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posted by mrpg on Wednesday September 05 2018, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the sol-sol-la-sol-do-si dept.

Over in the EU Parliament, they're getting ready to vote yet again on the absolutely terrible Copyright Directive, which has serious problems for the future of the internet, including Article 13's mandatory censorship filters and Article 11's link tax. Regrading the mandatory filters, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser, has written about a a very disturbing experiment he ran on YouTube, in which he kept having public domain music he had uploaded for his students get taken down by ContentID copyright claims.

[...] I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.

I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: “Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed.” Once again, this was a mistaken notification. The recording was one by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Lorin Maazel, which was released in 1961 and is therefore in the public domain. Seeking help, I emailed YouTube, but their reply, “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” was less than reassuring.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:15PM (#730872) Journal

    If it is reasonable to have a $150,000 statutory penalty (in the US) per instance of copyright infringement, then it is fair to have an equal penalty for each defective DMCA notice.

    By defective I mean things like:
    * filer is not the copyright owner or registered agent
    * the work is in the public domain
    * the claimed infringement is clearly fair use under the fair use factors
    * the DMCA claim doesn't even state a copyright infringement, it merely is trying to silence something the filter doesn't like

    This would force DMCA filers to give each DMCA filing at least the "sniff" test.

    Oh, they would say, but this doesn't work at scale!

    All I can say is: HA HA HA HA HA HA !!

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:03PM (#730927)

    Ya, it shouldnt work at scale for the exact reasons goven by the article. Maybe we just need to re-imagine our economy.