Most people have extremely weird ideas of what's considered piracy and what isn't. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that's somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not piracy either. Torrenting an album is piracy, but listening to a bootleg on YouTube isn't.

YouTube noticed this at some point and is now happy to let everyone know how much pirated music is available on their site. One of their main points for shilling YouTube premium is how their music catalogue is way better than Spotify. Of course the piracy site has more. That's always how it works. Spotify actually has to license the music on their platform and is subject to copyright law. They can't just get the Neil Young discography from soulseek one day and wait until his estate notices, facing no repercussions whatsoever aside from agreeing to a takedown request. Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.

Not that I'm complaining especially when a lot of the music on youtube isn't publicly accessible anywhere else. It's just been extremely strange to see this go from an "open secret" to something they're shouting from the rooftops and face no repercussions for. In the future I want everything to be like that and I'd rather keep youtube how it is than see them get the punishment that by all rights they should be getting. It's just so strange that this is the position things have ended up in.

Note: The following text is intentional abuse of the tagginator bot. Fuck you.

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[–] LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What I don't understand is that any Joe schmo can upload to YouTube a licensed copyrighted song from another artist and post the lyrics with it and call it karaoke, and they get no copyright strikes whatsoever,

while one time I had a Phil Collins song playing in the background while bantering with my daughter, immediately after uploading it to YouTube they flagged & removed it for copyright infringement.

Why did the karaoke Joe schmo get away with it but I can't even accidentally have a song playing in the background while I'm bantering with my daughter?

[–] Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They likely DO get a copyright claim. But a claim doesn't necessarily mean that your video gets removed. YouTube gives the copyright claimer the choice for what to do with videos they claim, which can include removing them, leaving them visible but taking any profit made from ads on the video, splitting the ad revenue, or just leaving it alone.

I do absolutely agree that removing a video for having a song in the background is bullshit. Just wanted to give an explanation for the inconsistency.

[–] IMongoose@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Ya, YouTube follows copyright law as closely as it can or it would have been sued into oblivion. I have used a few copyright songs in videos and they usually don't get outright blocked but the song creater counts those views towards revenue and if YouTube doesn't have a song license for a country the video is blocked in that country. YouTube tells this to the uploader.

Related, H3H3 had a huge lawsuit about fair use over video clips because YouTube would handle it the same way - leave the video up but transfer all revenue to the clip holder. H3H3 ended up winning that but the point is YouTube is extremely pro copyright, erring on the side of copyright holder in all cases until convinced otherwise.

[–] Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Dude fucking same. I uploaded a 5 minute clip of my buds and I at a league of legends tournament we were participating at and it got striked because someone was playing a shitty song in the background for 30 seconds while we talked over it. Some minor who's who artist. It was low quality audio too, they must have an amazing system to be able to pick it out from all the rest of the noise.

[–] Hillock@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

YouTube doesn't have a say in this, it's up to the copyright holder of each individual song. YouTube just detects if a song is copyrighted or not then gives the owner the option what to do. The three common ones are

Disable the Video.
Claim Monetization of it.
Do nothing.

So whoever holds the rights to Phil Collins song is the one responsible for your video being disabled. While whoever holds the rights to the song Joe Schmo decided to go with option 2 or 3.

This process has mostly been automated. So it feels like YouTube is doing it but they are just following the orders of the copyright holder.

The system is a bit overzealous in some cases and even fair use gets flagged.That's on YouTube. But to be fair, it's very hard to have an automated system detect the difference between fair use and not. YouTube should just implement a better way to dispute false copyright claims.

[–] Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Perhaps it's being presented as fair use? Education via the documentation of the lyrics?

It's a bit of a stretch, but that's all I've got.

[–] scytale@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Because the music in Joe Schmo's video gets claimed by the artist's label/distributor, and they get paid for it. I experienced this first hand when I uploaded a music video of my song on my youtube channel and my distributor claimed it. I had to go and prove to them that I'm the very same person and owner of the music before they released the copyright claim on my video.