Happy 2021,
So … I produced/performed/recorded five instrumental pieces for a client Christmas project.
A publishing company — Licensing - Music Licensing for Publishing and Recorded Music - Concord — has claimed they own the copyright of “What Child is This.”
Despite providing five links proving that it is PD, they are still disputing that fact.
I also submitted it is my own original performance.
We’re in phase two of the dispute.
QUESTION: Has this ever happened to you?
If you’re curious … Music in question begins at 10:52
I uploaded a concert performance as an unlisted YouTube video, and boom, it got claimed by a major label (which I won’t name here).
The work in question was my own composition (the Largo movement of a Baroque-style chamber piece with a didgeridoo soloist; something that a real human listener could never mistake for something else!). But there they were, persisting on the claim that the live performance was in fact from their Bach CD, even though I explained to them they had made a mistake.
It made me realize how these big companies potentially abuse the ContentID system when it happens to make incorrect detections.
Today, I send the master recordings to a ContentID manager company, which, in my case, is Identifyy (a HAAWK company). With them, I have protected all of my production music before submitting it to any marketplace stores / YouTube / streaming aggregators.
With Identifyy (and others alike) you can actually also ContentID-protect the mechanical rights to a PD recording of yours, which at least in theory should vaccinate you against this kind of issue… And using the (wrongly claimed) mechanical rights as the basis is exactly what Concord is also doing with you here.
UPDATE: One video has been cleared. But another related video that contains the exact same score with What Child Is This is also being claimed as theirs. UGH.
Usually I first upload tracks to AudioMicro which takes care of BMI. But with this project I didn’t. That may be where it went south.
I’m going to register all five tracks with BMI today. so we’ll see…
HAAWK looks interesting. I perused their site but couldn’t find their rate schedule. I may investigate further… Thanks for the lead.
This happened recently for me too.
I uploaded a public domain piece to YouTube and immediately it got claimed. First it was a surprise but then I thought well, that’s not so strange with all recordings of same composition.
I’m also with Identifyy, HAAWK.inc.
There’s a function where you manually ask them to claim the video containing your music. It took a few days and now there’s no claims.
I don’t know but I guess that since Identifyy claimed the video for me I hope there will be no more claims from other agencies in the future.
To wrap on happy bow on this post, I kept pushing back, submitting proof that i was a public domain song (which these greedy idiots could have found out in a simple google search), and they backed off.
