Day 48: What's fair is foul! Or my adventures with copyright.

What passes for thought Thursday

Long time fans of Don's Basement (and I know how you are, both of you) may recall my Day 6 post, 'Shelter in Place and a video. No extra charge." In those early days, the Basement aspired to be inspirational. You know, help everyone get through the dark days of a pandemic. But the public spoke (at least my friend in Sheboygan) who wrote, "Hey Don! It looks like your sense of humor is back. The first few nights were kind of dark but this is much better." 

That post contained a video of my playing and singing, "Better Things," the 1981 Kinks song.

Here is the video....





You can't play it. YouTube won't let me embed my video to my blog,

Yet, I can link to it.

This bothers me.

On March 16 just 10 days before I tried to embed this video, YouTube released a statement of the virus. They planned to reduce staffing at various sites. "With this change, we will start relying more on technology to help do some of the work normally done by reviewers. This means automated systems will start removing some content without human review. As we do this, users and creators may see increased video removals, including some videos that may not violate policies. We won’t issue strikes on this content except in cases where we have high confidence that it’s violative."

My video was blocked because of the following:

Content Used: Video uses this song's melody. Well at least they recognized the melody.

Claim Type: Composition.  Guilty...It's not my song. It's a cover like a billion other songs on YouTube and dozens of "Better Things" covers.

Impact on the video: Video cannot be monetized. Monetized? You can't be serious. Don's Basement has been operating since 2011 and has posted over 200 times. I can honestly say I haven't made a penny, a shekel, a copeck. Please,

Copyright Owners: LatinAutor - SonyATV, SOLAR Music Rights Management, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, Sony ATV Publishing  

LatinAutor is a non-profit organization established in Uruguay as a federation of Latin American collective management societies. They are pretty aggressive in their copyright claims.

Although this guy on reddit may have gone too far.

"I did some research about this LatinAutor guy and he’s just mass copyright claiming my videos and I’ve spent over 2 hours making disputes."

LatinAutor made news by signing a deal with Impel, a UK company. From their website, "IMPEL Collective Management Limited (‘IMPEL’) licenses and administers the digital rights of its publisher members’ Anglo-American repertoire for online activities on a multi-territory basis."

The factors that Judges consider in regards to Fair Use are as follows:
the purpose and character of your use
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
the effect of the use upon the potential market

"Another important fair use factor is whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work. Depriving a copyright owner of income is very likely to trigger a lawsuit. This is true even if you are not competing directly with the original work."


Who is depriving? Clearly no one is going to listen to my rendition of "Better Things" and say to themselves, "I was going to sign up for Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited or Spotify so that I could hear the Kinks but after listening to Don's version, why bother?"

FACEBOOK has been much looser in their guidelines. Their guidelines have a common sense feel to them.

"Is the use commercial or purely personal? Commercial, or for-profit uses are less likely to be considered fair use."

Will the use replace the original work such that people stop buying or viewing the copyrighted work? 

Common examples include use for the purpose of criticism, commentary, parody, satire, news reporting, teaching, education and research.

That sounds like the Don's Basement mission statement.