YouTube pulls audio from greatest music video ever
Keyboard Cat rocks out with Hall and Oates' band on YouTube.
(Credit: YouTube)This is really quite sad.
Citing copyright concerns, YouTube has deleted the audio from a hosted video that depicts the Internet meme "Keyboard Cat" showing up in a vintage TV after-school special and then embedded in the foreground of the '80s-era music video for the song "You Make My Dreams" by pop duo Daryl Hall and John Oates. It was an extremely awesome match, because the musical feline fit into the minimalist Hall & Oates video a little too well.
The audio appears to have been deleted on behalf of music label Warner Music Group. "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG," a message adjacent to the video read. "The audio has been disabled."
The Keyboard Cat-Hall & Oates video was getting popular, with over 375,000 views on YouTube in fewer than two months and press from blogs like the AOL-owned Urlesque, so it's not quite clear whether WMG was alerted to the video directly or if the sound was pulled because an audio fingerprinting technology trawled through it.
Earlier this year YouTube started giving people who uploaded videos with copyrighted content the option to silence the video rather than have it taken down. As my colleague Greg Sandoval noted at the time, while YouTube once had deals in place with all four major record labels, its deal with Warner fell through.
So there goes one of the greatest music videos to hit YouTube ever. (In my opinion, of course.)
"I hate you, Warner Music Group," one commenter on the muted YouTube video wrote. "This video is hilarious and promotes a song that would otherwise never reach the ears of young people. What is wrong with you? When did the music industry go so wrong?"
Other comments are along the lines of "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" and "A f***ing injustice to the world."
So, clearly, I am not the only one saddened by this takedown. It's a quintessential example of the music industry missing the point. The presence of a funny video that makes it look like a cat has joined Hall & Oates' band is not going to suddenly make hordes of people start pirating the duo's songs who otherwise would've paid for them. In fact, as commenters pointed out, some of the Internet-meme-savvy kids who were swapping links to the video probably had no idea who Daryl Hall and John Oates are. (Embarrassing confession: I bought "You Make My Dreams" on Amazon MP3 after the Keyboard Cat video got it stuck in my head.)
The Internet breaks plenty of new trends, but it can also make older bits of media rocket back into the spotlight. If the label with the rights to onetime pop star Rick Astley's catalog had freaked out over the ubiquity of "Never Gonna Give You Up" on YouTube, for example, Astley (whom I had never heard of before the "Rickrolling" phenomenon took off) would not have been lip-syncing on top of a float at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade last year.
I understand that traditional media rightfully has a lot of qualms about copyright alternatives and "remix culture," some aspects of which are fairly radical, and Hall & Oates have a history of tightly guarding their catalog. But every time there's another instance of copyright-induced silliness like pulling the audio from an innocuous Internet sensation, it just makes me shake my head and wonder when, if ever, they'll finally get it.
It's time for Keyboard Cat to play the record labels off.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline. 
Artist: Hey are we getting paid for that music video?
Record Label: Hang on let us check with legal... um... nope.
Artist: TAKE IT DOWN NOW!
U2 to this very day when they go to major cities like New York, or London they hit the record stores, and markets like Chinatown to see who they can bring action against for selling bootleg, counterfeit and black market items.
Most bands don't care about things getting on youtube. They view it as promotion.
Its the LAWYERS that pull this crap.
A common misconception with copyright is the presumptino that artists have a right to be paid. They don't. They have a right to market their work. Actually getting paid means their work has some value to the public and someone buys it.
Your U2 example is a good one. Someone else marketing U2's work gets in the way of U2 doing the job through authorized channels. That said, U2 still doesn't have a right to demand fair use stop. Such as parody of their work.
everyone needs to convert to Vimeo.
However, I would have thought this would have fallen under fair use by parody. If this had been shown as a short on the old Saturday Night television program there would have been no word from the suits at Warner Bros. Music.
Oh well, their loss. It will be uploaded again and again by others.
As the saying goes, once something is online, you cannot kill it.
If you watched it on YouTube, it turned into a weird surrealist piece.
Why? Because "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles was playing as the background song. WMG has the rights to that recording. But never mind that the danged thing is the OFFICIAL STATE SONG of the state of Georgia, we have to put WMG's rights first. Thus, silence.
Never mind that the Charles estate probably wouldn't have minded in this case, or that it's a sign-off for a non-commercial entity. Nope, the WMGBot's final word is law, no matter how awesome something is.
This is probably why the only WMG recordings I've ever bought are those of Natalie Merchant, who later ditched the label to go indie.
I've had innocent tracks taken out of my videos too. - How can i help if the wedding video had background music? this is crap.
Stringer journalists used to get paid to produce news for AP and other news hubs. Now, people are willing to go out and shoot video stories for the merest graphic bug that says "Look, my amateur video got used on CNN" -- and as a result, professionals who spent years in the trenches and have huge investments in professional equipment now can't feed their families.
You cannot have it both ways. You can't criticize large companies for sending American jobs overseas and at the same time demand that creative artists allow anyone and everyone to plagiarize their work for no compensation. We will all be the poorer for it if people can't own their own creations any more.
BTW, nowhere in the statute does it say the parody needs to be humorous or even any good at all.
The Copyright holder does have the right to ask YouTube to take down the video or mute the audio. And the Fair Use argument can only be used in specific cases. Good for you, subterraneancinema, that you were able to secure permission from the artists to use their works. Hopefully more artists will allow derivative works, parodies, or just people using their music as background to home-made videos.
The parody is the video not the audio. The audio is a copy of the original included into other content that is a parody. That's a violation of copyright law for the music if not the video content.
lol
tinyurl com/lfbvfc
http://tinyurl.com/lfbvfc
- by toolio2009 July 15, 2009 2:46 PM PDT
- What a bunch of idiots. Way to completely misunderstand the very medium you work in. If I'd ever bought anything from Warner Bros to begin with I'd be reconsidering it now.
- Reply to this comment
-
-
- by toolio2009 July 15, 2009 2:47 PM PDT
- er, Warner. heh.
-
-
Showing 1 of 2 pages (34 Comments)