I haven’t written a whole lot on copyright issues lately; I’ve said most of what I needed to say in A Broken Contract with the Public and my series on my gaming site. It’s all nuts. From the DMCA’s privileging of spurious copyright claims to the retroactive extension of already-existing copyright terms without regard to what this means to people who licensed these works for a specific term, much of modern copyright law seems specifically designed to punish the individual artist and audience member and make it easier for faceless media conglomerates to crush both without consequence.

And these really are conglomerates. Rick Beato recently put out a heartfelt video on his YouTube channel about how Universal Music Group is blatantly abusing Digital Media Copyright Act copyright strikes in an effort to shut his video series down.

They’re literally flagging videos in which he interviews an artist and the artist sings or plays their own music as a copyright violation.

We’re using a small segment from an interview with him [Adam Duritz, Counting Crows] on a song he sang on!

…

I’ve hired a lawyer full time because it’s a full-time job. I’ve had probably four thousand claims over the last nine years from things that are fair use where I’m discussing songs. I’m doing interviews with people where I’m playing the music that they either wrote and recorded or they produced.

…

Since we’ve been fighting these things and never lost one they still keep coming in.

…

It’s ridiculous.

The Universal drone certainly spent a long time reviewing each of those disputes, didn’t they?

I’ve had something similar happen on a much lesser scale. For me it was merely incredibly annoying. When I posted a short video about the wonderful Rumford sliding cookbooks I used, as its soundtrack, Louis Jordan and His Hot Five’s 1926 recording of Big Butter and Egg Man. It was something a home cook might have been listening to if they were listening to music while using the earlier of the pamphlets.

Any work created in 1926 had already returned to the public domain three years before I posted that video.

But that didn’t stop Sony Music Entertainment from claiming it was a copyright violation. In August of last year, they filed a claim with YouTube against the video, which demonetized the video; that’s not something I care about, as I have never made a cent on any of my videos but it was also “blocked in 1 territory.”

I was forced to spend time dealing with the issue because you never know what’s going to happen if you just let these things accumulate.

I submitted a dispute pointing out that the work had been in the public domain for years; Sony never bother to even respond. They simply let the clock run out, leaving the video blocked for the thirty days Google gave them to review the dispute.

They really are faceless, too. In December they filed another claim, this time as The Orchard Music, a Sony subsidiary. This time they didn’t quite run out the clock. The claim was resubmitted on December 4, I disputed it the same day:

This is a serial false claim. The Louis Armstrong track in question is the same 1926 recording that it was in August 2024. As a work that is more than 95 years old, it has returned to the public domain. Specifically, this is a 1926 recording by Louis Armstrong And His Hot Five.

The fact that both Rick Beatos recommended Aydin Esen is strong evidence they’re the same person. But you never know. Esen really is that good.

They released the claim 22 days later.

For someone like Rick Beato, who actually has a serious following and makes real if small amounts of money via his channel, this has to be far more than merely frustrating.

I potentially have a slight connection with Rick Beato. After a bad car accident back in 1986 I decided to become more serious about learning guitar; I pulled a name tab off of an ad at an Ithaca guitar store bulletin board and took lessons from a Rick Beato, in 1987 or 1988. I never throw out data once it’s on a computer, so I still have a Rick Beato in my contacts file, imported from a TRS-80 to a Windows PC to a Mac to a Blackberry and back to a Mac.¹

Once I left Ithaca for Musicians Institute, I pretty much lost track of him; I didn’t even know he was on YouTube until a commenter on a forum I follow mentioned one of his videos. My first thought was, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

I wasn’t even really sure I was remembering the name right until I started writing this post and decided I ought to go through my old notes and contact files to verify.

Somewhere around here I still have a transcription he did of the chord progression on one of the lighter Dire Straits songs. Possibly Angel of Mercy. That was probably not using my connection at its most optimal.² But at the time I liked the song. And it was definitely above my ability to transcribe its chords.

Big Butter and Egg Man was the hip new music when Rumford released the first of their sliding cookbooks!

I remember him being very surprised that I was accepted to Musicians Institute. While he quickly hid that surprise and helped me prepare, it was justified. I expect that MI either had a dearth of applicants that year or that I somehow accidentally triggered a “we’ll let this guy in” flag. Because I was definitely not prepared for the experience. With little upstate Ithaca being over twenty times larger than the only other place I’d lived at that point in my life, I wasn’t even prepared for Los Angeles.

That year at MI was the most fun I’ve ever had over my head.

Mind you, if I hadn’t encountered MI instructor Chas Grasamke and obsessed about fingerstyle and folk my entire year, I probably could have squeaked by.

It was a long time ago and we’re both a lot older, so I can’t be sure it’s the same person. For one thing, while Beato definitely appears to have been in Ithaca, the timeline for when is annoyingly off, just slightly, but enough to be confusing, from my own recollections of when I took lessons from a guy with that name. But the guy I knew then was a great guy; the Rick Beato of today is definitely interesting. If you’re interested in music, the history of music, and the current state of the industry and of listenership, his channel is worth a subscription.

He shouldn’t have to deal with this insane abuse of a law that was a bad law to begin with. No one should. The DMCA was bad law when it was passed, and it’s worse law now. It is destroying our ability to pass on important parts of our cultural heritages, from music to books to essays to movies. It incentivizes bad behavior and disincentivizes cultural literacy. It should be repealed with prejudice.