Hey everyone! How are you today?

Yesterday i tried to upload a video to YouTube, i never do this usually, i only use YouTube to watch videos. I am aware that WMG aka Warner, are the WORST people for having clips removed which contain music, but until yesterday i didnt realise the extent of the problem.

It seems that YouTube have an algorithm which can go through the start of a video/music and detect if it is in the Warner database, and immediately removes the sound from the video. The video remains, with no sound, and you have the option to choose some free music, leave it as it is or upload a new video.

Now, my video was just a funny, valentines video. It has 4 or 5 clips of songs, which lasted around 25 seconds each. It was hardly distributing their music for profit. The purpose for the video was for 1 day, for fun.

Companies like WMG are killing the music industry. They will have you believe that its the pirates which are doing this, when in fact it is their own ignorance towards new technology, media and how we are all now interacting. I completely agree that people who go to car boot sales and sell copies of music/DVD is wrong, very wrong. It does harm the people making the music/film, and should be stopped.

HOWEVER, using music in a funny YouTube video is completely different. Now, people will say “its still copyright infringement” blah blah blah. But these copyright laws were written a long time ago, for a different era. There is no way to really enforce them, you cannot stop every person in the world uploading a vid to YouTube which contains copyright material. I have seen so many clips taken down, for example clips of people using Singstar. If you dont know, Singstar is a karaoke game and you can record yourself singing songs.

The music industry, in particular WMG needs to wake up! Its not the 80s anymore, we arent recording off the radio (which people did and you could never stop them). If someone is using a clip of music in a video it is promoting their music, but more importantly it is not being used for profit. There needs to be a “fair use” style of copyright law brought into force, if you are using music under certain circumstances it should be allowed.

I am going to keep an eye on the WMG situation and see what happens