V.com weekend vote: Have you had false copyright claims made on video you've posted online?

January 21, 2024, 5:53 PM · A few weeks ago we posted a story about the problem of false copyright claims agains classical musicians who post videos online. Specifically, we spoke to Amy Beth Horman, whose videos of her daughter's violin performances were constantly being flagged, taken down, muted, etc. on the basis of false copyright claims.

In most cases her daughter was performing classical works that are in the public domain - not subject to copyright. For Amy this was becoming a part-time job, dealing with all the automated copyright claims created by bots on behalf of big companies like Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group or Universal Music.

This is hardly unusual, certainly I've had to deal with such claims, posting performance videos and excerpts from master classes on Violinist.com - always with permission, always public domain classical works. But the technology used to generate these claims seems to work particularly badly for classical music, as it is unable to differentiate between a copyrighted performance and a performance by a talented student, if they are playing the same work.

A lot of people shared stories about dealing with copyright claims, so I wanted to do a poll about it to see how widespread this problem is. Have you ever posted a video, only to have it get flagged for copyright violations, when no copyright was violated? What actually happened? Who did they think was performing? Was the problem resolved? Were you threatened with penalties? Please participate in the vote and then describe your experiences in the comments section.

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Replies

Susan Agrawal

January 22, 2024 at 12:34 AM · All.the.time.

Richard Shagam

January 22, 2024 at 01:52 AM · Artificial Intelligence (AI) has drawn a lot of attention only within the past year or so, but the copyright bots working over the past several years have been just another bad manifestation of AI. Perhaps has AI technology gets smarter, more accurate and more prevalent, these erroneous copyright claims could eventually disappear. Or the problem will only get worse. Unfortunately, I suspect the latter will happen.

Jim Hastings

January 22, 2024 at 12:15 PM · I've posted, but no issues so far. It wasn't till 2022 that I finally had a decent external USB microphone and no longer had to make do with the previous Android's onbord mic. Thus I've posted very little to date. These are my own improvisations I've come up with from bits and pieces of my warm-up sessions. Some of the masters who influenced me are Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Mazas, Kreutzer, Verdi; but these improv's - or whatever you may call them - are, nevertheless, all my own original work. No one else has ever heard them before. So I should be safe.

Tony Leatham

January 22, 2024 at 01:29 PM · In November, I posted two clips from an orchestra rehearsal on the orchestra's Facebook page. One was flagged as a potential copyright violation "in certain territories" - the other was fine (there aren't many recordings of Eberl's Symphony in E Flat major for it to compare to which is probably why we got away with it)

I suspect that nobody has bothered to programme the AI to consider classical music. It will be using the same algorithm for all audio and assuming that if it finds similarities to a recording, it's a copyright infringement. Probably a relatively simple thing to fix from a software engineering perspective, but persuading FB to do this will be the real challenge.

Mark Breiger

January 23, 2024 at 11:07 AM · The issue is that although the score is probably not copyright, a modern performance can be copyright. A performance of Beethovens 9th by the Vienna philharmonic is copyright. The computer searches other videos and finds the audio is similar and flags it.

If the system requires a closer match, then it may result in more piracy. (Piracy is rampant even with their ai systems, so maybe it is not much of an argument)

It should be possible to make a better system, but they (the websites and people who claim to own copyrights to the performances) are making too much money this way.

Lydia Leong

January 23, 2024 at 02:50 PM · I've been flagged both for my classical playing and my Scottish fiddling. The fiddling is especially puzzling, because there's quite a bit of ornamentation, which means it's not the exact same notes as any recording out there.

YouTube has of late been much better about recognizing classical music, though, without falsely flagging it as copyrighted.