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Comment by Mdotstrange | Hacker News Reader

When I disputed the claim I learned that BFM is claiming a wind sound from a "Sounds of Nature" CD they own the rights to has been infringed upon-so apparently they own the wind, all wind. So beware when recording the wind with your digital recorders, those evil copyrighted natural content devices!

Thanks for all the tips! I'm reading through these comments now.

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It seems to me that algorithms for identifying similar sounds would be likely to find an lot of pretty generic noises similar to a sample of wind -- other wind, distant traffic, etc etc.

As such, BFM giving such a sample to Youtube's automated infringement detector strikes me as copyright trolling -- it's inevitably gonna get lots of false positives, and they get to make a bit of money off each before the YT appeals process works itself out.

Wow, that is just pure evil! They're making a total mockery of the copyright system and I'm relishing the idea of someone exposing them for who they are. If they don't resolve this reasonably, would you consider taking them to court? Is it financially feasible?

What if we float the possibility that it's not evil, but just incompetent and lazy? It seems pretty likely that they learned they could upload all their content in order to protect it and then did so without any input from someone who knows anything about the fingerprinting algorithms and where they were likely to fail.

It seems that the fault rests squarely on YouTube for not getting this right.

I would claim that being willfully "incompetent and lazy" in a way that harms others IS evil.

You're allowed to copyright a recording of wind, just like you're allowed to copyright a photograph of a lake. The dumb part was putting into Youtube's system to look for similar ones.

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