Chris Betcher

Here's the follow-up from my last post about the copyright claim that YouTube made on a video I made using a Creative Commons soundtrack. You can read the previous post for the start of the story if you're interested. Since then, I've had conversations with several people about the issue. One was Jeff Price, the CEO of Audiam . Audiam was listed by YouTube as the entity responsible for policing the claim. Audiam is a service that musicians can use to track the use of their music in YouTube, although I think they also monitor Spotify and a few other streaming services as well. Basically, when a musician signs up to use Audiam's services they upload a sample of their music which gets passed on to YouTube and fingerprinted. Fingerprinting is a process whereby the track can be compared against existing tracks to see if it matches, thereby identifying the copyright status of the music. If a match is made, YouTube flags it as a copyright violation and that was the problem I ...

A few weeks ago I got home from a short holiday in Bali. We had a great time, and managed to collect a few snippets of video along the way using a GoPro camera. A few days after I got home I managed to stitch a few clips together into a little video summary of the holiday using my own footage and some Creative Commons music that I sourced from Jamendo, one of of my favourite sources for CC-licensed music. I used a happy little track called " 8_Happiness AC2 " by an artist called " Music for your Media ". The track was licensed under a CC BY-ND-NC licence - meaning that if I attribute the artist (I did), don't modify the music (I didn't), and not make money from its use (I'm not), I was welcome to use it. That's the nice thing about Creative Commons licensing; the terms and conditions of use are clear, explicit and fairly unambiguous. Or so I thought. After I edited the video - all 2 minutes and 52 seconds of it - it was published to YouTube. The ne...