Once again, can we use your likeness on our channel though?
- You may - Excellent, thank you
He said he's likeable!
What's up Insiders, in today's video we're going to answer your questions
around content ID copyright claims for remixes, humming, covers, all sorts of things
- So hello, I'm Barbara - And I'm David
- Our content ID expert - There you go
I lead the product team for content ID and I'll see if I can help
with some of these questions.
Thank you so much for coming back, David and I filmed a fair use video
If you haven't checked it out we're going to link to it down below
I highly recommend checking out that video, I learned a ton, and then
we're going to start off this video and I'm just going to ask a question
that I think is going to boggle a lot of people's minds
With the information he's going to share here.
So, help me understand the music industry. We're going to get a little more specific.
I would not expect that if I were to start humming a song right now, that this video
would get a copyright claim, but it can, simply because I'm humming a melody.
Yes, depends what melody you hum. So for every song you listen to, there are
essentially two sets of copyrights, so one set of copyrights belongs to
the songwriter, so that's for the words and the melody of the song, and another set
is for the recording artist. This is the actual performance of the song
and the recording of that song. So when you are humming a melody
you're humming a melody that the songwriter wrote, and so that would be their copyright
and so we call that a composition, so you're humming that composition.
And when you say a composition is that the melody and the lyrics themselves or only one?
It would be both. So it could be the melody or it could be the lyrics or it could be both
- Okay. - So if you were to put the lyrics on
the screen right here that could be claimed by the publisher. The publisher is
the entity that generally owns the composition rights. And so if you were
to put the words on the screen, that could be claimed. If you were to hum
the melody, that could be claimed. If you were to just say the words of
the song, that could be claimed. We talked about fair use in the last video
so there are special cases where if you are talking about it in a context that
is covered by the factors of fair use then it might be considered fair use.
But it is still a use of that copyright that belongs to the publisher
who's representing the songwriters.
So that covers one type, and then talk about the other type just once more.
Sure. So the other part is more what you would think
traditionally about a copyright in a song, so you're listening to music and
you recognize obviously that's Beyoncé. That's the master recording, or just master.
That copyright covers the recording itself and so if you were to use bits and pieces
of a master recording and maybe make a remix or something like that,
if you're using the master recording, one thing we see quite often
is people doing a drum cover on top of the master,
or singing over the master.
So playing that song in the background, but you're playing over the top of it
You're playing the instrument but you have the actual recording playing.
In that case the claim you would see, usually, would be for the master recording
because the master recording, on the rights side behind the scenes of
the system, always carries with it the rights of the songwriters.
- For the composition? - Correct. There you go.
So already in what you were saying you broke down the core part that I wanted
to make sure that we got across, is that there's two types of claims.
One is for the composition, it's for the melody, it's for the lyrics themselves
and one is for the actual performance of it. And so that's why, for all these use cases
you can get claims for these things. Do we differentiate those in the UI anywhere?
- Or on the copyright page? - We try to because people get very confused.
So sometimes we see disputes like, "hey I played all the instruments in the song
I didn't use any of the original recording" and so we try to be very clear in the claim
interface when you are getting a composition claim, or a claim
that represents the songwriters and the publishers behind them.
We do our best to make that clear, I think that there's always room to improve
that because people do get confused, it's a little jargony frankly, and not
everyone understands what a composition is, or a publisher.
I had no clue, I thought it was only if I take a song that I could have heard on
the radio, and if I put that in the background, I thought that was
the only thing that could get claimed. So I wanted to go through a list of other things
that you have been asking in the comments of our videos, and for you to break down
- "Yes, can be claimed" - Question time
Kind of rapid fire questions even though we've talked about some of these
so acapella, where it's either you or a group of people and there's no actual music
in the background.
Yes, if you're singing a copyrighted melody, keep in mind that not
every melody is copyrighted, some of them are in the public domain, but yes.
- Humming? - Same.
- If I'm reading lyrics aloud? - Yup.
- If I'm not reading them and not playing any audio but I'm just putting lyrics
on the screen.
- Yup, potentially. - OK, you did talk about covers.
Now the last two are more complex. So parodies. So there's two forms.
One is where you could be making more commentary about the original song, more in
the satire bucket, or one would be more derivative works, so can we say "the Weird Al
version" of parodies? - So this is super confusing and it does
go back to the questions about fair use from the other video. If you're using the song and
changing lyrics in a way that is holding the original up to ridicule or providing
a commentary on the original, then you might have an argument for fair use, there
are some pretty famous cases that have gone that way in courts, but if
you're just taking the melody and say "Hey, it would be funny to change the words
because I can use these different words, and they rhyme", or whatever,
that would be a tougher argument for fair use. Now, like we said before, fair use
is always complicated. But generally speaking, if you're just
using the melody in a way that's like, "hey, you know it would be funny is if I
made a song about how much traffic there is on the freeway in the morning and
I set it to a popular song", because people will recognize that popular song and that
will make our song more exciting for people, we are using the rights and we are using some
of the value that was created by that original creator of the song, and so that's
why it works this way. - OK, so parodies, lots to unpack there
but there's potential that parodies can be claimed. And then remixes?
- Same kind of thing. So remember we talked about how the recording
is the master, so if you're taking that master recording and chopping it up
and layering in other things, you're still implicating the rights
of that master recording. It may get claimed, again you still have
the various arguments and things like that but the fact is that that copyright
is still in use. - OK, Thank you
that's it for rapid fire examples. So that covers the core of what I wanted
to get across to all of you, but I also want to do a bit of a promo
for some future work that you've been doing around covers.
So if you can claim what you're doing because it's related to this discussion
Yea, it's actually out now. So on YouTube, when you are performing a song, singing it
humming it, we have the ability in many cases if you're in the partner program
to share revenue between the publisher and the creator
who uploaded the video. So we call this cover rev share although
it's not necessarily strictly a cover, it could be different versions of it,
it could be using a melody in different ways, but what happens is the claim will be made
in some cases you may have a little checkbox that you have to tick and say
"yes, this is actually me performing it", and then we split the revenue between
the publisher and the creator. We wanted to find a fair way to keep
creators in the monetization picture and so this is a step in that direction.
So we'll also include a link to the help center about that down below, and that
is everything for us today, hopefully it was a short and sweet video.
Do you like coming on Creator Insider with us?
- I love coming on Creator Insider. - And so what should our audience do?
I think you're supposed to thumbs up, like, subscribe, come back for more exciting stuff
on future episodes.
Please drop your comments down below, do keep the questions coming.
Always a pleasure, thanks for having me because Happy Birthday...
- They're like "Happy Happy Birthday". - Yea, some version of that.