I wonder if the publishers sadly trawl you-tube, looking for kids party videos in order to send Cease and Desist notices to parents.