an interesting development

[jmemcse517]

 

 

I had an interesting development concerning the "Something" Anniversary Video  I made for my wife and posted on Youtube. Whoever owns the Beatles publishing rights to that song successfully filed a copyright infringement action against me.

I am allowed to leave the video on Youtube. I can perform the song live, but it has to be listed in my ASCAP account. It is the responsibility of the venue to forward royalty payments for the publisher to ASCAP. I cannot try to monetize the content in any form, like Spotify or iTunes. There's more. They took that audio recording away from me basically, but hey, my bad - I should have been thinking about it. For the record - I made that in one day to surprise my wife - my singing sucks - it's not worth a red cent anyway.

I am finishing up a remake of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" this week. I do plan to monetize it. I found a company to help with licensing.

 

I'm sure most of you already know all this. I'm just an old retired lounge hack trying to have fun  

I have a lot of musician friends. Things have changed, I guess we have to be aware of this stuff. Anyway, that was a complete surprise to me...

[SamuelBLupowitz]

This is surprising to me. I remember a lot of videos being flagged and taken down in the early days of YouTube (when videos were limited to ten minutes and there were NO ADVERTISEMENTS), but now when they flag copyrighted content they usually just funnel the ad money to the copyright holders, since the ads are inescapable whether you used to agree to have them in your channel or not.

 

I love how Google’s transformation of a once valuable, even priceless service into an increasingly horrible consumer experience still doesn’t stop giant corporations from wagging their digital finger at you, for performing a 50 year old song for your wife on your anniversary. Gross. Sorry that happened, OP.

[cphollis]

Try making a video singing "Happy Birthday" and see what happens    BTW, lovely and thoughtful video for your wife!

[The Real MC]

5 hours ago, cphollis said:

Try making a video singing "Happy Birthday" and see what happens  

 

Where have you been?  In 2016 a court ruled that the copyright to "Happy Birthday" was invalid and that the song is public domain.

[jmemcse517]

This happened quick -

I now have a licensing certificate to produce and sell my 6 minute version of In A Gadda Da Vida. The owner is Doug Ingle, Iron Butterfly Music, Ten East Music, Cotillion Music Inc. The license is for digital download sales only. ASCAP  will forward Cotillion Music Inc 16 cents from each sale that happens on Spotify, iTunes and others. I can sell copies at any price I want. Release date is April 15th.

 

It's a really cool version I came up with - I'm hoping it's well received. I'll post it here when it gets back from mastering - I don't trust my 67 yo ears enough to master this down, but I have a guy in the Western US that makes stuff sparkle. He also makes it so no matter what device you're listening through you can still hear everything in the mix and it sounds good. It's worth his fee. Going to be a week or 10 days.

[MathOfInsects]

Beatles are stupid-aggressive about this. But...we do get away with a lot of larceny on this score. If you, Joe Nobody, wrote a song, and some other Joe Nobody started to make money off it while you didn't, that would feel wrong. It's your damned song, if they found a way to make money from it, more power to them, but at least some of that money should go to you too. That's all that copyright claims are. I agree it probably costs more for Joe Somebody to chase down each of the Joe Nobodies in the world than any of them make individually, but if they want to protect their copyright, they have to make sure these Nobodies in the aggregate don't make the copyright unenforceable down the line.

[cphollis]

2 hours ago, The Real MC said:

 

Where have you been?  In 2016 a court ruled that the copyright to "Happy Birthday" was invalid and that the song is public domain.

Thanks for the update!  Whew, we're all safe now ...

[Docbop]

What has changed is the places BMI and ASCAP used  to just ignore like small bar, of retail stores, playing in public for free, and they now go after.   Technology has made it easier to monitor internet, radio, TV.   Mega corporations who don't give a dam about art as Zappa said are only in it for the money have been buying up catalogs of music.   Too make things worse the mega music corporations and the politicians they purchase have changed the length of copyright so lasts ridiculous amounts of time before something can go pubic domain. 

 

What really ticks me off is copyright was suppose to be about per use or performance of the copyrighted material.   But once you've been on the bad side of copyright infringement it's all about deal making.    I first noticed this back in my computer days and some people created the software equivalent of ASCAP to monitor use of copyrighted software.    A small place I worked I guess a ticked off ex-employee called the software police on us.  We didn't have a purchased copy of software for every single person in the company using that software.   The funny part is before the software police coming they do give you warning they are coming to do an audit and when they will be there.    So wink-wink get your act together.    The company I was with had recently downsized probably who the snitch was and really couldn't afford buy more software to meet the headcounts.    So we just cleaned off stuff that individuals had install on their work machine and let the software police come audit.  In the end the give you a list of software being used throughout the company with breakdown of X people using Y copies of the software.   The part that gets me we are told to make X and Y match they say for this software just buy two more copies and this buy five more and pay us Z dollars of fine.     Copyright was just an excuse to fine us and get us abuse copyright a little less.   The copyright holder never got the per use they were suppose to.

 

Then a couple years late I'm working for one of the major software companies, thousands of employees,  and we get the notice the software police are coming and when.   So word goes out to all employees to clean up your machines,  delete personal software you installed, etc.    Software police come do their audit and it the same thing again you have X people using Y software.   The punishment is the same for a huge corporation buy a few more copies of this and that and pay us X dollars of fine.   

 

Music is no different  they got after individuals like the OP for a single infringement, but they mega corporation who buy catalogs of songs go to the streaming services and offer deals of you can lease our catalogs for X dollars for thousands of tunes.   Do the artist especially the smaller one get paid per use like there original contracts are for no.   The catalog owner make big money renting out the catalog and the artist gets a few cents if they tune is played a lot. 

 

Even when I worked in the church.   Copyright for churches was pretty much play what your want in service free of copyright, then churches started streaming services.   Things started getting ugly.    Church I worked for was going to stream their holiday special event and one artist was going do a MJ song.   We thought still a church thing copyright no big deal, but someone tipped off the people who own MJ's catalog and it got nasty.   First they want BIG $$$ because they heard we sell DVD's of special events.   So they agreed to drop the fee if we agree we won't make a DVD or leave that performance out of the DVD.   We don't sell that many DVD so no big deal no DVD.   They still wants a lot for single use to be streamed for free.    We told the artist to sing an different song.   Lucky for us one of our members worked in music licensing and he reached out to MJ people and got them to drop the single use fee for streaming to a couple hundred dollars and we grumbling said okay and the artist got to sing MJ's song.   

 

This copyright stuff isn't about fair use or per use it all about big corporation and profits no one cares about the songwriters. 

 

[MathOfInsects]

They didn't ignore those venues. Each venue with live music that includes cover artists paid (pays) the PRO's an annual fee to serve as a blanket payment, and that money went and still goes into a universal fund that pays percentages out to musicians and publishers. They literally send people out to cruise the bars and restaurants and confirm that they were not presenting covers without paying into the fund. This isn't new.

It's obnoxious to the low end of the food chain, but it stops being obnoxious the second you are on the other end of uncompensated use of your material that someone else is getting paid to present. 

[Tom Williams]

28 minutes ago, Docbop said:

Even when I worked in the church.   Copyright for churches was pretty much play what your want in service free of copyright, then churches started streaming services.   Things started getting ugly.   

 

They started getting ugly in the early '90s, pre-streaming, when CCLI became the BMI police for churches.  Suddenly, all those worship songs they taught you at the $500 conference were enforceable with the same kinds of scary fines.   The bigger the church, the higher the visibility, the greater the risk.

 

Now that there's streaming of live services, the licensing has grown still more byzantine.   We have a license where we can stream the music (after a page full of copyright notices per song), but we can't archive the music in recorded services.  Movie clips are so expensive we shut down our stream altogether when we use them.

[obxa]

Rick Beato has done a ton of videos on copyright takedowns. 

1 hour ago, Docbop said:

Even when I worked in the church.   Copyright for churches was pretty much play what your want in service free of copyright, then churches started streaming services.   

I will say these days through CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International) things in church world are much easier than in the secular world.  Churches pay a flat fee based on size.  It covers you for the year, and artists are fairly compensated.   I used to have to do annual reporting,  but now it's hooked up to Planing Center (service order software) and it's fairly painless.  There are some additional things you need to pay for live streaming, but CCLI handles those pretty well- including  secular pop stuff that's not under the CCLI umbrella. 

 

If you're doing cover songs for a recording, it's usually the Harry Fox agency as a first stop. 

 

 

41 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

They literally send people out to cruise the bars and restaurants and confirm that they were not presenting covers without paying into the fund. This isn't new.

Have a buddy  who owns a small bar,  often has acoustic duos/singles.   ASCAP has been being extremely intimidating as well as trying shake down use of Spotify.  Thankfully Spotify has biz accounts that cover everything.  Short of doing originals,  live music can be hard for the smaller places trying to keep the lights on. 

[obxa]

37 minutes ago, Tom Williams said:

We have a license where we can stream the music (after a page full of copyright notices per song), but we can't archive the music in recorded services.  Movie clips are so expensive we shut down our stream altogether when we use them.

Totally agree on that one. I only handle music.  I know our AV guys have stopped using video unless it's from typical content places.  Since we've focused more on our streaming  services post- Covid (AKA "Pajama Church")- I agree it's bit more involved.

[Docbop]

34 minutes ago, Tom Williams said:

They started getting ugly in the early '90s, pre-streaming, when CCLI became the BMI police for churches.  Suddenly, all those worship songs they taught you at the $500 conference were enforceable with the same kinds of scary fines.   The bigger the church, the higher the visibility, the greater the risk.

 

Now that there's streaming of live services, the licensing has grown still more byzantine.   We have a license where we can stream the music (after a page full of copyright notices per song), but we can't archive the music in recorded services.  Movie clips are so expensive we shut down our stream altogether when we use them.

I left the church about 2011, but they are still going but due to losing their building lease and Covid trimmed down and now mainly a streaming church.   In all the weekly media meeting I was in I don't think I ever heard of CCLI when we had to check copyright as I mentioned we had a member who had a music licensing business and he would get clearances for us when needed.  A lot of name artists and industry people were church members and we could reach out to them for help getting clearances.   

[stoken6]

16 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

If you, Joe Nobody, wrote a song, and some other Joe Nobody started to make money off it while you didn't, that would feel wrong

I was going to write a multi-paragraph post that says what Josh manages to convey in a sentence. Again.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[jazzpiano88]

19 hours ago, obxa said:

Rick Beato has done a ton of videos on copyright takedowns. 

Rick’s beef is mainly with takedowns which are clearly educational and fall into the fair use category.  

The ones that are really maddening are when he’s describing a musical concept and he plays a few seconds of a song to illustrate the concept, he will get a takedown for certain artists.   Even if he plays the song on his guitar.    He typically doesn’t challenge the takedown because if he loses, it’s a copyright strike and jeopardizes his channel.    He goes to twitter and creates a firestorm and usually the composer (or somebody with pull) will get the copyright holder to relent.   

[JimboKeys]

Something (no pun intended) i've been wondering about - how does YouTube pick out copyright-violating videos ?  If i post a video with the title "First song second set" instead of "I Saw Her Standing There cover" could it still end up flagged? I guess the question is whether they have some smart pattern recognition that recognizes the song by lyjrics and/or melody (could an instrumental be flagged ?) or is it just the title that gets their attention ?

 

-- Jimbo

[stoken6]

2 hours ago, JimboKeys said:

Something (no pun intended) i've been wondering about - how does YouTube pick out copyright-violating videos ?  If i post a video with the title "First song second set" instead of "I Saw Her Standing There cover" could it still end up flagged? I guess the question is whether they have some smart pattern recognition that recognizes the song by lyjrics and/or melody (could an instrumental be flagged ?) or is it just the title that gets their attention ?

 

-- Jimbo

Yeah there's an AI audio-matching algorithm. Sometimes it spots something, sometimes it lets a copyright violation through. I uploaded 5 tracks from my band DVD some years back - one was caught and I was offered the denometi[sz]e option - which I accepted. But the other four, not a peep.

 

Cheers, Mike.