We were browsing through my video list in my video manager on YouTube (YT) and noticed that one of them had matched 3rd party content. The Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society had a copyright claim in my Open WiFi Hacks Facebook | Eavesdrop & CocoaPacketAnalyser video. How strange, a music publishing company taking copyright on my own voice? I am flattered. This allows copyright claimers to collect royalties on ads they place on YOUR video. Now my video was locked into their copyright claim for quite awhile, generating a quite significant amount of views, thus my creation was generating revenue from a society that has nothing to do with me or my video.If you take the time to view my video, you will clearly see and hear that the video was entirely created by me, no music is ever played! Seriously, YT automated content matching is not foolproof and there is a strong tendency for false positive matches. Bodies such as these are trying (and succeeding) in collecting royalties on materials that are creations of individuals and are owned in the public domain. I would like to know what these 'societies' are registering with material that they do not clearly represent.
The royalties system is supposed to protect artists / developers / companies from people generating revenue from their creations. Independent artists trying to promote themselves and people that generate genuine original videos are being used as mules to generate profits for these 'societies' through advertisements, product placements and additional sales.
After finding this out I issued a counter copyright claim, because clearly they had no right to claim that anything belonged to them in the video. Within 5 mins I received this in email:
Dear Me, Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society has reviewed your dispute and released its copyright claim on your video, "Open WiFi Hacks Facebook | Eavesdrop & CocoaPacketAnalyser". For more information, please visit your Copyright Notices page Sincerely, - The YouTube Team |
Could you imagine what would happen if it was in reverse, some individual filed a false copyright claim on a huge company like Universal Music, Fox Studios or Apple? I am pretty sure they would get counter sued, particularly if they made a significant amount of profit, and wouldn't it amount to fraud as well?
