If you know me at all, you probably know that back in high school, I co-founded and taught Video Productions, an award-winning filmmaking program. To this day, I still help out, and still work on the site and keep the YouTube page relatively up to date.

Not too long ago, Video Productions got its first copyright claim, this one coming from UMG. However, instead of the video being taken offline, given a cease and desist, or being sued, we received the following:

Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page. 

Advertising? This is very interesting, because this basically means that UMG can now insert ads onto our page and take any revenue that this video would have earned. While this is probably better than a bunch of minors being sued, I wonder to what extent this could be taken.

For instance, if I were to create a long, very popular film that used only 15 seconds of copyrighted music, could the label still take control of all revenue and traffic? Could they effectively be given distribution rights over any piece of content that uses their property, even if the violation is minor in comparison to the work as a whole?

Obviously in this situation, the filmmaker would be best to get an original score or purchase licensing rights to the song used.

But I still find the concept of the media companies hijacking content and injecting ads into it rather fascinating. It’s almost an argument against doing any in-house new media marketing. Just wait for some kid to upload your song/movie/show and then go claim it.

The irony is that the video in question is a fake commercial for Pepsi. Perhaps we can get them as a sponsor and license the song from UMG. That’ll be the day…