I hate copyright law and agree it's broken, but it's not at fault here. Compositions can be copyrighted, but obviously Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is in the public domain and has been for a long time. Performances can be copyrighted, but obviously a performance isn't the same thing as a composition.
There's no legal grey area here. This is completely on Google/Youtube. Why isn't there a way to assert the copyright status when uploading, beyond saying you ownt he copyright or not? The answer would seem to be that it would take some work on the company's part, and they don't want to put it in because it's unlikely to yield any additional revenue and the occasional bit of bad publicity doesn't hurt them enough.
What about the copyright trolls that are filing claims for content they don't own, forcing Google into an arms race with them.
Even when the system is working "correctly" it is broken. If I take a video of my kid dancing to a song, I often can't share it with my family on YouTube. That's messed up.
Suppose your video goes crazy viral, has 12 million views, you monetize it, earn some modest figure on the thing. What forces you to pay the song's creators/copyright holders? What would make you think you should not pay them?
Obviously, this is an unlikely scenario, but where's the threshold at which it becomes important? Monetization? First million views? Theoretical monetization? Actual payout?
that notion is why I imagine Google added a threshold before a channel can be monetized. So the payment details here are moot unless you are already an established channel who should know this. Regardless, this is less about a random user "making money off music they don't own" and more about the potential that users aren't instead going to Vevo to make the music company ad revenue.
I have my qualms on DMCA as a whole, but this is ultimately tangential to the real issue of the lack of consequences for perjury.
There's no legal grey area here. This is completely on Google/Youtube. Why isn't there a way to assert the copyright status when uploading, beyond saying you ownt he copyright or not? The answer would seem to be that it would take some work on the company's part, and they don't want to put it in because it's unlikely to yield any additional revenue and the occasional bit of bad publicity doesn't hurt them enough.