You’ve seen my occasional grumbling about Warner going out of its way to pull down music videos in which it has some rights from YouTube. Well, it seems they’ve really stepped it up, now:
In early December, Juliet Weybret, a high school sophomore and aspiring rock star from Lodi, Calif., recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing “Winter Wonderland,†and she posted it on YouTube.
Weeks later, she received an e-mail message from YouTube: her video was being removed “as a result of a third-party notification by the Warner Music Group,†which owns the copyright to the Christmas carol.
[ . . . ]
In addition to Ms. Weybret’s video, family home videos that included a portion of a song playing in the background have been removed, as have any number of videos that use music in goofy ways, from montages to mash-ups.
When a man posted a video of himself using music to teach sign language, the audio was switched off because he lacked the proper copyright clearance to use Foreigner’s 1980s song “Waiting for a Girl Like You.â€
Yeah. Next time you’re tempted to buy a CD or download a track from iTunes/Amazon, check out the publisher/label, and decide if you want to reward this kind of behaviour.
unacoder
i use emusic almost exclusively. the smaller labels seem to get it.