The future is here today: you can't play Bach on Youtube because Sony says they own his compositions

James Rhodes, a pianist, performed a Bach composition for his Youtube channel, but it didn't stay up -- Youtube's Content ID system pulled it down and accused him of copyright infringement because Sony Music Global had claimed that they owned 47 seconds' worth of his personal performance of a song whose composer has been dead for 300 years.

This is a glimpse of the near future. In one week, the European Parliament will vote on a proposal to force all online services to implement Content ID-style censorship, but not just for videos -- for audio, text, stills, code, everything.

Just last week, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser posted his research on automated censorship of classical music, in which he found that it was nearly impossible to post anything by composers like Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner, because companies large and small have fraudulently laid claim to their whole catalogs.

Europeans have one week to contact their MEPs to head off this catastrophe.

Stop what you're doing and contact two friends in the EU right now and send them to Save Your Internet -- before it's too late.

_the_yellow_peril_ on September 6th, 2018 at 16:43 UTC »

There needs to be financial penalties for false copyright claims.

naerbnic on September 6th, 2018 at 16:23 UTC »

This already happened to a group I've worked with. We did a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore, whose score is (and was) in the public domain, and we got a copyright hit from Time Warner, even though it was our own recording of the music. It pissed me off to no end, but I didn't want to risk taking a copyright hit.

Gingerchaun on September 6th, 2018 at 14:31 UTC »