The campaign video titled “Everything is NOT Awesome” is inspired by the popular “Everything is Awesome” song, a callback to the LEGO movie. The video shows LEGO figures drowning in oil with a cover of the song playing in the background.

Over the past several days more than three million people have watched the video on YouTube. However, a few hours ago the video suddenly became unavailable due to a copyright claim by Warner Bros.

TorrentFreak contacted Greenpeace who informed us that the email YouTube sent doesn’t clarify on what grounds the video was taken down. The group assumes that the use of the song is the culprit, but says it won’t let this case go without a fight.

“Our film was designed as a creative way of letting people know about the threat to the Arctic from Shell and the role LEGO has in the story. It seems to have struck a nerve with some important corporate bigwigs, but this crude attempt to silence dissent won’t work,” Greenpeace’s Ian Duff says.

Greenpeace will appeal the takedown request, a process that can take up to 10 days to complete. In the meantime the group has uploaded the video to Vimeo, along with a call to its millions of social media followers and mailing list subscribers to re-upload it elsewhere.

“We fully intend to challenge this claim, and we’re asking supporters to upload the video wherever they can,” Duff says.

In the appeal Greenpeace will argue that the video uses satire and parody and that it is in the public interest. The video should therefore be protected under the right to free speech.

This is not the first time that Greenpeace has had one of its campaign videos removed from YouTube. Previously a video featuring several Star Wars characters was taken down. The video was later reinstated after Greenpeace successfully appealed the takedown request.

Warner Bros’ motivation for the takedown remains unclear. It seems unlikely that it is an automated request since there are still more than 700 video on YouTube that use the same ‘Everything is Awesome’ song.

Whatever the reason may be, the takedown attempt will clearly backfire.

During the days to come the rift between Greenpeace and Warner Bros. will be widely covered by the media while hundreds of copies of the video will be uploaded and shared.

Update: The video is back online.

“18 hours later we’ve seen that the video has been re-instated. WB have withdrawn their complaint. It seems who ever wanted it censored has spotted the error in their ways,” Duff informs TorrentFreak.

Update 2: Warner Bros. now removed the video from Vimeo….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Sadly, the system is not foolproof, especially when it is fed false data. Only recently a user was hit with bogus claims from a digital distributor after they wrongly claimed monetization rights over a public domain JFK speech.

Yesterday the scattergun approach to claiming rights on content people simply don’t own hit an inappropriate target, to say the least.

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, the 6,000 employee giant behind many open source enterprise products including Red Hat Linux. Apparently, even a man with Tiemann’s credentials and copyright awareness can’t escape bogus YouTube claims.

After creating a video recently, Tiemann decided to set it to music. Quite appropriately he headed off to ccMixter, a site which originated as a Creative Commons site a decade ago and one which provides samples, remixes and a cappella tracks under Creative Commons licenses.

Tiemann selected Sunray, a track available under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 Creative Commons license, married it to his video and uploaded it to YouTube. Things didn’t go well.

Straight after the upload a user called “RouteNote” claimed copyright ownership over Tiemann’s video. He filed an immediate dispute and RouteNote promptly dropped the claim. But then things started to get silly.

“I posted new versions of the video that were shorter, but using the same music, and lo, I received several more claims from routenote (and others!),” Tiemann explains.

“I disputed those, which routenote initially released. But here’s where things are broken: less than a day after they released the claim, they filed a new claim, against the same song, in the same video.”

So who are RouteNote? The YouTube user account is linked to a network of 53 channels totaling 21,717,873 views. It links to RouteNote.com, a company offering digital distribution services.

“RouteNote is the leading digital music distributor in the UK” the company claims.

TorrentFreak contacted RouteNote to find out why they’re plaguing Tiemann, but at the time of publication we’ve received no response. But for the Red Hat Open Source chief, however, the nightmare continues.

“In the mean time, others have filed claims against that song, which I have disputed, and some of those others have released their claims. They have subsequently filed claims against the new versions of the video that contain the same songs,” Tiemann explains.

Making matters worse, AdRev, a company that claims to be “the leading ContentID and Network partner on YouTube”, has also claimed copyright over Tiemann’s upload. But while RouteNote initially dropped their claims, AdRev have not.

“Another entity, AdRev, has rejected my dispute, despite me providing the URL to my source material,” Tiemann explains.

For AdRev, complaints about their copyright claims are nothing new. Their Twitter account is littered with questions about why they are monetizing other people’s content or having strikes placed on their YouTube accounts. In this instance a problem took more than a month to sort out.

Since AdRev rejected his dispute Tiemann now needs to appeal, but as this exchange shows, the company is not initially responsive.

Add the risk of getting a YouTube account strike if it all goes bad, Tiemann wonders what effect this is having on creators.

“So now I need to file an appeal, which puts my account at risk of a copyright strike. How many others have abandoned the fight at this point? How many Creative Commons artists are seeing their works abandoned because of this bad behavior on the YouTube frontier?”

While alleged infringers are quick to be punished by the YouTube system, there is no come back on those making the erroneous complaints. This is something that YouTube definitely needs to address.

“Banks got into a lot of trouble for robo-signing mortgages. I think that all this robo-enforcement of copyright is going to end badly for everybody, too,” Tiemann concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

When TF was alerted to the issue this week the video had received under 10 views, yet someone already had their eye on it.

“A company called Believe Digital has made what I believe to be a fraudulent copyright claim against me for [the speech] I posted on YouTube,” Homer explained. “They’ve threatened no legal action, but have merely asserted ownership for the purpose of monetizing the video via advertising.”

Believe Digital, a digital distributor for independent labels and artists, looks like a professional outfit. However, taking over the monetization rights of what should be a public domain speech and then on top refusing to respond to Homer’s dispute encouraged us to dig deeper. It would prove an interesting exercise, even though we already suspected there had been a monumental screw-up.

After Believe Digital ignored TF’s attempts to discuss the issue, we spoke with Adam Holland, a Project Coordinator at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he works on projects including the DMCA ‘clearing house’ Chilling Effects.

“Works produced by the Federal government are public domain. So the text of the speech itself is in the public domain,” Holland told TF.

“If the federal government made a recording of the speech, then that recording is public domain. The JFK Presidential library confirms that that at least one version of the recording is still public domain.”

Drilling down into Believe Digital’s repertoire we see that they represent a pair of artists called Harley & Muscle. Their track, Open Society, features something of interest throughout most of the track.

Were Believe Digital really trying to suggest that the original JFK speech infringes their rights, or could there be another explanation?

As pointed out by Adam Holland, a government audio recording of the speech would be in the public domain, meaning that Harley & Muscle could have simply sampled that. However, their use of a separate and private recording would be a different matter.

“It’s possible that someone else, a private individual, made a recording of the speech in question, and the copyright status of that sound recording or A/V work would be more complex, but it’s likely the individual would have a valid copyright in that exact recording,” Holland explains.

“This is only germane to the issue at hand if Harley & Muscle own that original recording, of course, and if it is that recording that was used to create their YouTube video. Otherwise, there’s a 3rd party involved who has rights that may or may not be infringed here by both parties.”

Adding yet more complexity to the mix, Holland goes on to explore another potential, albeit hugely unlikely scenario, but one in which Believe Digital could have a legitimate claim.

“It seems extraordinarily unlikely, if not impossible, that the speech excerpt on YouTube [uploaded by Homer] was made by copying the samples within the [Harley & Muscle] song and pasting them together. It may well be impossible, I haven’t listened to the full extent of both. What seems likely is that both of the parties involved had access to another, more complete recording of the speech,” Holland adds.

Which would be, of course, the original public domain work. With that established and a fun detour into the public domain and back again, all roads branched back to what we initially believed to be the source of the problem – YouTube’s ContentID.

Somehow the system has ‘awarded’ Believe Digital and Harley & Muscle “the rights” to go around monetizing this particular JFK speech based on their remix of the work more than 50 years later. That may have happened because speeches themselves don’t qualify for ContentID, potentially designating Harley & Muscle as the original publisher. However, those very same rules could also exclude their track from ContentID, but clearly didn’t.

“Generally, [these kinds of mismatches are] unquestionably the downside of ContentID, and the extent to which it streamlines procedures for content holders. It’s certainly a shame that Believe Digital won’t engage, but this is really a place where YouTube needs to step in,” Holland concludes.

While Believe Digital did not engage with either Homer or TorrentFreak on the matter whatsoever, during the week came a development.

“Thanks to your intervention this claim has indeed been silently dropped, just as I suspected, without an apology or even so much as an explanation, and I presume also without any consequence to the opportunistic claimant,” Homer told TF.

With Homer’s ‘strike’ gone he can relax again once more, but something clearly needs to be done about the one-sided nature of the YouTube complaints process.

Companies like Believe Digital should be made to stand and engage once they have made a claim, not ignore the issue until they come under pressure. In this instance it was ‘just’ a claim against the original speech, but a claim against another artist remixing the same content could mean loss of earnings – or the loss of his YouTube account entirely with a third strike.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

While the music industry and many researchers seek answers in the piracy realm, other drastic changes are too often ignored. The availability of free on-demand music through legal services such as YouTube for example.

Researchers from Fairfield University and the University of Colorado have started to fill this gap with a new study. In their working paper the researchers examine the effect of Warner Music’s 2009 YouTube blackout on the record label’s album sales.

At the time, Warner pulled all their music from the video hosting service due to a licensing dispute. The researchers use this event to compare the sales of Warner’s artists listed in the Billboard Album 200, to those from labels that still had their videos on YouTube.

The results are intriguing, to say the least. After controlling for several variables, such as music genre and album specific characteristics, they found that Warner’s top artists sold many more albums during the blackout.

“We showed that the removal of content from YouTube had a causal impact on album sales by upwards of on average 10,000 units per week for top albums,” the paper reads.

According to the researchers, these results indicate that YouTube doesn’t always serve as a promotional tool as many claim, certainly not for the top artists.

“While a great deal has been said about the potential role of these service in promoting and discovering new artists and music, our results cast some doubt on this widely believed notion, at least with regards to top selling albums [...], they write.

The researchers estimate that for the top albums the total in lost sales because of YouTube equals roughly $1 million per year. This is a significant percentage of the label’s total revenue.

It is hard to say, however, that YouTube is hurting overall revenue, as the advertising revenue it receives from Google also brings in a significant sum of money.

The results, which are largely driven by the top selling albums, suggest that there is no promotional effect of YouTube on album sales. In addition, there is no effect on Google searches for the artists in question either. In other words, YouTube doesn’t mainly hurt album sales.

“Our findings suggest that sales displacement effect can be real without a promotional effect. That is, the people listening on YouTube appear to be, to some extent people who would know about this album anyway, but may not buy it because of YouTube,” the researchers conclude.

The findings are interesting for a variety of reasons. Although they don’t prove that YouTube costs the music industry more than it brings in, it clearly shows that there are more factors that can explain people’s shift in music buying habits than piracy alone.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Up until now “pirating” YouTube users would only get a slap on the wrist by Google, and have their YouTube accounts terminated at worst. However, it appears that the RIAA has had enough and is now going after the uploaders of two leaked Chris Brown tracks.

The RIAA’s quest started earlier this month when Vice President Anti-Piracy Mark McDevitt contacted YouTube personally to demand the takedown of the leaked tracks “New Flame” and “Die it For You.”

“We are asking you for your immediate assistance in stopping this unauthorized activity,” McDevitt wrote in a letter to the video hosting service.

“Specifically, we request that you ensure the removal of the infringing files from your system, or that you disable access to the infringing files, and that you inform the site operator of the illegality of his or her conduct,” he added.

YouTube was quick to comply, as both videos are unavailable at the time of writing. However, the RIAA didn’t stop there. Instead, the music group went to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to obtain a subpoena for the personal details of the uploader, or uploaders.

In their request the RIAA explains that it requires a subpoena to identify those responsible for the uploads. Among other things, they are looking for the IP-addresses and emails associated with the accounts in question.

“The purpose for which this subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity or identities of the individual or individuals assigned to this URL,” RIAA writes. “This information will only be used for the purposes of protecting the rights granted to our members, the sound recording copyright owners, under [the DMCA].”

The RIAA’s request for a subpoena was granted by a court clerk on the same day. This means that YouTube now has until April 15 to hand over the requested information, unless it decides to appeal.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the RIAA has gone after YouTube users. Whether this is an isolated incident has yet to be seen, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if the record labels want to set an example.

The RIAA has been an active proponent of criminalizing those who “stream” copyrighted videos in the past. While that failed through the PIPA bill, this may be an opportunity for them to test the water under current copyright laws.

In any case, YouTube users should be aware that the RIAA and others can obtain their personal details on a whim.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The precise terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but the fact that YouTube has been trying hard to combat piracy in recent years can hardly have gone unnoticed. It invests large sums into Content ID, but this anti-piracy / monetization system can’t ever hope to solve the problem completely.

So, while the world is worrying about The Pirate Bay and other so-called ‘rogue sites’, through no fault of its own YouTube continues to be a pretty decent place to watch unauthorized content, not least hundreds if not thousands of Hollywood movies.

Finding that content is fairly easy too, via a title search (sometimes followed by “full movie”) and the activation of the “Duration Long” feature which only returns videos in excess of 20 minutes. However, spammers have been doing their best to pollute these results for some time, with fake video uploads of around two hours which claim to be the movie but are actually ploys to generate traffic to other sites.

If only there was a pre-moderated YouTube-movie-indexing site with a great Popcorn Time-style interface complete with reviewer ratings. Maybe looking something like this?

Actually there are already quite a few of these kinds of sites but MovieFork attracted our attention after it appeared in a complaint to Google penned by Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner and Disney – together the MPAA.

The complaint features three sites – MovieFork, FullMovies.cc and Otakhang.com, each dedicated to indexing Hollywood movies already available on YouTube. While many of the titles indexed by these sites are older classics, there’s no shortage of newer titles from the past year. Quality is half decent too, hardly the peer-through-a-letterbox experience of years gone by.

In its complaint the MPAA asks Google to take down specific URLs, including the MovieFork homepage. In another it asks for the FullMovies.cc domain to be delisted along with that of fellow YouTube movie indexing site Uflix.net.

But despite the nature of the sites, Google refused to comply with the MPAA’s requests. Google’s own Transparency Report shows it took “no action” in respect of the takedown notices and searching for the precise URLs with Google search reveals they are still indexed, with none of the sites’ homepages being delisted either.

Quite why Google is refusing to respond is unclear, but there are some interesting pointers. For example, similar requests to take down URLs that point to movies hosted on sites other than YouTube have been successful, such as the one for Man of Steel listed in this complaint.

It’s certainly possible that Google expects rightsholders to send their takedowns directly to YouTube, rather than shooting endless links and leaving the original content intact. Indeed, there are plenty of signs they are doing just that as some links are no longer available.

The scale of the free-full-movies problem is evident when one looks at Zero Dollar Movies, a site that claims to index 15,000 movies, all available for free from YouTube. It appears to use the YouTube Search API and even has its own ‘Instant’ feature for suggesting content that searchers may be interested in.

Other indexes, such as /FullMoviesonYoutube, a section of Reddit dedicated to just that, are pretty basic but show that not much infrastructure is needed in order to create a decent selection.

The movies-on-YouTube problem isn’t new in the same way that the torrents issue isn’t, but like Popcorn Time showed, it’s certainly got an awful lot prettier.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It is a complex battle with a simple disagreement at its core. In 2007 the entities reached a licensing agreement for YouTube to use works from GEMA’s extensive repertoire. Two years later negotiations to extend that deal broke down when GEMA’s long-term demand of around €0.12 per stream was rejected by Google.

In May 2010 GEMA sued to have YouTube block certain titles so that they could not be viewed locally. In April 2012 and after much legal wrangling, the Regional Court of Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held liable for the “infringing” videos and must therefore take measures to render content unavailable in Germany.

And herein lies the problem. YouTube is a constant source of frustration for German users thanks to the blocking of thousands of videos as a result of the GEMA dispute. When local users try to access popular videos being enjoyed by their fellow Internet users (GEMA claims that YouTube overblocks unnecessarily) they are greeted with a message informing them that they should blame GEMA, not YouTube, for the inconvenience.

Time and again, users are informed that videos are blocked due to GEMA not granting the necessary music rights. As a result, GEMA has become very unpopular indeed.

Trying to remedy the situation, GEMA applied for an injunction to force YouTube to change the messages, claiming that they misrepresent the situation and damage GEMA’s reputation. YouTube alone is responsible for blocking the videos, claiming otherwise is simply false, GEMA argued.

Yesterday the District Court of Munich agreed with the music group and issued an injunction to force YouTube to comply, stating that the notices “denigrate” GEMA with a “totally distorted representation of the legal dispute between the parties.” Changing the message to state that videos are not available due to a lack of a licensing agreement between YouTube and GEMA would be more appropriate, the Court said.

“For almost three years, YouTube has misled the public with these blocking messages and unlawfully influenced public opinion at the expense of GEMA,” GEMA CEO Dr. Harald Heker said in a statement.

“The decision sends an important and positive signal: It’s not GEMA preventing the enjoyment of music on the Internet. It seeks merely to license YouTube, like all other music portals. Our concern is that the artists participate in the economic exploitation of their works and can earn a livelihood in the future.”

YouTube parent company Google said it was studying the decision.

“We need to examine the reasons for the judgment, before we can make a decision about what to do next,” a spokesperson said.

Once the judgment of the District Court of Munich is made final, YouTube faces fines of up to 250,000 euros per breach.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Needless to say, this process is far from flawless. In the past we’ve covered countless false, inaccurate, and just plain hilarious DMCA claims, but YouTube’s takedown process is particularly problematic.

As we have noted previously, YouTube copyright claims are in a class of their own, thanks to a one-sided notification system that has no evidentiary requirement. Nowhere was this more apparent than the Mega song takedown of late 2011, but it’s a constant problem.

The main issue is that automated bots don’t (or rather can’t) understand fair use, although to be fair, it’s an area of copyright law most labels seem to want to ignore when it suits them, and one that won’t be fixed until Lenz v Universal finishes its slow trip through the courts.

But in the meantime, many artists are still stuck dealing with systems that ignore significant sections of copyright law in order to keep things under lock and key, artists like Dan Bull for example.

Dan, as regular TorrentFreak readers will know, is an artist that relies heavily on fair use to create his music, and he recently gave fans an idea of just how much of a pain it can be.

For his 2010 [NSFW] song “I’m not pissed”, he reveals a screen-grab showing 18 separate claims that have been made against it. While some of them were released after being disputed, two of them, BMG Rights Management and PRS, rejected the dispute and stand by their initial claim.

“It is up to me to prove myself innocent by asking eighteen different publishing companies through an automated system to revoke the automated claims. Each publisher has a month to reply, with no obligation to even do so. If even one of the eighteen publishers says ‘nope’ then it’s back to square one,” Bull explains.

“Any financial loss or restrictions on my channel are entirely on me, and will not be compensated for once the claim is lifted. This has been going on since last year with no end in sight,” he adds.

It’s a situation that discourages new artists and stifles creativity. Despite the claims of the major labels, and until some actual consequences are introduced for false, inaccurate, or over-reaching claims, it’s going to harm the greater creative world, just to enable the big guys to profit.

Meanwhile, Dan has expressed his ire at YouTube in the way he knows best, through [again NSFW] song.

And yes, he’s pissed now.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The social networking giant allows its 40 million daily users to upload their music collections meaning that the site has become one of the world’s largest sources of unauthorized music to be found anywhere on the planet.

Making matters worse for the labels is that content stored on vKontakte has often been made available for download through numerous other apps and websites utilizing the company’s API.

As a result vKontakte has been branded a “notorious market” by the USTR and put under pressure by the likes of the IFPI, who say that the huge Internet business has built itself up on infringing content. Following years of inaction, there are now signs that vKontakte is beginning to listen.

In June 2013 before the implementation of Russia’s new anti-piracy law, reports surfaced that music was becoming harder to find on vKontakte with results for some leading artists drawing blanks.

The company put this down to copyright holders sending many more takedown notices than ever before. Indeed, it soon became apparent that some companies had previously been given moderator access to remove their content from vKontakte directly. Nevertheless, rumors began to circulate that vKontakte might have deployed some other kind of anti-piracy system.

The company has since admitted that it has developed a technology designed to stop users from uploading content that has previously been marked as infringing.

“For each track which receives a copyright holder complaint we create an acoustic impression,” said vKontake spokesperson Lobushkin George. “Downloading the exact same copy will be difficult.”

The system is not without its flaws. One local artist, Noize MC, complained that he would like to make his music available on the social network but since someone already marked someone else’s upload as infringing, the system now bans him from doing so. Another artist, DJ Dmitry Diamonds, said that after sending in a complaint of someone infringing his copyrights his own uploaded music disappeared from his official page.

But despite the teething problems, it appears that vKontakte intends to expand the system.

According to content owners who spoke with Izvestia, vKontakte will now introduce fingerprinting in order to tackle infringing video uploads at source. Representatives from the social networking site declined to comment but sources at several media companies suggest that the the anti-piracy system will be similar to YouTube’s Content ID.

At least three media companies have struck deals with vKontakte to publish their content legally on the networking site alongside the ability to remove infringing content with fingerprinting.

“There is currently only one type of interaction: illegal content is removed in response to a request from us,” said deputy general director of CTC Media Sergei Petrov. “We look forward to the new tool, as it can greatly facilitate the fight against pirates.”

According to Amedia president Alexander Akopova the fingerprinting technology was vKontakte’s idea. It will remove the need to constantly search the site for illicit content and will also eliminate problems caused by users renaming files.

“The management of VKontakte made the right move by creating such a system,” says Akopov. “I am glad that it was their own initiative.”

Wide agreements on a filtering and takedown system with copyright holders will help vKontakte avoid many of the perils of the new anti-piracy law introduced August 1. Currently the social networking site can be bombarded with complaints which have the potential to take the site offline if not properly handled, but formal agreements might be enough to keep rightholders happy.

It’s even possible that these moves will be enough to appease the USTR, IFPI and MPAA. Finding out should be just a few months away.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In these instances someone targeted by a wrongful DMCA takedown is usually given the chance to file a counter-claim stating why content should not have been removed. Content then has the opportunity to be reinstated or removed if the dispute cannot be settled.

While counter-claims provide a balance to a DMCA complaint, there is evidence to suggest that YouTube, one of the biggest receivers of copyright notices online, is in some cases disallowing them.

When a video is uploaded to YouTube it’s put through the company’s Content ID system and compared against digital fingerprints provided by copyright holders to check for infringement. YouTube user John McKelvey has discovered that if you fall foul of signatures provided by certain rightsholders then your content gets taken down – and remains down – even if no copyrights have been infringed.

Here’s what happened. McKelvey has been publishing an ongoing series of hip hop history videos, each taking a look at classic, rare or overlooked records. One featuring Eric B. & Rakim caused the latest issues.

Fair Use

“This video, like all my other videos in the same vein, are Fair Use in a number of ways at the same time,” McKelvey told TorrentFreak.

“First of all, I only play a short portion of the songs (in this video, I play clips of three songs, though UMG’s claim was only against one of them), within the context of a scholarly, critical review of the record. The video is non-commercial/non-profit; I didn’t even have YouTube ads on the video.”

Furthermore, McKelvey has gone to some length to ensure that his videos feature only incomplete clips, all of them deliberately recorded at below MP3 quality so no one will be inclined to rip them. At every available opportunity he encourages people to buy content and refuses to upload MP3s, even though he says viewers are constantly asking him to.

Unfortunately Content ID doesn’t understand the concept of fair use (or being ‘fair’ in general) and when the system scanned a video of McKelvey chatting about an old Eric B. & Rakim vinyl it was flagged up as infringing and disabled.

McKelvey sent TorrentFreak copies of his correspondence with YouTube as he tried to get his video back online. The responses from YouTube highlight a worrying development, one which means that certain labels are ALWAYS right in copyright disputes, even when they’re wrong.

Text of counter notice filed by McKelvey

My video is NOT a competitor to sales of the [Eric B. & Rakim] song. It directly encourages viewers to buy it for themselves. Anyone seeking a pirate copy would in no way be happy with my video as a substitute.

YouTube email to Universal advising of McKelvey’s counter-notice

We received the attached counter notification in response to a complaint you filed with us. We’re providing you with the counter notification and await your notice (in not more than 10 business days) that you’ve filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the counter notifier’s allegedly infringing activity. Such notice should be submitted by replying to this email. If we don’t receive notice from you, we may reinstate the material to YouTube.

YouTube mail to McKelvey 11 days after filing of counter-notice

Thank you for your counter-notification. The complainant has reaffirmed the information in its DMCA notification.

YouTube has a contractual obligation to this specific copyright owner that prevents us from reinstating videos in such circumstances. Therefore, we regretfully cannot honor this counter-notification.

——————

McKelvey was then invited to sort the matter out with Universal directly via the youtube@umusic.com email address and was pointed to this page as explanation. It appears to have been published or updated April 2 and contains the following text:

YouTube enters into agreements with certain music copyright owners to allow use of their sound recordings and musical compositions. In exchange for this, some of these music copyright owners require us to handle videos containing their sound recordings and/or musical works in ways that differ from the usual processes on YouTube.

In some instances, this may mean the Content ID appeals and/or counter notification processes will not be available.

——————

No right to reply

So, it seems that where YouTube has a record label deal (and that could be any label, no list is provided), those labels are allowed to take down any content they like for any reason they like – infringing or not – and YouTube will block its users from having the right to reply.

As noted by FairUseTube, while YouTube has a legal obligation to remove allegedly infringing content on request the same cannot be said for accepting counter-notices or reinstating content. Nevertheless, the one-sided nature of the process is bound to increase frictions between those defending right to fair use and those who feel rightsholders are constantly eroding it.

“I was shocked when the reply came in saying how it didn’t matter if my video was Fair Use or not, because they had some secret contract with the labels and were refusing to honor my counter-notice anyway,” McKelvey says.

“It was very frustrating, because it showed me that it no longer mattered whether I had a legal right to post my videos. At least in this case, YouTube has stopped siding with the users because they’ve apparently been bought off by UMG. It’s also frustrating because this new policy was not disclosed to us, so we’re set up to file useless counter-notices only to have them work against our channels,” he concludes.

While YouTube now openly admits having preferential deals with labels, that hasn’t always been the case. In December 2011 the Google-owned company initially allowed Universal to blatantly censor Kim Dotcom’s ‘Mega Song’. It was later reinstated.

Check out John McKelvey’s hip hop blog here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.