Google asserts song writer owns no right to his own songs.

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:39:30 GMT

Fellow Clan Analogue member APELL posted a message this morning to the clan-l mailing list. It seems that Google's subsidiary You Tube has decided that a video of an APELL performance, playing his own music, filmed by another Clan Analogue member is actually owned by Viacom! Of course this idiotic mistake is actually compounded by an equally idiotically byzantine procedure to get the video restored:

Due to Google buying YouTube for 2 billion $$$ with the plan to use it to further its massive advertising revenue through the site, it is now attempting to clean up the copyright infringements throughout the site and has recently struck a deal with Viacom who control a large of film and TV content to remove all Viacom content from the site. Unfortunately they have mistakenly removed my clip with the Viacom purge...

Here's what the clip actually is:

http://www.apellmusic.com/mm/apell_fringe2005_kazum_slap.wmv

Which is me playing bass with my own original music filmed by Jeremy from Windup Toys.

I had a look to see how I could get my clip viewable again and I have to go through the legal process of filing a counter notice to their Californian office

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=59826

I faxing them on Monday when I get to work - wish me luck!

This is the problem with the whole corporate copyright regime nowadays. Even when there is a genuine mistake (as opposed to say the totally malicious behaviour of the RIAA and MPAA) which should be easily rectified, for the individual artist, it's a huge burden for the small independent to deal with such bureaucratic systems.

Xray Dubs - google tag

Google asserts song writer owns no right to his own songs.