<story><title>They&apos;re deleting my channel, but they don&apos;t know why? [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAEdFRoOYs0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dperfect</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not a lawyer, and I definitely think the whole copyright system needs reform, but I believe there could be legitimate issues with the legality of publicly posting guitar covers as this person is doing on their channel.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not very familiar with the channel, but from the little I&amp;#x27;ve seen, I believe the educational nature (and thereby fair use defense) could be debatable. Even if some of his videos are clearly educational, it seems that some videos are just covers of popular songs. And even if he&amp;#x27;s not using published sheet music to play the songs, he may still be required to have mechanical licenses, and possibly also sync licenses.&lt;p&gt;Most published music has three licenses that could be relevant here: the mechanical license (covering the combination of notes, rhythms, and&amp;#x2F;or lyrics that make the song distinct and &amp;quot;recognizable&amp;quot;), the sync license (using the song along with images&amp;#x2F;video), and a master license (covering a specific recording of the song). From my limited experience (and confirmed here [1]), it appears that many of these videos probably require at least a mechanical license to be performed publicly on the channel.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I absolutely agree with the sentiment that YouTube&amp;#x27;s handling of these issues is extremely problematic. They really need to start treating content creators with more respect and assume innocence until proven otherwise. There also needs to be more transparency into the process (and claims) so creators aren&amp;#x27;t left in the dark, along with improved ways to respond to erroneous claims.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.legalzoom.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;posting-cover-songs-on-youtube-what-you-need-to-know&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.legalzoom.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;posting-cover-songs-on-yo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grawprog</author><text>Our current copyright laws do nothing hut stagnate human creativity. As much as people like to believe they&amp;#x27;re creative geniuses, most creations tend to be based on previous creations.&lt;p&gt;Just look at the majority of popular music between 1955-1980 or later. Just about all rock music is either heavily inspired by or directly ripped off of blues. If copyright laws had been what they were today entire genres of music wouldn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;Same goes for Hollywood, tons of movies are just wholesale ripoffs of older ones or &amp;#x27;heavily inspired by them&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;And i&amp;#x27;m sure people on HN are likely familiar with such things as the 7 main literary archetypes and whatnot that apply to most human story telling in general.&lt;p&gt;The best kind of human creativity comes from building on what came before. Sure, we need a system to ensure creators are paid and have control of their creations, but our current system goes so far overboard it limits overall human creativity.&lt;p&gt;Profit should not come over the benefit of society and humanity, especially when there&amp;#x27;s room for both. I doubt anyone was really losing any significant amount of money by this channel existing, but somebody was gaining through its existence.</text></comment>
<story><title>They&apos;re deleting my channel, but they don&apos;t know why? [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAEdFRoOYs0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dperfect</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not a lawyer, and I definitely think the whole copyright system needs reform, but I believe there could be legitimate issues with the legality of publicly posting guitar covers as this person is doing on their channel.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not very familiar with the channel, but from the little I&amp;#x27;ve seen, I believe the educational nature (and thereby fair use defense) could be debatable. Even if some of his videos are clearly educational, it seems that some videos are just covers of popular songs. And even if he&amp;#x27;s not using published sheet music to play the songs, he may still be required to have mechanical licenses, and possibly also sync licenses.&lt;p&gt;Most published music has three licenses that could be relevant here: the mechanical license (covering the combination of notes, rhythms, and&amp;#x2F;or lyrics that make the song distinct and &amp;quot;recognizable&amp;quot;), the sync license (using the song along with images&amp;#x2F;video), and a master license (covering a specific recording of the song). From my limited experience (and confirmed here [1]), it appears that many of these videos probably require at least a mechanical license to be performed publicly on the channel.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I absolutely agree with the sentiment that YouTube&amp;#x27;s handling of these issues is extremely problematic. They really need to start treating content creators with more respect and assume innocence until proven otherwise. There also needs to be more transparency into the process (and claims) so creators aren&amp;#x27;t left in the dark, along with improved ways to respond to erroneous claims.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.legalzoom.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;posting-cover-songs-on-youtube-what-you-need-to-know&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.legalzoom.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;posting-cover-songs-on-yo...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gfody</author><text>according to Tom Scott&amp;#x27;s very informative summary of all things youtube and copyright [1] there are seemingly reasonable alternatives to suddenly shutting down a whole channel - it seems like we&amp;#x27;re not getting the whole story as to why those were rejected or aren&amp;#x27;t being considered in this case?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>