The absurdity of YouTube’s Copyright Claim System

I recently found a bumblebee nest in my back yard. Friends on Facebook asked questions about it, and I decided to set up a GoPro and record a video of the bee’s activity. After assembling segments into a two hour video, I decided to add some music. Knowing that is a tricky proposition on YouTube, because of the insanity of illegitimate organizations making copyright claims on the tiniest sample they can suss out of a video, I came up with a strategy I thought would be foolproof:

1. Pick my music: Flight of the Bumblebee, composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov sometime around 1899-1900. Long out of copyright.
2. Find a MIDI file built from the score.
3. Run the MIDI file through a computerized synth to get a mp3 file.
4. ***
5. No profit. (YouTube took away my ability to monetize.)

I even included this helpful message in the description:

**The musical accompaniment is a computer generated audio track created from a MIDI file transcribed from the original score. As the score itself is long out of copyright, and this is not a human performance, you would be blatantly abusing the Youtube copyright system if you attempt to file a claim against this video.**

As a computer generated rendering of a MIDI file of a public domain work, there should be no basis for a copyright claim. And yet… I got one within minutes of uploading my video. This had to gave been done by an automated system that scans all new videos on Youtube, for I do not have a popular channel. I’m reasonably sure my only subscribers are family members and the occasional random person who took pity on me. At my current rate of subscribers and views I should qualify for monetization right around the time we finish colonizing Mars.

A company called AdRev Publishing has filed a claim: “Monetized in some territories” What does that even mean? Monetized isn’t the same as copyrighted. There are people that ‘monetize’ Project Gutenberg public domain books by publishing them as ebooks on Amazon, but that doesn’t grant them rights.

They specifically filed a claim against the interval occurring between 16:59 and 19:04. That’s really odd, since I repeated the exact same piece of music approximately 60 times. If they have a claim, and its legitimate, why pick a specific interval in the middle? Why not the first iteration? Why not the whole video? I suspect they didn’t file against the whole video so that if I successfully dispute this they can just file again for a different time interval. Or maybe it’s even more evil… Maybe they only file against a small subset of people’s videos with the expectation that people won’t risk their account on a dispute for such a small slice of the ad revenue; and in that way make tiny slices of revenue from large numbers of creators.

AdRev didn’t demand I take my video down. Nooo… they leveraged YouTube’s system so that the video now shows ads and they get the money. What really makes this absurd is that I can’t show ads for revenue on my own videos, because YouTube changed their requirements and I no longer make the cut. So I make a video, AdRev swoops in and files a completely bogus claim against a computer generated rendition of a public domain piece of music, and AdRev gets to make money on my videos where I can not.

This is my response to the claim on Youtube:

While filing my dispute to their claim I am presented with a dire warning that filing a fraudulent dispute can result in the termination of my account. This is a scary threat for some content creators, as they may be depending on income from their videos. This warning feels a bit one-sided to me, as AdRev has been filing claims against Flight of the Bumblebee since at least 2017 and in at least one case dropping the claim when it was disputed. Is there no penalty for a company filing fraudulent claims? How many times have they pulled this maneuver?

In another display of bias against the creators that made Youtube what it is, when a claim is filed it goes into effect immediately; but they then have thirty days to respond to your dispute. That’s thirty days where a creator is in limbo stressing about the fate of their monetization. I wonder how many claims are filed by automated systems and then left hanging for thirty days after they are disputed?

This is what YouTube has become: A platform where content creators upload videos and copyright trolls can file an illegitimate automated claim and steal any potential revenue, and where the threat of a lost account will deter people from disputing those claims.

UPDATE 2019/12/11 (NZT, of course!) – Thanks to Cory Doctorow’s awesome write-up at boingboing, and the sleuthing of Sluggo in the message boards, these two interesting tidbits have come to light:

• AdRev CEO Noah Becker — The Little Bully Who Cried Wolf — TWICE
• AdRev Noah Becker Spurious Perjurious DMCA Takedowns REJECTED — All Videos RESTORED

UPDATE 2019/12/12 – I received an update from YouTube today that Adrev has deigned to release their illegitimate claim on my public domain music. YouTube considers this “Good news!” but I find it disturbing. My takeaway is that YouTube never reviewed my response, and instead allowed AdRev to self police. If that’s the process, then YouTube gets to remain blissfully ignorant of the abuses occurring on their platform.

Phase two of this experiment is coming soon…