Proposed copyright law makes uploading cover videos illegal

[drfsupercenter]

Surprised nobody's posted about this yet:

Free Bieber: Vote no on S. 978

Not sure how reliable this is, but it seems scary enough regardless.

[admin]

I think I posted about this proposed bill here:

New Senate Proposal: Five Years In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos | News - Digital Digest

After looking at the website above, I'm actually a little bit more conflicted about this proposed bill. On one hand, it's your typical heavy handed pro-copyright bill written by politicians who don't know how the Internet works. On the other hand, it could have prevented Justin Bieber from becoming famous by locking him up for 5 years.

I really don't know what to think now!

[drfsupercenter]

Ah, didn't realize it's been around since June.

And as much as I hate Justin Beiber... think of how many artists get their start by covering other bands. If they make that a crime, then that's basically directly hindering the music industry everywhere. I know of lots of YouTube musicians who I like who started with covers before writing original works.

[admin]

I know, I was just joking.

YouTube is a great place because of cover songs, and others uses of copyrighted music that is in no way a substitute for buying the proper music (since it's usually just a clip, or a not so good quality version with sound effects and dialogue interrupting the music). In fact, at the same time, it helps to promote the music as well (how many times have you read comments that said "what's the music in this video?", and I'm thinking a lot of people might just go iTunes shopping after learning the answer as well, if a link to the iTunes page wasn't already in the video description).

[drfsupercenter]

Yeah, they have the little content matching thing where it shows the name of the song and has links to buy it on Amazon and iTunes. Granted, all that link does is perform a search on those stores so half the time it links to the wrong thing altogether - or in my case, I'll upload some exclusive remix of a song, and it links to the regular version, etc.

Personally I think that unless somebody is uploading an entire movie (which hey, I've seen fan films on there before), YouTube shouldn't have to remove stuff. I've made quite a few videos of clips from various things with a copyrighted song as background and it gets removed...
With things like GrooveShark, if somebody wanted to listen to a song for free they could just go to that site and listen to it, how is using a random YouTube video any worse?

[admin]

Yep, I agree. There are also plenty of legal music videos on YouTube, and content holders also get to take in revenue from user uploaded copyrighted clips, so piracy is not a huge problem on YouTube.

But I think this law is aimed at the likes of Megavideo, and they do have a lot of copyrighted content on there. Content holders know that it's hard to have a technical solution to prevent people streaming pirated content unlike with public P2P, so they're lobbying for a legal solution instead, except this one seems a bit overreaching, it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.

[drfsupercenter]

Yeah. I've had to open tons of different YT accounts, though, because of the fact that they keep deleting my stuff.

Really, I'll upload things like movie trailers, TV commercials, and the like, all of which is FREE ADVERTISING... plus things like anime music videos, which yes, is using copyrighted clips, but 3 minutes of an entire TV show isn't too bad, is it? I would consider that fair use, given the length of most shows.

I like what they used to do maybe 3 years ago - if your video contains a copyrighted song, they wouldn't block or otherwise remove it... instead they would just place an ad next to the video so the copyright holder can earn money. THAT I'm totally OK with, NOT going "You used a copyrighted song so we're blocking this worldwide"