Youtube Taking Down Covers - How Does It Work?

GiRa

GiRa

Power User
Yesterday I uploaded two covers on Youtube. I used two backing track taken from the net (public sites) and today one of the videos become not available from mobile devices. Is there something I should do?

In the video management I got a message that says "The claimant is allowing their content to be used in your YouTube video. However, ads might appear on it.", that I can't monetize and "If you agree with these conditions, you don't have to do anything".

That's perfectly ok for me as I just want to use the videos to find a new band after moving to a new country, but I can't understand why the video is becoming unavailable.

Some suggestions from people more experienced than me?
 
Well...
You don't own the song- the artist does...
What youtube is saying- they own the song- so they get the money that comes from ads on your video...
And- if they want ads on it you can't stop it...

Also some artists limit the video on certain devices- i don't know how youtube does it but it's like desktop/computer, smartphone and smartv

There's nothing you can really do- and you're probably fine.
 
I am totally cool with that, but I kind of got worried when the video started being intermittently unavailable. Anyway, it's up now. So far so good :)
 
A guy here at my work used to work at YouTube in the team that was responsible for auto-detection of copyrighted materials. This is 2-year-old knowledge, but I suspect it's still pretty applicable. The automation fingerprints the copyrighted material and then fingerprints posted material and if there's enough of a correlation it takes down the posted material and replaces it with that copyright claim message.

It's not that you can't cover tunes and post them (that's actual legit), it's that your cover fingerprinted close enough to the original that it got flagged. The system actually thought it was the original recording with high enough confidence to remove it.

The fingerprinting is pretty complicated but they generally do a bunch of high and low pass filtering, boost some vocal frequencies so vocal beats are prominent and such. What they actually fingerprint isn't very listenable. They're trying to capture the patterns that make the clip unique in a way that they can spot those patterns in other clips that undergo the same fingerprinting transformation.

If you're getting flagged consider it a compliment; robots think you sound quite a bit like the original material!
 
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iaresee said:
It's not that you can't cover tunes and post them (that's actual legit), it's that your cover fingerprinted close enough to the original that it got flagged. The system actually thought it was the original recording with confidence to remove it.
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Does Soundcloud work the same way?
 
On a similar note - fb just took down a cover of my band doing Kyrptonite, citing the Corporate Music Corp (cant remember actual entity)...it was our first gig, outdoors.
Wonder who/how it was found? And who would care, it was buried in our vid's.
 
I am quite happy that there is a way for the original artist to get revenue from their work. The point is that even youtube itself is not so clear on the matter: while there is a list of songs that you can use, specifying also how to use them, the final behavior is not that consistent it seems.

Both Livin' on a Prayer and Laid to Rest are allowed to be use entirely used, the revenue goes to the publishing record companies. Nevertheless, those video has been a little hit and miss in the first days. Now I am not even checking anymore, but it seems that everything is working.
 
Tone Collector said:
Wonder who/how it was found? And who would care, it was buried in our vid's.
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Every video posted would be queued for scanning. Both for copyrighted content and for facial recognition, etc. for graph building.

That's the data that Facebook has on you and your social network that makes it valuable.

No human flagged it is my safe bet. Computers are much cheaper.
 
The reason it's hit or miss is because Youtube has been extorting artists to bolster content on their music properties..

If they DO NOT sign their agreement, Google will leave infringing content in place and free from their Music Key algorithms. It will be up to the artist to issue take downs and do all the work to remove illegal content.
 
benvigil said:
The reason it's hit or miss is because Youtube has been extorting artists to bolster content on their music properties..

If they DO NOT sign their agreement, Google will leave infringing content in place and free from their Music Key algorithms. It will be up to the artist to issue take downs and do all the work to remove illegal content.
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Thanks for this.

It's tough, both for the artist and for Google that has to pay the R&D costs.
 
Toopy14 said:
Does Soundcloud work the same way?
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Seems so. They seem to extract the vocals and generate the fingerprint to match. So in case you mix one of the vocal tracks available on YouTube into your cover your upload is most likely going to be deleted. The harder it is to extract the vocals the better the chances are your upload will pass.
 
ChristThePhone said:
Seems so. They seem to extract the vocals and generate the fingerprint to match. So in case you mix one of the vocal tracks available on YouTube into your cover your upload is most likely going to be deleted. The harder it is to extract the vocals the better the chances are your upload will pass.
Click to expand...

I had a guitar clip pulled from Soundcloud but there were no vocals, it was just me testing out an Axe-Fx preset.
 
ChristThePhone said:
Seems so. They seem to extract the vocals and generate the fingerprint to match. So in case you mix one of the vocal tracks available on YouTube into your cover your upload is most likely going to be deleted. The harder it is to extract the vocals the better the chances are your upload will pass.
Click to expand...

In some cases, vocals don't seem to matter. I've tried putting stuff up without vocals, and they get removed.
Youtube refuses to allow this video in any mix whatsoever. I finally had to relent and upload it to my own site.
 
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