Music

A fraudulent ‘company’ that I am not even convinced exists called the Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society is claiming the monetization rights to all kinds of material on Youtube!

They don’t have a website. The only information on the web you can find on them is their facebook page where their tag line is

“You get the pleasure of posting videos
We get the pleasure of making money from your videos
It’s a win-win situation “

In all seriousness…WTF? Who are these people and how did they manage to get into a position where they could use Youtube to claim monetization on basically anyone’s videos?!

Thankfully, dealing with them is easy enough! You just need to know your rights. They have tried to claim copyright ownership of several of my videos, all of which I have disputed and none of the disputes have been contested by these people.

Up until today I thought they may have been semi-legitimate, if somewhat shady royalty collection business.
Perhaps a small group of lawyers working on behalf of larger record companies for a percentage of the royalties…

This evening I visited my youtube channel and saw that they had claimed the copyright of one of my own original songs!!
They identified my (completely original) song as infringing the copyright of a completely different song that I had never heard of, that I had to search google for, which turned out to be some kind of trance remix of a completely unrelated song…Wtf?

I immediately disputed the claim and received an email from Youtube saying:

“Dear tibetanpunk,
Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society has reviewed your dispute and released its copyright claim on your video, “Sonic Sunset No.2“.” (shameless plug)

I have filed complaints with Youtube and I encourage anyone else who has been targeted by these people to do the same.

Send an email to copyright@youtube.com explaining how these people are making fraudulent claims on your youtube content. Don’t let them get away with this!

If you check their facebook page, you will see that I am not alone. There are a lot of people who have had their own creations wrongly identified and had copyright claims made against them for the purposes of monetization.

Youtube does not even notify you that the claim has been made against you by them either, so you will need to check under ‘video manager’ in youtube to see whether or not there are any claims against your content.

Know your rights! If you have used copyrighted material in your videos and aren’t trying to monetize it it is more than likely fair use.

If it is videogame footage etc. it is fine, even if it contains copyrighted music. If it is a cover version of a song you like, it is fair use. If it is footage from a concert, it is fair use. If you have used a copyrighted song as the soundtrack to your video, only allow the real publisher, like SONY, EMI or whoever it really is to claim copyright and monetization rights.

We need to get Youtube/Google’s attention to this as these people are really insidious and parasitic. If we get enough attention directed towards these people, Youtube/Google will have to do something about it.