A little background. In 1981, myself and 5 high school classmates took a trip to China to study at a university there. It was a big deal. A local news station sent a camera crew with us and they made a documentary about it. It even won a Peabody award. My Chinese teacher recorded the documentary on a VHS tape.
Fast forward to yesterday. I uploaded the grainy video to YouTube. Apparently, my teacher had set the VCR to record for an hour but the documentary only lasted 55 minutes. The remaining 5 minutes were the first part of “The Cosby Show.” This morning, I was notified by YouTube that my video was removed for copyright infringement based upon the fact that it contained material owned by Carsey-Warner, the production company that made The Cosby Show. I don’t dispute that there was a trivial infringement and I’ll work on editing the clip.
My question is: How the heck did they know? The video did contain the Cosby theme song. Are all videos scanned and then a “SoundHound” type algorithm is applied to find violators? Honestly, given the vast amount of “infringed” copyright on YouTube, I was shocked to see my video taken down.
Interesting. I wonder what it was about my 37 year old clip that made it stand out from the literally thousands of Cosby show videos. Maybe they didn’t like playing second fiddle to a documentary about high school kids.
Probably because it was unaltered. Everything else is most likely sped up or slowed down or zoomed way in or zoomed way out or altered in some other way in an attempt to defeat Content ID.
Probably nothing. I don’t know if it’s random or they scan every new upload, but I’ve had one or two (wedding dance) videos get caught and I’ve seen some other videos that never get noticed.
It’s also possible that the person that owns the rights to the song has requested that youtube watch for it and block it if it gets uploaded. When my video was noticed, I was told I could either remove it or let the copyright owner monitzie it. I’ve heard others (someone, here) say that Prince, IIRC, has all uploads that contain his music taken down. No ifs, ands or buts.
The action the copyright holder takes doesn’t automatically mean blocking either.
I uploaded a homemade video for a small local charity that uses part of the Cheers theme music. Within seconds I got a notice roughly along the lines of “This material is copyrighted by Sony Music (iirc). Tick this box to acknowledge that Sony Music has various rights, and that you agree that any revenue generated by this upload is Sony’s not yours”. The video is still up, and has almost a thousand views!
Yes, Prince was very vigilant about keeping unauthorized reproductions of his work off Youtube. As for the poster you’re thinking of, I believe it’s gaffa and this thread, which I remember very well.
I uploaded a home video of my son’s birthday party and dubbed some music from Steve Vai for some background at one point. I got a warning that it had copyrighted material. It wasn’t blocked but it does limit things you can do, like upload videos longer than 10 minutes.
When everything gets straightened out, could you post a link? I’d like to check it out, because my niece spent the summer in Indonesia as an exchange student (and I love old docos).
Is there any chance that the video itself is still under copyright?
There’s a chance that it’s still under copyright but no chance that the TV station cares. About 10 years ago, I contacted them to see if I could get a copy of the video and nobody knew anything about it. They eventually sent me a tape of random clips that they had found.
I’ll link to the video when I get this straightened out. In the meantime, here’s the synopsis from the Peabody people. Link.
I’d say likely the music. I had that problem a few years ago. My youngest was a competitive gymnast and I took a video of her doing a floor routine and uploaded it to FB. It didn’t load. Tried again. Blocked.
Puzzled, I looked into it and FB’s algorithm had matched the music playing with a copyrighted work and decided it couldn’t display it.
