Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#201

Post by daedalus_f » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

gabrielblack wrote: post #57

I can't understand why Youtube has no procedure to flag companies as "Wicca Moonlight” like scammer / troll so, after a certain number of infractions like that one ( pretending to be the rightful owner of the rights on BEETHOVEN music !), they are sanctioned in some way or banned. That to add some symmetry to the procedure to fight trolls trying to steal other peoples hard job.

"Wikka Moonlight" seems to be the name of the audio the copyright claim is originating from rather than the organisation claiming the copyright. [1] The audio contains a recording of Moonlight Sonata with a load of added reverb. The uploading channel is "Alice Violet Molland - Topic".

The "Topic" bit generally gets added to a channel name when a music distributer (like DistroKid [2]) publishes music to youtube on behalf of a musician (in this case Alive Violet Molland), typically at the same time adding it to other streaming services.

Distrokid will let you publish an unlimited number of albums in this way for about $20 a year and then collects the revenue from any streaming on your behalf. I'm guessing the distributer may also register the audio with music rights organisations, which are presumably the source of the copyright claims.

The Wicca Moonlight video now has 4.4k downvotes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ThyLB6bakk [2] https://distrokid.com/

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#202

Post by weswpg » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #150

jeffwass wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathise with her. I had a copyright claim on one of my YouTube videos (I’m totally small potatoes, handful of vids with dozens of views). I made a video of myself playing my own unique interpretation of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats on piano. https://youtu.be/ZNfMZ6g9YWo I got a copyright violation notice shortly after posting it, by some random Latin American music company. It wasn’t clear if it was legi…

Not an expert, but I've been learning a lil about this lately. Royalties for performances of someone else's song are paid to the writers of the words and the music. The melody and words can be copyrighted, not the chords or style. So you can use the chords of an existing song and give it new melody and words, and it is your own song. Style has nothing to do it. I love this quote from the classic The Manual: How To Ha…

Learning about the difference between a "groove", a "melody" and a song has been a wonderful rabbit hole to go down. Thanks!

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#203

Post by gaius_baltar » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #122

tomcooks wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or creators should promote public domain platforms like archive.org instead of complaining that a commercial platform is run like that

And what exactly would that solve? Now you've shifted the problem to a different organisation without addressing the actual issue: bad actors and copyright trolls being asymmetrically favoured over content creators. Being a non-profit organisation doesn't make you immune from frivolous lawsuits...

> And what exactly would that solve?

Google won't get the ad money from these views. That's the point.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#204

Post by DreamScatter » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

cma wrote: post #196

dredmorbius wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how lossy the compression is. Your watermark becomes compression artefacts instead.

Most audio codecs by now use perceptual noise substitution, which potentially substitutes in identical noise (I think it just EQs it?).

no, the mp3 codec actually deletes humanly inaudible portions of the frequency spectrum to reduce storage, this data isn't recoverd or replaced or referred when played back again, it's lost information. what is removed is based on human perception limits for audio

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#205

Post by DreamScatter » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #124

p49k wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent comment was also referring to YouTube's AI marking a benign video as 18+. Google is willing to wrongly punish people via excessive/unfair false positives in the interest of trying to be more advertiser friendly. It's just about money.

Well, false positives result in fewer scandals than false negatives here. So guilty until proven innocent seems like a perfectly reasonable, if very annoying, stance.

It's not reasonable to screw innocent people over.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#206

Post by Symbiose » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

I made a Moonlight Sonata cover myself a few years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIbBcJ7EkxQ) and had countless copyright claims since then.

I had to manually dispute every single claims over the years and prove again and again that no copyright were infringed.

It can get tiring when you get a copyright claim finally lifted after weeks of dispute, only to get a new claim the next month.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#207

Post by pierrec » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

teachingassist wrote: post #106

ozim wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are disputes over "white noise" videos so it is already as bad as it gets.

Given that white noise is random, a recorded copy of white noise is its own perfect watermark.

If you're comparing sample-for-sample, maybe. But that's not what is performed by music identification algorithms - it would be both slow (to the point of being unusable) and inaccurate (because of re-encoding, etc). Instead they rely on different kinds of dimensionality reduction that match the way we perceive music, so they only compare smaller amounts of data to get more perceptually relevant matches. The Shazam fingerprinting algorithm is the best known but there are others.

So if you submit white noise to a copyright database, it could match different white noise recordings.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#208

Post by JeremyNT » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #180

eru wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you need to make it a parody to be in the clear?

I'm guessing the next Weird Al has already been disillusioned with the copyright ban hammer.

Weird Al himself was well aware of this issue, and famously would only parody songs after receiving permission from the authors.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#209

Post by emidln » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #117

opan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue, not a lack of cost meaning we aren't deserving of a good experience. Look at Peertube or other free as in freedom options.

> I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue, I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale. Currently, about 5000 videos are uploaded to YT every minute . If just 0.1% of them have any potential copyright issues, that's 5 potentially complex cases per minute or 7200 per day. No amount of human review will be able to decide this in a timely manner. The piano teacher's case is j…

> 7200 per day

Let's say it takes 5 minutes to properly adjudicate a dispute. 5 minutes allows 20 per person-hour. An 8 hour shift could resolve 160 reviews. 7200 / 160 = 45 shifts per day to review all of the hypothetical copyright issues. I don't think that's required, and the number of requested reviews is going to be some fraction of that. Requiring google to spread out under 50 shifts over a 24 period in order to provide a fair review so that they may bring in billions of dollars a year from youtube doesn't seem like a large ask. This is call-center-esque work and even done in the US or Western Europe would be very cheap, particularly as it can avoid otherwise more cumbersome regulatory hurdles.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#210

Post by naniwaduni » Sat, May 01, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #135

Sebb767 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are provisions in the CDMA precisely for that, and the platform is liable for indulging those in systematic cases. (assuming you mean DMCA) Yes, that has provisions, but YT copyright claims are explicitly not DMCA claims. This is intentional to both protect the content creator (lawsuits are expensive!) and YouTube. > YouTube lawyers must know that there’s a significant risk they’ll piss of a someone like a la…

> There is no chance for Google to automate away any of this. I'm not quite so pessimistic. There is a chance, machine learning is pretty good these days. But: the chance is pretty low and I assume other priorities are taking up most of their time, and this would be a risky project from a legal point of view.

There is no chance because copyright is not a data problem. It is a provenance problem. Provenance is not a function of data.

(Humans can't really solve this problem either.)