Thursday, June 26, 2014

More False Claims

A while ago I chronicled my troubles with an outfit called 'The Orchard' who were making false copyright claims on the public domain music I was using on various of my videos over at YouTube.  No sooner had I successfully fought off one lot of their fraudulent claims, then they'd hit me with another batch, clearly hoping that if they could swamp me with their shit then I'd just give up and capitulate.  I didn't and they were forced to back down.  Everything went quiet then and I hoped that 'The Orchard' and their ilk had finally backed off.  Then, last week, I suddenly got another of these copyright claims.  This time it was on a single video and was from someone calling themselves 'CD Baby', claiming that I was using one of their artist's track.  Unusually, this lot had a website which not only listed their artists, but also allowed you to listen to their tracks!  Which revealed that this particular artist had sampled the same piece of public domain music I'd used on the track in question.  Once I'd filed my dispute with Google, 'CD Baby' withdrew their claim in record time.  All of which left me thinking that they might actually be legit.

Until, that is, they tried to pull the same stunt again a couple of days ago. You see, the video they originally targeted exists in two versions on YouTube, although edited differently, they share the same soundtrack.  Incredibly, 'CD Baby' had come back for a second bite of the cherry by making the same copyright claim against the same piece of public domain music on the second version!  Did they think I wouldn't notice?  Do they think I'm stupid?  Needless to say, I filed the same dispute as before and, once again, they were forced to back off, although this time they seemed more reluctant to drop the claim, as it took several days for it to be withdrawn.  Now, I'm sure that 'CD Baby' would claim that it was all a quirk of the Content ID system that Google allows various rights holders and agencies to use to try and detect copyright violations on YouTube.  They'd undoubtedly say that they fed their client's track into the system in good faith, not realising that he'd included a sample of public domain music in it.  Which would highlight a fundamental weakness of the Content ID system, in that it can't handle music sampling.  However, if it was simply a technical glitch, why weren't both the claims made simultaneously?  Why was there a gap of several days between them?   I don't know what I find more insulting - the attempts to make a fraudulent copyright claim on public domain materials, or the fact that they think I'm so stupid I won't notice that they are trying to make the same fraudulent claim twice.

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