I know; I’ve asked a few of these.
I watch react videos on YouTube and I’ve noticed a pattern I don’t understand.
I’ll watch a react video where the person is reacting to a popular song and they will play the entire song as they react to it.
But I’ll watch a react video where the person is reacting to a TV show or movie and they will delete out the soundtrack if a popular song is playing and explain that they can’t have the song in their video because of copyright.
Why the discrepancy?
There’s no legal reason I can think of. And the same song will be detected by the copyright bots whether it’s played on its own or as part of something else. (If anything, it will be less likely to be caught in movie/TV shows).
My best guess is that people reacting to whole songs know they’re going to be flagged, and just accept it. If they’re just flagged, and not given a copyright strike, all that happens is that they can’t make money on the video. If they have a nice Patreon, or make other content, they can get paid for that.
The people who react to movies and TV shows tend to react to clips. Or they have you fire up the show/movie and commentate as you watch. So they have a better chance of trying to avoid the copyright bots. (Watching a whole movie or show would trip the bots even if there’s no music involved at all.)
The only thing to be really scared about are copyright strikes. Three of those active at one time means you get kicked off of the site. But YouTube tries their best to make that option unattractive. Content owners can shut down an entire video with a strike, or they can leave the video up and run ads on it, and get money. Most companies choose the latter.
Anyways, if it’s not what I said, then I don’t know. I do know there’s a lot of misunderstanding of copyright on YouTube. They could just be mistaken. And I guess it’s conceivable that the music reactors actually have a license.
Are react videos transformative use of copyrighted material? If so, reacting to a song would be fine, but perhaps reacting to a video would not be considered transformative for any copyrighted music on that video.
However, I think more likely that music can easily identified with software while video would not be so easy to identify.
It will often depend on the holder of the rights. Just playing the song is probably covered by YouTube’s ASCAP licensing; commenting would fall under that.
But it’s more complicated with movies or TV. It is probably not covered by the licensing, since it’s more complicated: the movie is covered, but the song’s licensing agreement with the film does not include Youtube streaming (the film would, so payments would go to the film).
Also some people don’t allow youtube streaming for their songs. Rick Beato has a series of the best guitar intro, piano intro, etc. and has mentioned that he sometimes can’t play one of them because the artist won’t allow it and will issue a takedown order for the entire video. That probably happens from time to time on reaction videos; you just don’t see it happening.
Cinema Sins avoids playing any songs in the soundtracks of the movies they cover, which leads to issues with movies like Cats where they can’t use the audio when songs are sung to avoid the movie producers becoming butthurt.
So, bottom line, the songs themselves are licensed, but once they’re in movies, they’re not.
Chuck got it right. And if you ask why such a contradictory system exists, all I can say is that it goes back into history with different sets of lawyers for different types of users concentrating on their own needs and ignoring what others were doing. And there was no overarching body that could negotiate to put everything together logically.
@RealityChuck mentions ASCAP. YouTube does indeed have an agreement with ASCAP. But looking at their website about said agreement, it says they issue ContentID flags and take out revenue on the video just like any other rightsholder.
That being the case, I would expect it to work like every other copyright flag on YouTube: whoever puts out the flag gets all the money made from the video in question (not including YouTube’s cut). The revenue is not in any way shared with the person who made the video.
That would be exactly how it works when video clips (or the sound from video clips) get flagged. Whoever flags it gets all the revenue from the video. So I don’t see why this would make a difference for the video producer.
https://www.ascap.com/help/music-business-101/youtube-faq-uploaders
Okay, I’m shocked.
I just read an article that coincidentally is related to this topic. Apparently some police officers have adopted the tactic of playing copyrighted music while they do something questionable. This means that automatic software will detect the music being played and delate videos of their activities that are posted online.