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‹ Photo Notes · 18 října, 2012
YouTube takes nice care of copyright. Very nice indeed …
I just received an email from YouTube. They tell me that my video Prague Nude Shootings II contains content that is not mine and that for this reason I’m apparently to expect ads that will be inserted into the video.
Apparently I used the track Monk’s Boogie by the band Drunken Monkey. It took a lot of work to find this piece. In my track I used a perfectly ordinary drum pattern. In the first part it plays slowly, from the middle the same pattern is played fast. The Drunken Monkey track I allegedly used for my video stands entirely on drums, which are indeed very similar to those in the fast part of my track. As I said, it’s a completely ordinary pattern; the similarity is about such that you could say all waltzes in the world rob each other, because under all of them the drums play „oom-pah-pah oom-pah-pah“. There is no other similarity between the two tracks.
On YouTube I filled in the form „I believe this copyright claim is not valid because: This video is my original content and I own all rights to it“. Even before sending, this text popped up, which does warn me a little, because „they“ are most likely not mistaken:
„Think for a moment about all the content you put into the video. Wasn’t there some music? Wasn’t there some recording from a concert, film, television programme, video game or another YouTube video? If so, you may be infringing someone’s copyright.
It doesn’t matter whether you recorded it from TV for free, whether you bought a DVD or video game, or whether you shot the footage yourself at some event, you still need permission from the copyright owners of the material you based your creation on. It may seem odd to you that you shoot something yourself but don’t own the copyright to it, nevertheless that is what copyright law stipulates.“
I spat on two fingers, raised them to take an oath and ticked that „I am sure that I own all rights to the audio and visual content in this video, and I want to file a dispute against this claim.“
After clicking the Submit button this popped up:
500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
The mention of monkeys really amused me at that moment, and I pondered their sobriety. In the end I completed the mission and sent the dispute, though I was asked several more times whether I was serious. Yes, I’m serious.
Below is the video in question (I prefer to embed it from Vimeo, where they don’t have broken machines:) and since I was looking for it anyway, here you have the track YouTube mixed up with mine. Compare for yourselves.
Within a few minutes I received an email announcing that I had won: „IODA has reviewed your dispute and released its copyright claim on your video“. No sorry…