Putting up a YouTube video of your daughter’s clarinet recital

Warner-Google Contractual Staredown Vexing Some YouTubers

By Ashby Jones

Next time you think about putting up a YouTube video of your daughter’s clarinet recital, you might check to see who owns the rights to the songs.

Why? Because while YouTube — owned by Google — has reached licensing deals with a host of record companies, the company is currently locked in a contractual dispute with Warner Music. As a result, videos containing even homemade versions of Warner-owned songs are getting yanked from the video-sharing site. Click here for the NYT story.

Our favorite example from the Times story involves not the one featured in the lead — about a schoolgirl’s piano version of “Winter Wonderland” getting yanked from the site — but the one about the video of a man teaching sign language with the help of Foreigner’s 1980’s song “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” (Heaven help us if Foreigner songs prove to be the best medium for teaching sign language.)

Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks much of the removed material –especially those which contain homemade material, should fall under fair use, “because they are noncommercial and include original material produced by the user.”

Still, for now, it seems YouTube is taking a more cautious route. Chris Dale, a spokesman for YouTube, said, “While we work with music labels to keep music on the site, sometimes our negotiations don’t pan out, and we understand that this can be a big disappointment to our community.”

Dale said that YouTube offers users the chance to dispute a copyright claim. But few have.

Said von Lohmann: “People are somewhat intimidated by the possibility of being sued by one of the music companies, even if they have a free lawyer, like us.”

Source:
Warner-Google Contractual Staredown Vexing Some YouTubers - Law Blog - WSJ