I have run afoul of copyright law recently. The first infraction was when a friend couldn’t view the video from a newscast of my parent’s house burning down on their phone. So I just quickly downloaded the 4 minute video, uploaded to youtube as a unlisted video and shared it without thinking. I’d blame the stress of the situation but I knew it was probably shady content sharing.   So my account has been flagged and because that video was video 3 times (probably twice by me before sending the link) and was unlisted I have caused some damage to that news channel selling ads while people tuned in to see our house burn down.

I wonder if the house burning down could be declared a copyrightable performance piece….

I tried to clean it up when I saw that notification and the video had only been viewed a few times but then /all/ of my unlisted videos were switched over to /public/. So that’s not cool. I was trying to keep things out of the lime light, like home videos I wanted to share with a wider audience.

So then, I also posted a video of the family just sitting around the kitchen and strumming out any old song that we thought we could trudge through. Turns out THAT cause some copyright flags.

The first one is for a song called “Marry Me”  – I had to check our video to see if anyone was playing that, perhaps on their phones near the camera, or maybe even if everyone else tried to cover that when I left the room.

If we were playing it I could /almost/ understand if that was a problem for auto-content scanners – you know /IF/ we were that close to the real performance but I don’t know that frigging song [hypothetical to real situation coming up].

So I disputed it through the form and stated: “We weren’t playing that song, and we were all performing to /no/ audience so this claim probably isn’t all that valid”. But as the picture below shows at least one rights holder rejected my dispute! Fantastic.

Here is the video at 5:20, we’re not playing Marry Me

So the next challenge is at least the song we were trying to play

“Hotel California (Eagles Tribute Mix)”, musical composition administered by:”

But I can’t even… I … We can’t /play/ a song by someone else, even poorly, to no audience, on an unlisted link on an account that does not generate ad revenue ?

It might have lasted longer than I thought it would but Youtube is done.

Here is us playing through it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETE4kXTe-10