There is nothing we could do…
Have you heard of stories of musicians’ original content on YouTube being unreasonably copyright claimed and there is nothing that they can do about it? Well…it happened to us for the first time!
This unfair and unbelievable experience has led us to understanding how risky it is to connect to you from a third-party hosted location. You just never know when you might be shut down or lose your channel. So here is what happened…
Back in May last year, Scott arranged Satie’s Gymnopedio No. 3 for 4 hands (duet) based on Debussy’s orchestral version of the piece (both in the public domain). We recorded it and uploaded it to YouTube. A few months after, out of nowhere, we got a copyright claim on it. Normally, if we get a copyright claim and if we do have the rights to the material, we can dispute it listing the reasons and our rights. So we did the same this time explaining this work was our own arrangement and performance, and the work being in the public domain. (For those of you wondering about public domain copyright, you own the right to your original arrangement of public domain material.)
What was different this time was that the person, or it may have been a company, rejected our dispute and still claimed that they have the copyright to this video content. So we contacted YouTube customer service and explained the situation, and they gave us two options:
We can do nothing and just give up the copyright (and all of our YouTube revenue will go towards the other party)
We can dispute it again, but if the other party rejects it again, then we will get a strike on our account. With 3 strikes our channel will be shut down.
We could not believe this! Absolutely unbelievable! We didn’t want to risk having a strike on our account, so we gave it up. But this experience really made us realize how unreliable it is to stay connected on a third-partyhosted location!
We have all heard of the algorithm - something that controls what you see on social media. Of course the algorithm is in favour of the platform that you are using, so whatever content makes you stay on the platform will be in favour. We have noticed that our Facebook posts reach A LOT fewer people if a link is mentioned. Our posts often don’t make it to people’s newsfeed.
If you would like to stay connected with us, please sign up to our mailing list! We have realized this is the only way that we can be sure our content can reach you! (Of course please whitelist us! Add us to your address book so that our emails make it to your inbox!)
We are not here to bad mouth these social medias. We just want to explain what happened to us, and actually, to many of us. We will be prioritizing activities on our website from now on, so we ask you to join our mailing list to be the first ones in the know of our updates! :)
