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YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music

YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music

Posted by timothy
from the estate-of-john-cage-winces-with-envy dept.
New submitter eeplox writes “I make nature videos for my YouTube channel, generally in remote wilderness away from any possible source of music. And I purposely avoid using a soundtrack in my videos because of all the horror stories I hear about Rumblefish filing claims against public domain music. But when uploading my latest video, YouTube informed me that I was using Rumblefish’s copyrighted content, and so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company. This baffled me. I disputed their claim with YouTube’s system — and Rumblefish refuted my dispute, and asserted that: ‘All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content: Entity: rumblefish; Content Type: Musical Composition.’ So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish’s exclusive intellectual property.”

(h/t Peter Surda)

The video is here (and below); a discussion thread is here. In the discussion, according to a friend, “people bring up
different examples of copyright (ab)use on YouTube.” However, as I responded:

I don’t think it’s abuse of the system. I don’t know what copyright abuse is. I don’t think copyright abuse is really possible. All these things are natural outcomes of having a copyright system.

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To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.