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> The problem is that he is making money of the back of the recording of the musical work I don't follow. Can any reasonable person really suppose that a 30 mi

> The problem is that he is making money of the back of the recording of the musical work I don't follow. Can any reasonable person really suppose that a 30 minute travel video's ad revenue might be materially affected by the presence or absence of a random ten second snippet of a random song at some random part of the video, briefly audible in the background (at presumably low quality)? I'm no lawyer, but as stated the claim seems facially absurd.

nickjj 7y ago
> briefly audible in the background (at presumably low quality)? Yep it's both low quality and low volume. It's hard to apply exact numbers but let's say speaking volume is an 8 but the background music is at a 3 or 4. It's present and loud enough to make it out but it's not crystal clear. Quality wise it suffers because it's not a direct audio input into the video. It's being picked up by a small positional mic from ~50+ feet away.
dijksterhuis 7y ago
The degree of material gains from including a copyrighted musical work don’t matter. It’s a blanket thing. The copyrighted work has been included in content that is monetised. The guy is making money and the musical work has some part to play in that. Here’s a counter example. Imagine if I recorded Bono from U2 chatting about random stuff between playing live tracks at a concert. But I inadvertently caught the last 10/20 seconds of most songs. I make these recordings publicly available and monetise them. I was only doing it to catch Bono’s musings between tracks. But people can hear the copyrighted material as well. Under copyright law, I have made a copy of the musical works (mechanical right) and have made them available for consumption (performance right). Just because I only caught snippets doesn’t matter. It might affect the amount of money I need to pay rightsholders, but there is copyrighted material in those recordings. So the rightsholders should be remunerated. That’s it. That’s the whole fundamental point.
- fenomas 7y ago
  > The guy is making money and the musical work has some part to play in that I understand that a lawyer for the music owner could conceivably argue that claim, and that a court could conceivably agree with it. I'm sure everyone in the thread agrees on that. What I'm questioning is your presenting "he made money from the music" as a clear fact, and not something a court would decide - suggesting that the presence of audible music necessarily guarantees that theft has taken place, no matter how strong the arguments to the contrary. It's hard to believe the law on this famously contentious topic would be that simplistic.
  - dijksterhuis 7y ago
    He made money from his content. His content included a recording of a copyrighted work. Therefore he made money from that recording. It’s that simple. He could have: * scrubbed the audio * removed the section including the musical work * overlaid a royalty free musical work to replace the copyrighted one * asked the market vendor to turn the radio off * waited until the radio played a work that was not copyrighted * etc etc He’s chosen to include copyrighted material in his content by not doing any of that. Some of which would have been relatively simple to do. In court I would think it would be difficult to prove there was nothing he could have done to remove the offending audio. And he also falls foul of Fair Use (there’s another comment somewhere that digs into the definitions of educational content in this case) as this is not incidental usage. If he falls foul of Fair Use, then regular copyright laws come in to play, which takes the simplistic binary viewpoints: * Is there copyrighted music or not? * Is money being made from the use of music or not? Yes to both => remunerate rights holders.
    - nickjj 7y ago
      Some of those are pretty ridiculous expectations of any content creator. Scrub the audio? I don't think he's going to go in there and literally separate and remove the song's frequency from his voice which are interweaved together. Something like that takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and time and always comes out sounding bad because any time you remove shared frequencies it'll make your voice sound very choppy and robotic (I know because I've done things like this). His job would slowly become being an audio engineer instead of a traveler. Overlaid a royalty free musical work to replace the copyrighted one? Not possible, his voice and background audio is on the same track. To do that would essentially mean muting the entire track. This is the easiest option and often what he does. He just cuts it or mutes it, both of which makes his video content worse. Asked the market vendor to turn the radio off? He often does this in closed stores where he plans to spend a bit of time in, but it's unrealistic to expect anyone to do this in an open outdoor market with ~200 vendors spread around everywhere for 1,000 feet in every direction. You're asking to basically shut down the whole market and control every audio source while you walk around. Not happening for a regular person. Waited until the radio played a work that was not copyrighted? Not possible due to the above reason but this is also a little more unreasonable because there's no reasonable chance a regular person will be able to determine which songs are copyright and which are not, especially not in another country where they don't even know what song is playing. Also by the time he researches the song (assuming he somehow figured out how to even determine if it's copyright or not), chances are a different song would be playing and now he's stuck in a research loop for the rest of his life, or ends up in an another infinite loop waiting for a copyright free song.

nickjj 7y ago

> briefly audible in the background (at presumably low quality)? Yep it's both low quality and low volume. It's hard to apply exact numbers but let's say speaking volume is an 8 but the background music is at a 3 or 4. It's present and loud enough to make it out but it's not crystal clear. Quality wise it suffers because it's not a direct audio input into the video. It's being picked up by a small positional mic from ~50+ feet away.

dijksterhuis 7y ago

The degree of material gains from including a copyrighted musical work don’t matter. It’s a blanket thing. The copyrighted work has been included in content that is monetised. The guy is making money and the musical work has some part to play in that. Here’s a counter example. Imagine if I recorded Bono from U2 chatting about random stuff between playing live tracks at a concert. But I inadvertently caught the last 10/20 seconds of most songs. I make these recordings publicly available and monetise them. I was only doing it to catch Bono’s musings between tracks. But people can hear the copyrighted material as well. Under copyright law, I have made a copy of the musical works (mechanical right) and have made them available for consumption (performance right). Just because I only caught snippets doesn’t matter. It might affect the amount of money I need to pay rightsholders, but there is copyrighted material in those recordings. So the rightsholders should be remunerated. That’s it. That’s the whole fundamental point.

fenomas 7y ago
> The guy is making money and the musical work has some part to play in that I understand that a lawyer for the music owner could conceivably argue that claim, and that a court could conceivably agree with it. I'm sure everyone in the thread agrees on that. What I'm questioning is your presenting "he made money from the music" as a clear fact, and not something a court would decide - suggesting that the presence of audible music necessarily guarantees that theft has taken place, no matter how strong the arguments to the contrary. It's hard to believe the law on this famously contentious topic would be that simplistic.
- dijksterhuis 7y ago
  He made money from his content. His content included a recording of a copyrighted work. Therefore he made money from that recording. It’s that simple. He could have: * scrubbed the audio * removed the section including the musical work * overlaid a royalty free musical work to replace the copyrighted one * asked the market vendor to turn the radio off * waited until the radio played a work that was not copyrighted * etc etc He’s chosen to include copyrighted material in his content by not doing any of that. Some of which would have been relatively simple to do. In court I would think it would be difficult to prove there was nothing he could have done to remove the offending audio. And he also falls foul of Fair Use (there’s another comment somewhere that digs into the definitions of educational content in this case) as this is not incidental usage. If he falls foul of Fair Use, then regular copyright laws come in to play, which takes the simplistic binary viewpoints: * Is there copyrighted music or not? * Is money being made from the use of music or not? Yes to both => remunerate rights holders.
  - nickjj 7y ago
    Some of those are pretty ridiculous expectations of any content creator. Scrub the audio? I don't think he's going to go in there and literally separate and remove the song's frequency from his voice which are interweaved together. Something like that takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and time and always comes out sounding bad because any time you remove shared frequencies it'll make your voice sound very choppy and robotic (I know because I've done things like this). His job would slowly become being an audio engineer instead of a traveler. Overlaid a royalty free musical work to replace the copyrighted one? Not possible, his voice and background audio is on the same track. To do that would essentially mean muting the entire track. This is the easiest option and often what he does. He just cuts it or mutes it, both of which makes his video content worse. Asked the market vendor to turn the radio off? He often does this in closed stores where he plans to spend a bit of time in, but it's unrealistic to expect anyone to do this in an open outdoor market with ~200 vendors spread around everywhere for 1,000 feet in every direction. You're asking to basically shut down the whole market and control every audio source while you walk around. Not happening for a regular person. Waited until the radio played a work that was not copyrighted? Not possible due to the above reason but this is also a little more unreasonable because there's no reasonable chance a regular person will be able to determine which songs are copyright and which are not, especially not in another country where they don't even know what song is playing. Also by the time he researches the song (assuming he somehow figured out how to even determine if it's copyright or not), chances are a different song would be playing and now he's stuck in a research loop for the rest of his life, or ends up in an another infinite loop waiting for a copyright free song.