Thursday 18 February 2016

Youtube, Fair use, and false copyright claims

Listen to my Fallout clip from 14:10 to 14:53.



Youtube monetisation is very interesting and unpleasant. There are companies which canvas the internet for anything they can claim, despite not owning the content themselves. There was a few seconds of music from a computer game in the background of a clip and a company auto-issued ownership of my entire clip.

Now by Youtube rules, if i don't dispute this immediately, the claimant owns my stuff. If it's found in my favour - the company can re-issue the claim, again and again. No penalty exists for false claims. And they make millions - from doing nothing. It's automated. The companies don't create any content - they just steal from the hard work of others.




(Not sure if the Nostalgia Critic gets the revenue properly if a video is embedded - they didn't disable it, which is an option - but if you do like that clip, just click "watch on Youtube" and 'like' from there.)

Listen to my Fallout clip from 14:10 to 14:53.

It's clearly fair use; it's noisy and has voices all over it - there's just no goddamn way someone is going to think "I don't have to buy that tune now because i can listen to this 43 second clip instead!"

(Ironically, I found complete studio quality reproductions all over Youtube, so actual musicians themselves benefit not at all from the attack on my channel - presumably real pirates have no trouble creating new Youtube channels at a whim)

Computer games use music all the time - do we have to silence all the sounds? I can turn off music for future clips for this particular game - but if i wanted to talk about the music for the original game of Civilisation, I couldn't do so on Youtube - 43 seconds would be more than enough for some company that never makes music to say it owns my fifty minute review.

I think we are seeing the beginning of the end for Youtube. There's really no alternative service for home content creators at the moment, so this saddens me.

With the collapse of social media into Feminist-owned 'SafeSpace', it's going to be very difficult to get people to find content hosted elsewhere in any case. Unless it's SocJus approved, naturally.

Someone else found the same problem when they were live streaming from the game. http://freedom.community.tm/threads/fallout-4-and-copyright.164928/

Also, see below - please follow back to Youtube to 'like', and to see the impressive collection of links they assembled for more information.

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