Copyright claims against trad material on YouTube
Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2018 5:04 pm
Copyright claims against trad material on YouTube - and how to deal therewith!
Oh Chiffers, here is a conundrum which has periodically exercised us, IIRA - the posting of indubitably trad material in YouTube videos which to our surprise becomes the subject of a Copyright claim via YT's system. This is irritating, to say the least, and I've seen folk get very het up about it. However, I do have some sympathy for recording artists who by registering their recorded (and or transcribed and published) arranged material as copyright are legitimately seeking to protect their revenue from their work and who had no intention of claiming actual authorship of trad material. "The System" (of intellectual property rights) doesn't actually cope very well with this situation. It is, of course, perfectly fair for an arrangement of trad material to be copyright protected, but the melodies themselves (if genuinely trad, authorship unknown or too long ago) *cannot* be thus limited.
YouTube uses an audio database to identify potential copyright infringements, so of course, any trad material which appears in a registered arrangement and which you or I then record and upload is liable to get picked out and claimed against. There is no point inveighing against the likes of The Chieftains who tend to copyright every arrangement they record. They're *not* trying to stop anyone else playing the tunes involved or to make money off anyone else's renditions, nor claiming they wrote old trad material themselves.
It's annoying if one of your own uploads of unquestionably trad material (do check!!!) is subject to such a claim, but it is also generally fairly easy to deal with and I have done so successfully several times. I had another one tonight. I have uploaded a sequence of screenshots of the process on the Facebook C&F page (https://m.facebook.com/groups/222948058 ... 7882695590)
which demonstrates how I have dealt with it and, as previously, I confidently expect the claim will be dropped in due course.
Oh Chiffers, here is a conundrum which has periodically exercised us, IIRA - the posting of indubitably trad material in YouTube videos which to our surprise becomes the subject of a Copyright claim via YT's system. This is irritating, to say the least, and I've seen folk get very het up about it. However, I do have some sympathy for recording artists who by registering their recorded (and or transcribed and published) arranged material as copyright are legitimately seeking to protect their revenue from their work and who had no intention of claiming actual authorship of trad material. "The System" (of intellectual property rights) doesn't actually cope very well with this situation. It is, of course, perfectly fair for an arrangement of trad material to be copyright protected, but the melodies themselves (if genuinely trad, authorship unknown or too long ago) *cannot* be thus limited.
YouTube uses an audio database to identify potential copyright infringements, so of course, any trad material which appears in a registered arrangement and which you or I then record and upload is liable to get picked out and claimed against. There is no point inveighing against the likes of The Chieftains who tend to copyright every arrangement they record. They're *not* trying to stop anyone else playing the tunes involved or to make money off anyone else's renditions, nor claiming they wrote old trad material themselves.
It's annoying if one of your own uploads of unquestionably trad material (do check!!!) is subject to such a claim, but it is also generally fairly easy to deal with and I have done so successfully several times. I had another one tonight. I have uploaded a sequence of screenshots of the process on the Facebook C&F page (https://m.facebook.com/groups/222948058 ... 7882695590)
which demonstrates how I have dealt with it and, as previously, I confidently expect the claim will be dropped in due course.