Fraudulent Copyright Claims on Youtube

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audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

I know there is a lot of hostility here regarding what I do, meaning republish Librivox audios on youtube. But I do it honestly and I mean no harm or disrespect. I also don't make much money from the channel, certainly not compared to the time, effort, and money that I put into it. Other people however, follow a different approach. I regularly have to deal with copyright claims against the videos I publish, and recently, these claims have escalated to the point of threatening to destroy my channel entirely, with all 750 videos, that I put countless hours into editing, designing covers, organizing captions and etc.

There is a company called "Dance all Day" that claims content on behalf of another company called "Audioliterature". They are not interested in taking down content, they just want to hijack the monetization. I never accept their claims, always dispute them, and they always back down. Until yesterday. I now have nine claims, with three active takedown notices on my channel, which means I will receive three copyright strikes, because they insist that they own the audio track for several chapters of Andy Minter's reading of The Regent by Arnold Bennet. I was publishing this and other recordings in honor of him due to his recent death, and I didn't even publish the video yet, it was caught by Youtube's automated content ID system. I checked it out, and they have relabeled and are pushing his recording as "The Regent - Stanley Green". Note that whoever is behind this company, "Dance all Day"/"Audioliterature", does this often, with many Librivox titles.

Now I don't know what to do, and maybe most people here don't care about my channel getting taken down (even though everything I do is above board), but then you should care twice as much that some outfit is fraudulently exploiting the work of volunteers.
TriciaG
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Post by TriciaG »

I sympathize.

About all we can say is that LibriVox recordings are in the public domain - as is even stated in every single audio file (one reason we do that!)

However, we as LV don't have resources to fight such things very much. I think we have a pro bono lawyer for cases against us that are obviously without merit, but we don't usually fight gray-area cases, and we don't have anyone who can assist you as a third party, unfortunately.

I'm no lawyer, but submitting the original recordings with the LV disclaimer - shouldn't that prove your case?
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audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

Oh, I don't really expect help, I'm mostly venting and letting people know about this abuse. People got on my back because I didn't actively credit narrators a while ago (I do now), these guys are actively faking the narrator and claiming copyrights. I have provided the original recordings with the LV disclaimer, but Youtube says they "don't mediate disputes". Sometimes there are mistakes made, especially in the automated system, and that is fine, but a real person representing these people actively reviewed the appeals several times, with the evidence included, and went ahead with the claim, proving they are engaged in malicious fraud. Youtube apparently doesn't care. I can back down and let them monetize the video, it would cost me something like $0.10 in lost revenue (yea, I make that little money from most videos), but their abuse has pissed me off.
Peter Why
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Post by Peter Why »

If they're putting the re-assigned recordings on youtube, would it be worth simply attaching comments pointing to the free LibriVox recordings and naming the correct reader? I don't think comments can be deleted by anyone other than the original poster or the youtube admins.

Peter
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audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

Peter Why wrote:If they're putting the re-assigned recordings on youtube, would it be worth simply attaching comments pointing to the free LibriVox recordings and naming the correct reader? I don't think comments can be deleted by anyone other than the original poster or the youtube admins.

Peter
They are apparently selling the re-assigned recordings elsewhere, not actually posting them on youtube. Their activities on youtube seem restricted to claiming the original recordings through the back end. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Jj3s4-XSM , you can hear that it's Andy Minter's recording, they have links but at least the amazon one doesn't seem to be working. Still, they hijack the video of anyone using Andy's original recording as their own. These con artists make my blood boil.
audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

Poking around, it seems they were trying to sell these books on Audible (again, they do this with many Librivox titles):

https://www.amazon.com/The-Regent/dp/B01LYMYFG0

Based on the warning on the page "This title is not available for you. Sorry, this title is no longer available." and the fact the link to the "Audioliterature" publisher seems to be broken, I'm guessing they got caught in it and are no longer able to sell them. Which may be the reason they are more aggressive with the fraudulent youtube copyright claims.

You can also find the title on Spotify and things of the sort in the repackaged format, with Stanley Green listed as the narrator.
audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

Wait...

https://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/The-Regent-Audiobook/B01LXC22M6

http://www.audible.com/search?searchProvider=Audioliterature&ref_=a_pd_Fictio_c2_publnk

http://www.audible.com/search?ref_=a_pd_Fictio_c2_1_narr&searchNarrator=Stanley+Green

You can clearly hear that these are Librivox recordings they are selling. I don't know if things in the public domain can be repackaged and sold like that, as far as the law is concerned. But I'm pretty sure Audible doesn't want to be caught selling repackaged librivox recordings.
Peter Why
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Post by Peter Why »

For me, all three links open on the Audible front page .. I assume it's because I don't have an Audible account.
Peter
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audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

Peter Why wrote:For me, all three links open on the Audible front page .. I assume it's because I don't have an Audible account.
Peter
Strange, I don't either. Well I do but I'm not logged in. It could be a geotargeting thing. What happens if you search "Stanley Green" (as Narrator) or "Audioliterature" (as Provider)? They have books by Mark Nelson, Phil Chenevert, Bob Neufeld and of course, Andy Minter, among others, with pitch shifted significantly. I haven't gone through all 250 audiobooks they sell but all that I checked came from Librivox, all with fake narrators. For example, I ordered their books by best sellers, the first result is The Art of War narrated by Phil Chenevert (Edward Miller according to them). The second is A Tale of Two Cities by Bob Neufeld (George Doyle according to them), with pitch shifted up so much that he almost sounds like a girl. Look, I've shifted pitches in my uploads too, but I wasn't putting up fake narrator names and selling the recordings as my own, I was just playing with sound editing trying to make stuff sound better. And I certainly wasn't going around telling people they can't upload recordings that I didn't make. These people are.
annise
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Post by annise »

What they are doing from our point of view is legal , we release everything into the public domain.
If I spent my time worrying about all the legal but false claims made by people trying to sell products I wouldn't have time to do things here, I just do my best not to support them financially in any way so I'm not going to visit audible or Youtube if I can help it.
Seems to me you are annoyed because they are stopping you making money out of our recordings - so talk to Audible , write reviews , stick pins in a wax image of "Stanley Green", make waves on facebook or twitter ........ and anything else that is legal. We can't do anything about it.

Anne
audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

annise wrote:What they are doing from our point of view is legal , we release everything into the public domain.
If I spent my time worrying about all the legal but false claims made by people trying to sell products I wouldn't have time to do things here, I just do my best not to support them financially in any way so I'm not going to visit audible or Youtube if I can help it.
Seems to me you are annoyed because they are stopping you making money out of our recordings - so talk to Audible , write reviews , stick pins in a wax image of "Stanley Green", make waves on facebook or twitter ........ and anything else that is legal. We can't do anything about it.

Anne
I don't care if they sell Librivox stuff on audible. It seems iffy, but whatever. What I care about is them claiming to own content they do not own and using the law to stop others from using it. What I care about is them using copyright law to threaten to shut down my channel for using recordings released by Librivox.
annise
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Post by annise »

I'm no lawyer but surely if your recording is by Andy Minter and theirs is by Stanley Green they are different :hmm:
audiobooksunleashed
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Post by audiobooksunleashed »

annise wrote:I'm no lawyer but surely if your recording is by Andy Minter and theirs is by Stanley Green they are different :)
lol... anyway, I'm sure everything will work out. I'm not asking anyone for help, I know half the people here despise me, depite the fact that my channel saves bandwidth costs and attracts more listeners to the work of volunteers. Whatever. I felt I should make it known that there are people actively trying to stake a claim to own the copyrights to librivox recordings.
VfkaBT
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Post by VfkaBT »

Phil and Mark should record a duet of a popular work in Chip n'Dale voices just to mock these yobbos.
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Post by lurcherlover »

audiobooksunleashed wrote:
lol... anyway, I'm sure everything will work out. I'm not asking anyone for help, I know half the people here despise me, depite the fact that my channel saves bandwidth costs and attracts more listeners to the work of volunteers. Whatever. I felt I should make it known that there are people actively trying to stake a claim to own the copyrights to librivox recordings.
I doubt that any of us despise you. However, you will find that an open site such as YouTube will result in many problems, and attract people who want to make money either legally or illegally. It's a penalty people pay for using the site. And I know plenty of innocent people who have uploaded to the site and have been OK, but there are others who may not be so lucky.

As LV provides quite high quality and often professional sounding recordings, there will be people, I'm sure, who will want to take advantage of this, and this has obviously (from what you have said) meant that your site, which is pretty big, will have problems.

I can't speak for LV but I would imagine the saving of bandwidth would not be so great a problem, even if it is good to keep it as low as possible. Others may may have more knowledge than me regarding this aspect of the LV archive and site.
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