How Rumblefish Ended Up Claiming Copyright On A Song Uploaded By The Band Who Actually Held The Copyright

from the overclaiming dept

A few years back, we wrote about the company Rumblefish claiming copyright on public domain works on YouTube and getting them taken down. Recently, the company got a lot of attention for claiming copyright on someone's video because it had some birds chirping in the background, and a very mistaken Rumblefish process not only believed it owned the birdsongs, but then an employee doubled down and refused to back down when challenged on this. The company did eventually admit a big mistake after this received a ton of publicity -- but many of us were still worried about the process that allowed Rumblefish to make such a bogus claim in the first place.

Here's a story of another Rumblefish takedown -- but the details suggest one of the reasons why these things may be happening. John Boydston, from the band Daddy A Go Go, recently contacted us after he discovered that Rumblefish was claiming copyright on a video he had put up on YouTube, for an original song called I Wanna Be An Action Figure. The song was written by Boydston and he holds the sole copyright. It was released on a CD back in 2002. The video was produced (by Boydston again) just last year and posted to YouTube last October. Even so, Boydston received a notice from YouTube saying that music in that video "may have content that is owned or licensed by rumblefish." Boydston filed a dispute over this -- but was told that it would take a month to hear back -- and in the meantime ads might appear next to his videos with the proceeds going to Rumblefish.

Thankfully, the process didn't take that long. Within a day of filing the dispute claim, YouTube sent Boydston an email telling him that "rumblefish has reviewed your dispute and released its copyright claim on your video." So, at the very least, that's an improvement over the birdsong situation.

So, what happened? Boydston searched around for a while to actually find a contact at Rumblefish and had a short email exchange where he was told that the "system is working the way it should." It turns out that Boydston signed the band up with CDBaby to be his online distributor. They offer his music off of the CD Baby site, but also distribute it to tons of other properties, like iTunes, Amazon and various streaming services. And... it turns out, mixed in with a long list of music stores and streaming sites, is Rumblefish. The company is supposed to help potentially license the song to others, with a cut of the proceeds going back to Boydston (I assume after Rumblefish and CDBaby take their cut). So part of that is that Rumblefish automatically registers all such music with YouTube's ContentID, and sets it to "monetize." That, of course, leads to the silly result that any time an indie artist who uses CD Baby puts their own work up on YouTube, Rumblefish may end up claiming the work as its own (though, in theory, some of the proceeds would eventually get back to the author). Unfortunately, this is not clearly explained at all.

CDBaby does let its musicians opt-out of each individual service, and having gone through this whole experience, Boyston has decided to uncheck Rumblefish, and no longer allow them to claim his own music on YouTube.

Filed Under: contentid, john boydston, takedown
Companies: cdbaby, rumblefish

Rumblefish CEO: Claiming Copyright On Your Incidental Recordings Of Birds Was Merely A Series Of Unfortunate Errors

from the that-just-happen-to-profit-us dept

Following Rumblefish claiming copyright via YouTube's ContentID system (and putting ads on the video to monetize it) of a guy's nature video because the birds singing in the background sounded too much like a Rumblefish-licensed track, Rumblefish's CEO has gone into PR crisis mode, setting up an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit to address the story. While he gets a smidgen of kudos for the funny title of it:

I'm the CEO of Rumblefish, I guess we're the newest up and coming bird music licensing company - I'm also a copyright, music licensing, entrepreneur guy. Ask me anything.

the details aren't leaving many satisfied. The key explanation is basically that it was a "series of unfortunate errors":

Here's what happened. YT ID'd a song in our catalog improperly, it was disputed, one of our content ID reps re-instated the claim mistakenly. The issue was brought to our attention b/c of a post tonight. We reviewed the video, I watched it myself, and it was clearly a mistake. We released the claim on Sunday eve a few hours after our mistake came to our attention. That's what happened.

We review a substantial amount of claims every day and the number is increasing significantly. It's been rather challenging. We have millions of videos now using our songs as soundtracks and keeping up is getting harder and harder.

This is, almost certainly, an accurate reflection of the specific events, but hardly touches on the key error. That the Rumblefish rep re-instated the video "mistakenly." Remember, this was a nature video. There was no music. No one who watched the actual video would think that it involved someone taking "bird songs" off of some Rumblefish licensed track and placing it on the video.

Separately, this highlights an ongoing problem that we've discussed concerning YouTube's ContentID program. While it has been a great way to enable copyright holders to make money from content uploaded by others, it also can (and often is) abused to either take down content or to monetize someone else's content.

Filed Under: birds, content id, copyright
Companies: google, rumblefish, youtube

Guy Gets Bogus YouTube Copyright Claim... On Birds Singing In The Background

from the that-ain't-right dept

A whole bunch of folks have been sending in this Slashdot story about a guy who had one of his videos "claimed" via ContentID on YouTube due to a purpoted match with content that Rumblefish claims to hold the copyright on. We actually saw this post early on, because it links to an old Techdirt post about questionable Rumblefish takedowns. In this case, the guy says that there was no music in the video, but that Rumblefish said that the birds singing in the background violated its copyright:

"I make nature videos for my YouTube channel, generally in remote wilderness away from any possible source of music. And I purposely avoid using a soundtrack in my videos because of all the horror stories I hear about Rumblefish filing claims against public domain music. But when uploading my latest video, YouTube informed me that I was using Rumblefish's copyrighted content, and so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company. This baffled me. I disputed their claim with YouTube's system — and Rumblefish refuted my dispute, and asserted that: 'All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content: Entity: rumblefish; Content Type: Musical Composition.' So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish's exclusive intellectual property."

While it's still not fully clear what happened, the idea of claiming copyright on birds singing is actually not an entirely new concept (though, yes, it is ridiculous). In 2010, we wrote about Apple getting sued buy a guy, Martyn Stewart, who had recorded a bunch of bird sounds. Someone else had used those sounds in an app called iBird. As I said then, I'm not sure that there really is much "copyright" to claim over recording birds, but even if someone wants to make an argument that recording birds is copyrightable, it's pretty clear that the guy in the story above was just recording his own sounds -- not using someone's "copyright"-covered bird songs...

Filed Under: birds, contentid, copyright, youtube
Companies: google, rumblefish, youtube

Music Licensing Firm Offers Cheap Licenses For YouTube Videos

from the but,-um,-what-about-free? dept

The New York Times is reporting that music licensing firm Rumblefish is trying to help people making YouTube videos avoid takedowns or the dreaded YouTube ContentID "silencing" by offering music that can be licensed for YouTube videos at $1.99 per song (for non-commercial purposes only). While it's at least somewhat good to see music licensing firms recognizing that this market isn't going to buy hugely expensive licenses, and trying to adjust to handle this new market, it sort of ignores the fact that there are still a ton of Creative Commons and similarly licensed (or public domain) music out there that they can use. Since the Rumblefish catalog in this offer doesn't include any major label music or "big name" artists, it seems like those who might be interested in such a thing could probably find just as good, if not better, Creative Commons-licensed music. On top of that, this is the same Rumblefish who caused some problems last year when it claimed licensing rights over some public domain music, pissing off a bunch of YouTube users.

Filed Under: licensing, music, youtube
Companies: rumblefish

YouTube Taking Down Public Domain Works?

from the make-it-stop dept

In the past couple of days I've received emails from two separate people who found that public domain material they put on YouTube was taken down to companies claiming ownership of the work. In both cases, the stories seem pretty ridiculous, and for all the complaining that copyright holders do about how awful it is that they need to "police" their own content on YouTube, it seems like those who are getting hurt are people who are putting up public domain material and getting shut down -- often with little recourse.

The first story comes to us from two self-described "hippies," Haint and Littia, who had put up a video showing some of Haint's works, and used as background music a song by a group called the Psalters, who put their entire album into the public domain so that anyone could do what they wanted with it -- such as using it for background music in a video. However, music licensing company Rumblefish, supposedly uploaded its catalog into YouTube's content ID system -- and apparently (and I'm still trying to figure out how, because no one seems to have a good explanation), the Psalters song is somehow in Rumblefish's catalog. Hence, YouTube took down the video. Apparently others have also been finding their perfectly legal and licensed content taken down thanks to Rumblefish as well, and were told that they needed to call and get Rumblefish's permission to get the content back up.

Haint and Littia note that they can't issue a counternotice, because Rumblefish never sent a DMCA notice which they can counter (Update: to clarify, as explained in the next sentence, they can dispute, but that's slightly different than countering the DMCA notice, and comes with its own problems). The "takedown" was triggered by the content ID match, which still makes things a bit tricky, since "disputing" such things could potentially lead to a lawsuit, so there's a bit of a chilling effect in disputing a content ID match. Poking a big company with a stick where they can turn around and file a lawsuit is a bit scary -- even if you know you're in the legal right.

While looking into that story, reader Stephen Pate sent over his own story of having his entire YouTube account suspended. He's not entirely sure why, but believes it has something to do with video he posted of the recent "crash on the moon." The video was taken directly from NASA's live broadcast, which NASA makes clear is not covered by copyright.

But... along came everyone's favorite news organization, the Associated Press, and claimed the video was their copyrighted material. Nice of them. Due to at least one other similar incident, Pate's entire account was shut down, and to make matters worse, this apparently happened at about the same time that YouTube switched emails to gmail logins, leading Google to claim that it can't match his email to the email of the account in question.

I'm sure Google and YouTube are trying their best, within the confines of copyright law and various lawsuits, to handle such situations, but it seems like things are a mess -- and more and more users are finding that even if they have what appears to be perfectly legal content, they may face takedowns and even loss of their entire account, with limited avenues for recourse.

Filed Under: content id, public domain, takedowns
Companies: associated press, google, rumblefish