Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

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I sympathise with her. I had a copyright claim on one of my YouTube videos (I’m totally small potatoes, handful of vids with dozens of views).

I made a video of myself playing my own unique interpretation of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats on piano. https://youtu.be/ZNfMZ6g9YWo

I got a copyright violation notice shortly after posting it, by some random Latin American music company. It wasn’t clear if it was legit or not, it could have been some holding company of song rights or some failure of the AI.

I disputed the claim, saying I used no recorded material, it was entirely my own styling on the song including ragtime and stride piano influences.

Frankly I’m not even sure how copyright works on covers, particularly if style is quite different.

The company never responded in the 30 day period so the copyright claim was removed.

My channel is so small that I probably would have just removed the video. I’m not even close to the levels that are required for monetisation (1000 subscribers and 4000 cumulative view hours).

But it was a bit surprising how quickly it was claimed that I violated someone’s copyright.

Covers of songs, even if the covers use completely new styles are protected by copyright law and therefore can risk being claimed by YouTube's system:

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...

I guess you need to make it a parody to be in the clear?

I'm guessing the next Weird Al has already been disillusioned with the copyright ban hammer.

Weird Al himself was well aware of this issue, and famously would only parody songs after receiving permission from the authors.

Permission from the authors is unfortunately different from permission by the copyright holders. IIRC Weird Al did it more for goodwill than legality.

> Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it’s important to maintain the relationships that he’s built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties.

https://www.weirdal.com/archives/faq/

Didn’t even need the next Weird Al. Al’s own YouTube videos were copyright claimed by his own label for violating copyright.

Not necessarily.... The Posterchild for parody is 2 Live Crew Pretty Woman. Which includes samples of the original Oh, Pretty Woman. Youtube videos get flagged for 10 seconds of a song snippet all the time.

After the Campbell v Acuff-Rose Supreme Court decision, 2 Live Crew licensed the song from Acuff-Rose music. (which is what they tried to do in the first place).

Parody is a fair use defense, so you have to go through a lawsuit to be able to assert it.

Not an expert, but I've been learning a lil about this lately. Royalties for performances of someone else's song are paid to the writers of the words and the music. The melody and words can be copyrighted, not the chords or style. So you can use the chords of an existing song and give it new melody and words, and it is your own song. Style has nothing to do it.

I love this quote from the classic The Manual: How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way by KLF:

...the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

Learning about the difference between a "groove", a "melody" and a song has been a wonderful rabbit hole to go down. Thanks!

I'd love to know if (the downvoters think) that has factual errors. I'm a jazz musician who will soon be releasing music online—some my compositions, some not—and planning to pay license fees etc. Thanks—I'm a totally at a loss what could have made people downvote it!

I think the problem with that post is that race (black and white people) are unnecessarily brought into it. I'm sure that musicians of all races would want this issue addressed. Making it about race is extremely ridiculous.

Ohhhh ok thank you!

The book is from the UK, I'm in Australia, it didn't seem a ridiculous thing to say to either of us. Maybe the problem was...US sensitivities. I, like I believe the KLF also, am white and have dedicated most of my life to the music of "blacks of African descent". The issue is how much more important groove is in black music, and how copyright is in origin a white thing. Changing copyright would no doubt be a massive, heroic, lifelong task. Like the way it took Douglas Nicholls[0] 30 years work to remove a racist sentence and a bit from the Australian constitution! I just don't hear calling for a hero here as a negative thing at all, the way evidently some people do.

Did any black people have a problem with the quote? I am curious.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26980084

p.s. wow, it's you! I checked out your github and website (crucialflow) a few months ago, hehe small world. proof: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153386

Groove is just as important to many non-black people, so saying that only black people would care about this is annoying me. Anyway, I don't have the ability to downvote things, I can only speak for why I didn't like the phrasing.

Small world I guess, I used to be a random nobody, I guess now people have something to recognize me by. I also release music under the name Dream Scatter by the way.

> saying that only black people would care about this is annoying me.

..But I think no-one said "only black people would care about this".

Like also I think no-one said "We need black people to change this copyright system" or "this is an issue between black and white people".

I'm not sure the quote is 100% serious, if they really thought things can or will be changed in their suggested way. But if I think about it, which I didn't until people said stuff like "Making it about race is extremely ridiculous."—it just seemed a commendable but unremarkable sentiment, one I never dreamed anyone could have a problem with—suggesting a black lawyer seems apt, for reasons something to do with what could be called self-determination. It would be more awesome and appropriate if black people righted the historic wrong, than if white people did it for them because poor black people can't do it on their own. Etc.

Ok, thanks, I think I learnt something about what your and other peoples' problem was/is, and I hope you learnt something about "my side", where what is extremely ridiculous is someone having problems with the noble desire expressed in that quote. But I guess it's hard here where we don't know each other at all, and don't know about what it seems are the unshared assumptions and beliefs that made my quoting a few lines on fixing copyright from a classic book from the 1980s into something extremely ridiculous and annoying in 2021. ..Ok thanks again.

Suggesting that the KLF are racist is pretty ridiculous!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_KLF

That doesn't have anything to do with black or white people. We don't need black people to change this copyright system, just people in general who want to make sure that musicians get paid. Saying this is an issue between black and white people is extremely ridiculous.

same here.

i am a big fan of film music. i made a small piano reduction of a favorite piece and uploaded it to youtube. i wasn't even mad when i saw the copyright claim within hours, since i run no ads.

i was however baffled and somewhat proud that my efforts were not in vain, and that the algorithm thought my poor interpretation was close to the real thing.

i do not defend the algorithm though.

You are not allowed to create derivative works from another person's creation, regardless of whether you are making money from it. You can't go and make a Shrek III flick, for example, or write a book set in the Harry Potter universe. Likewise, you can't adapt music from a film (IANAL, there are things like fair use, but in general this holds).

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

> You are not allowed to create (free) derivative works

I think putting such constraints on creative work is a cultural disaster.

Then your beef is with the United States, not with Google.

I think misappropriating someone else's work to make a buck is a cultural disaster, but then I work for a living and expect to get paid, so what do I know? Fair Use does exist to provide an avenue for the reuse of the work of others for criticism, parody, and the like., but straight up lifting someone else's work and using it to your own ends, even if noncommercial, is wrong.

Explain why it's wrong when there's no money involved (e.g. fan-fiction and similar works).

Even if there's no money involved that can still damage the market for the work it derives from. It's one thing if the derivative work consists of original characters in the same setting, or existing characters but in a what-if scenario, but as soon as you start trying to write derivative works in the same vein as the original then you're damaging the original author's ability to market his existing work, and to continue that work himself. You are, in a very real sense, taking something that isn't yours.

That's great if you ignore the fact that almost all our ideas are borrowed. Copyrights work against the movement of ideas - the ground culture springs from. It is artificial scarcity, like DRM, unnatural in the domain of information.

> as soon as you start trying to write derivative works in the same vein as the original then you're damaging the original author's ability to market his existing work

That seems ridiculous. How would expanding literature hurt it? It would be like free PR for the original. Art (tales, legends, stories, music and potry) used to be orally transmitted, we forgot that too, with every retelling it was reinterpreted and adapted. Even Tolkien didn't invent the elves and Rowling didn't invent sorcery.

depends on the derivative. I can't make a story about hogwarts. But I can make a story about a girl with a scar who gets enrolled in a magical academy. And I probably just described 20 works with that description. But I think the legal definition of "derivative work" isn't that loose.

The more gray areas for derivative work is stuff like fan art, translations, and remixes. All are technically in the area to be copyright'd, but at the same time it also helps publishers in essentially being free, natural advertisement.

I don't get why you're confused. You violated copyright and got a legitimate claim against you.

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