Music copyright is incredibly messed up, even compared to the rest of copyright. I was doing research for a project I'm working on, and it's nearly impossible t

Music copyright is incredibly messed up, even compared to the rest of copyright. I was doing research for a project I'm working on, and it's nearly impossible to determine if any 20th century recording is in the public domain unless the author explicitly declared it as such. YouTube (and by extension Google) are actively making this worse with automated ContentID. There are many documented cases of author-released public-domain or creative commons work being claimed by other people [1]. Create a false entry in the ContentID database and issue takedown notices to the original creator and anyone else who used the music. Even if you get caught you can drop the claim and still walk away with the money you made off of their videos. [1] See http://incompetech.com/wordpress/category/copyright/ http://incompetech.com/wordpress/category/copyright/ for several examples