Rick Beato is just one of dozens of popular music-related YouTube content creators being screwed by UMG (Universal Music Group). Reaction content, and actual interviews with the artists and/or producers are being targeted. And while several of my favorite channels are affected, Rick Beato is being reamed BIG TIME.
Yeah YouTube loves to mess with content creators!
Thier DMCA is a joke!
It’s is like Google want to destroy YouTube.
Youtubes algorithms automatically responses to the copyrights owner algorithms, that identified potentially violations and generated copyright notices. And both algorithms aren’t including appropriate metrics that check the actual contents context and such.
As a summary… here is just another fed up content creator that doesn’t like the fact that he has to delete his work / content that included the claim of a copyright owner.
This is nothing new, but in short terms. The content creator had copyright claims issued for some of his shorts. But instead of taking those shorts down to avoid to a strike… he makes content about that stupid situation. And now we finally get that lawyer creating content in the form of reacting to the other content creators troubles (and both of them generating content in the process).
For “small” channels this is definitely an issue. As they’ve got to lawyer up just to receive a actual human interaction in the process. Which is an costly incidence for the content creator as it’s essentially a huge business expense for them.
In other words: You’ll find lots of drama within this ecosystem. But in most of those cases, that’s related to those youtube channels which are build upon the platform and that rely on their revenues they’re generating on the platform.
But besides the buisness-driven youtube channels there are also a lot of channels that simply don’t rely on their ad revenue payouts. Channels that don’t even activate monetization or that don’t care to fit into the monetization model and are driven by other motivations. Those channels which wouldn’t usually show up in your youtube feed.
Anyway, in the end I wouldn’t really say that the music industry is to blame. As I assume that they’re hiring the services of a third party to enforce their copyrights. And based on the sheer volume of daily uploads … it’s might be a tough pill for a “honest” content creator if they flag his work.
In the end, one copyright claim is related to a teaser / short of a full feature video. The issue could be resolved easily by removing that short.
Rick Beato is far from bitching about this situation for no reason. The videos/shorts that have been affected often include the band or artist themselves discussing tracks and/or albums. This is not the YouTube algorithm. It’s a team of people (in this case from UMG) surfing YouTube for ANY snippet of ANY song and claiming copyright.
And besides, there is the Fair Use Doctrine, to which his, and many others seemingly fall under.
Yeah and the algorithm is poorly made/ruched(because goggle didn’t want to get sude.. Again).
And it ignore fair use and live YouTubers without a easy fast way to fix some even get totally screwed because some one abuses the DMCA System.
I strongly doubt that this is a product of manual labor. As the amount of daily added new content on the platform is essentially enormous.
In short : Every day 2.6 million videos are added to youtube, which equates to 518,400 hours of playback.
Content ID is in fact an service that youtube provides to their corporate customers to identify potential copyright infringements. The tools they’re providing are listed here.
In short, if UMG simply escalates every match that Content ID has identified to a copyright strike, without reviewing each potential case individually, they essentially redirect the responsibility to investigate and to clarify the matter back to youtube as the platforms owner. This might be a malpractice from their side… but a pragmatic one which I totally can relate to as youtube as a distribution channel and platform should enforce these policies. And not the copyright owner.
That is dumb, indeed. And is definitely unfortunate for the single content creator whose work received a copyright strike notice / demonetization of the video in question and such.
I’m pretty certain that these cases are a result of automated processes that are reliable to take down blatant infringements relatively easily - but there are definitely limits to which degree youtube can process and analyze each individual upload to check if the upload contains copyrighted material and if so, in which context it is being used. The effort classify reliably if it’s fair use or not, is simply not an easy task. At least in terms of the sheer volume of uploads on a daily basis.
From my point of view: Youtube tries to off-load the content-reviewing process to the actual copyright owner and provides them the required tools. But that is obviously not satisfactory for some companies such as UMG as the traditional music business didn’t had to actively monitor all the given media distribution channels.
Thus, I assume it’s easy to blame UMG. But from my point of view: Youtube does a pretty poor job in handling these cases properly.
Fair point. The problem is, if you’re at all familiar with Rick Beato or Professor Of Rock, they have each been targeted. Not metaphorically targeted, but straight-up targeted by UMG. The point is, and should be quite obvious to YouTube and UMG, is FAIR USE. These two channels in particular fall on the side of interviews and short weekly docuseries. Nothing they do infringes on any copyright. In fact, they’re probably garnering INTEREST in a song or album in which the viewer may very well purchase.
But in comparison to youtubes business model as a digital music streaming service which distributes UMGs back catalogue via youtube music, youtube is most likely trying to protect that long-term business model. And won’t stand up for their individual content creators.
Here’s the latest from Rick Beato.
