Copyright or Wrong?
After several emails back and forth with the YouTube Copyright and DMCA compliance team, their primary message was:
Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes
Thanks very much. I got that. I repeatedly asked “What’s my recourse if the copyright claimant has mistakenly confirmed their claim to my content?” They simply wouldn’t answer my question. “YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes” is all I could get.
Finally, they sent over an email address of a specific person at Spinnin Records. I wrote yet another email to this guy, trying to be polite despite my frustration after all the emails and messages I had already sent. And this morning I was rewarded with a quick mildly apologetic reply that they had released their claim on my video. Thank you!
However, seriously, WTF?! I can understand that false positives are inevitable with an automated content-ID matching system. However, the official process of disputing the claim on YouTube is obviously deeply flawed if the claimant can simply press a button and now “All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims”.
This took me a week to get resolved, during which time Spinnin Records was earning income from my work. Both the content-ID matching system, and the official YouTube process for disputing the claim all completely failed.
At the end of each of my videos, I have a copyright notice like the one at the right.
Does this actually provide any protection to the content that I create? Or am I kidding myself?
March 10, 2012 @ 8:00 am
This right here shows why SOPA was such a bad idea.
March 12, 2012 @ 7:27 am
I agree, its way too easy for ANYONE to just click a link to claim a copyright infraction. Its a classic case of having to prove innocence as opposed to proving guilt.
March 13, 2012 @ 9:59 pm
Guilty until proven innocent. Sums it up nicely!
Crazy.
March 22, 2012 @ 7:30 pm
You should really think about branding your site and place a brand watermark or text in all of your videos. This way nobody could steal your content without you getting credit.
I don’t like the idea of cloud computing for this reason either. Imagine a day when everyone has a dummy terminal, all disks go away and all applications and ALL OF YOUR CONTENT are in the cloud and everything is streamed. All of your ideas and hard work belongs to us, slave, hahaha! (says the corporation)
March 25, 2012 @ 11:07 pm
Hi Justin,
I’ve never thought much about continuously watermarking my videos. I find visible digital watermarking (placing a giant faint text across the entire image) pretty obnoxious. Smaller watermarks could be cropped out. I imagine that any more advanced imperceptible watermarks wouldn’t survive youtube’s transcoding. But i haven’t really researched this much, so maybe there’s some cool way to do this that I don’t know about?
I continue to wonder whether my copyright statement at the end of my video provides me any protection at all. It almost feels like “honor system”, where not everyone is actually honorable and playing by the rules.
“All your base are belong to us”!! It’s inevitable 🙂
John
February 2, 2013 @ 11:21 pm
I have the same problem, with the same company:
http://jelstudio.dk/Spinnin'_Records_copyright_dispute/
Funny enough I had the same problem earlier with another company also from Holland. Maybe the dutch just have worse morals and ethics when it comes to youtube copyright-claims…
This whole youtube copyright-system is broken and should be outlawed. It benefits criminals more than law-abiding folks.
What can we do about it?
February 5, 2013 @ 11:20 am
What a mess!
After multiple emails to the YouTube copyright/DMCA compliance team, they finally gave me an email address for someone at spinnin records. These were the people I contacted:
Marco Cobussen marco@spinninrecords.nl
Daniel Buchner daniel@spinninrecords.com
They reviewed my video and retracted the claim. When I asked for an explanation, they said that they receive 100s of claims per day, 99% of which are good claims- and their claim review team must have dropped the ball on mine. I read that as “they’re mostly correct so we don’t bother to review them”. So lame.
This system is deeply flawed – google/YT need to change it.
Hope you get your video/claim cleared up quickly!
-John
February 5, 2013 @ 6:32 pm
Hi John, thanks for replying 🙂
Yes, YT’s system is flawed.
I also had a lengthy back’n’forth with YT via email about this before I got the email daniel@spinninrecords.com. I never got any reply from Daniel or anybody else there when I tried writing them though.
I can obviously understand that if you feel like people constantly ‘cry wolf’ on copytight-claims that are indeed valid, that you would then begin to simply switch to auto-pilot and just re-affirm them all without checking if they ARE indeed correct.
I don’t know the people at spinninrecords.com, so judging them is obviously not something I SHOULD do. But it’s hard no to when you feel stepped on and it feels so difficult to get things set straight. And especially when it keeps happening over and over again.
And even if it IS only heavy workloads and ‘honest mistakes’ that makes companies like this reaffirm the claims when they are incorrect, it certainly doesn’t make it any better for those users who are the victims of it. Maybe these companies are just too big with too little staff to really run them responsibly. They obviously get away with this copyright-misbehavior it seems.
And YT’s help-desk is not really much help at all. I mean, if they don’t want to get involved in these copyright-disputes, then why don’t they just post the emails to these companies on the user’s page from the beginning (along with the copyright-claim info). Why should we have to mail back and forth several times before we finally get these direct contact emails. It makes little sense to me.
Anyway, I’ll try emailing them again, and also on that Marco email you mention. Thanks for posting those two.
Here’s to a better YT experience in the near future! 🙂
Thanks for talking about these issues.
jacob.
February 5, 2013 @ 9:14 pm
I hope you can get through to them. It took awhile for me to get a response as well, but they were quite reasonable once they answered me.
Yes, it’s hard not to feel violated and wronged, and how unfair it is that copyright claimant is earning money (however little) from your original content. It’s an extremely unfair system which makes YouTube judge, jury and executioner, and the little guy has no voice and no recourse. Just wrong.
John
February 6, 2013 @ 3:57 am
And then there are the odd day every once in a while where things just clear up in a matter of only hours 🙂
I wrote a mail and sent it to both addresses, and a couple hours later the claim was released 🙂
Now, if only it was always that easy 🙂
Well, that’s ONE happy user 🙂 (until the next event comes along)
February 6, 2013 @ 10:34 am
Great to hear!
Until next time,… 🙂
John
February 5, 2013 @ 8:24 pm
It’s MUCH better to use a watermark in every frame and on every photo than to have a single copyright notice at the end. Make it impossible for anyone to strip you of the credit you deserve for your work and ideas. Most people who steal your work do so because they are too lazy or stupid to come up with their own material, chances are highly unlikely that someone that lazy, stupid or unscrupulous will expend any effort whatsoever to eliminate a watermark frame by frame. Most video editing software has the ability to embed a watermark somewhere on the screen.
February 5, 2013 @ 8:51 pm
For me personally that’s not the main issue, since most of my stuff is in the ‘free to share for free’ domain anyway (I don’t mind getting that extra exposure, and my stuff IS made to be seen 😉 ). My dislike is when these guys hijack the ownership to my videos and tries to monetize them or block them in certain countries. A watermark doesn’t prevent copyright-hijacking the way the YT-system currently works.
February 5, 2013 @ 8:59 pm
Watermark does not prevent hijacking but it does make the dispute process a little more clear cut and streamlined. It serves multiple purposes by acting as a deterrent for anyone hijacking your work for monetization but also even if they do steal your work it acts as advertising for your site driving more traffic so in a sense you still get credit for your work and your work, even if it is hijacked acts as advertising with the watermark in place.
February 5, 2013 @ 9:10 pm
While it’s a good suggestion to use watermarks to protect your content, it does nothing to stop youtube’s content-matching algorithms from falsely matching your content with some other copyright holder, and filing an automatic claim against you. That’s really the problem here…
John