Universal Music Takes Down Maroon 5's Own Video With A Copyright Claim
from the nice-work,-geniuses dept
This seems to happen every few months or so, but once again, a record label is causing a big name musical act to have its own video blocked from showing up on YouTube. As you may have heard, Maroon 5 recently released a new single, entitled "This Summer's Gonna Hurt Like A Motherfucker" -- and with it, a video that has been getting lots of attention. So, you might want to go check it out on YouTube, but if you do that right now, you'll be presented with this (ht: @RomanOnARiver):Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: content id, copyright, maroon 5, promotions, takedowns
Companies: interscope, universal music, youtube
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Ready, fire, aim!
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Re: Ready, fire, aim!
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Re: Re: Ready, fire, aim!
Universal has a bunch of 12 people whose sole job is to fire 'automated' takedowns (Spoiler: they're generated by real human beings).
The aim is to take down rival movie trailers, music videos etc just as their own releases are coming out.
They fake 100% the automated takedown so they can say 'ooh software error' rather than 'hey we're abusing the law fuckers, and because we're rich there is NOTHING you or the politicians we own can do about it'.
Someone still complains...they get the Heath Ledger / David Carradine treatment.
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Re: Ready, fire, aim!
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Nothing wrong
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Re: Nothing wrong
Other than those two things, not much.
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Re: Re: Nothing wrong
The major labels are companies and they have to make a profit. Publishing a song for free might decrease that profit (in their opinion according to the studies published). Taking it down is just good business.
( I guess I should add some /s or something but not sure which one. )
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Re: Re: Re: Nothing wrong
Obscurity is always a far greater threat than poverty because the former directly leads to the latter. You can either keep your content available with the chance that you might not be making money from some people, or you can take it down and definitely not make any money off of it whatsoever.
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Re: Re: Re: Nothing wrong
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Re: Nothing wrong
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Re: Nothing wrong
But, that's not what happened, no matter how you try to spin it. They screwed themselves with their own anti-piracy measures. Yet, they expect us to believe that everyone caught by this system is a pirate, not an innocent or independent artist screwed in the same way.
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Re: Nothing wrong
But they did want it on Youtube, that's why they put it up on Maroon5's official Youtube channel in the first place.
Or are you saying that Interscope/Universal does not control their band's official channel?
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Re: Re: Nothing wrong
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Re: Re: Re: Nothing wrong
I prefer the idea posited below - they accidentally put it on the main Maroon 5 channel instead of the band's VEVO channel, and some admin monkey tried to remove it via the DMCA tools instead of the normal account options and/or asking YouTube to move it to the correct one.
The funny thing is that the actual reason is irrelevant to the point at hand. However it happened, UMG managed to issue a copyright takedown on its own content. If a video with 1.5 million views by a world famous chart-topping band can be taken down from its own channel by a mere clerical error, what hope do other innocent victims have against intentional abuse?
In fact, if you want an actual conspiracy theory, how many potentially huge up and coming indie acts have been killed by similar actions, only not enough people know about them for their stories to get noticed? What's more likely - killing a hugely successful video to generate more publicity for a multi-platinum world famous band via stories about the label's incompetence, or blocking the ability of a talented indie artist to get ahead without signing to an RIAA label?
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Abolish Copyright
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UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
What had happened was waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2008, I'd bought a Flip camera and shot footage in Toronto of dogs playing in a park. I cut a single 3-minute shot into a minute-long video called "Puppies Play In Toronto" on my new Dell laptop. It was the first video I'd ever made.
To have some music, I just grabbed a track that came with the computer. I think I even credited the artist, Karsh Kale (whoever that was), on my video. Uploaded it and forgot about it.
Jump ahead six months and I get a message through YT from Karsh Kale complaining that I'd used his music and take it down and wah wah wah. I apologized, explained where I'd gotten the music and (I thought) hid the video. I then recorded an original piece of EDM and laid it on the video, reuploading it as "Puppies Play In Toronto (F.U.K.K. Version)" So AFAIK the offending track is down, my music is up, life is good.
Many, many, MANY videos that use music are matched and tagged in the credits, but for some reason after all these years, UMG has dinged my account because gawd forbid the music they gave away with every fraking computer in 2008 ended up in a video, credited.
I was going to get the video by my YouTube page had a giant WARNING page I had to acknowledge and now I have to watch a video called Copyright School and take a quiz before I can watch anything. I can't post long videos and do annotations for six months, too. Jerks.
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Re: UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
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Re: UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
That's a joke right? Please tell me this a joke!
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Re: Re: UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
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Re: Re: UMG's robots dealt me a copyright strike last weekend. F*ckers!
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I changed all of those links from links to the files, to links to the "Larry Lessig: Laws that choke creativity" video so people would know why I had to remove the links.
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Re:
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Re:
UMG and other labels are well known to farm their DMCA activity out to 3rd parties with poor quality control, and this would not be the first time a major corporation has had a DMCA notice sent against its own content. Documenting them here helps show how flawed the system is, despite the labels' insistence that it's easy to perfectly identify and remove infringing content.
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Sigh....
Zero fucks given!
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Not a bug.
It's a feature, not a bug.
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Re: Not a bug.
So, you're saying that Big Media doesn't like its own content?
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Re: Re: Not a bug.
Altough I'm sure it's not the case here, have you ever heard of whitewashing ?
It's not like it's never happened in the past before...
However back when the internet wasn't a thing it was easier to "erase" old offensive or racist content and only archivists and journalists would know that any such "sordid" works a media company ever existed.
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Re: Re: Re: Not a bug.
Nope, this is a simple case of the attack tools they demanded coming back and biting them on the ass.
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I think this was a mistake
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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Re: I think this was a mistake
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Re: I think this was a mistake
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Re: I think this was a mistake
Even if they did need to take it down, they has the tools in their own account that would just remove it from their offered videos, without such an error message being seen.
We are still talking stupidity here, it's just stupidity of the entire system rather than a simple clerical error.
How about we all stop trying to come up with excuses, and accept that this is yet another sign of a hopelessly broken system with unacceptable collateral damage.
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Re: I think this was a mistake
But... if that is the case it's still idiotic. Not only did they use completely the wrong tool to remove it, but they waited until it had been seen well over a million times before correcting the error. If the normal Maroon5 channel was serving ads or otherwise being monetised, they've also lost themselves a revenue stream which was not causing any issues elsewhere.
It still indicates a broken system - if they can "accidentally" issue a takedown notice against their own content, and the content is removed as result, what hope is there for others whose own uninfringing content is "accidentally" targeted by them?
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"This video has been removed by the user.
Sorry about that."
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