Fair Play: Asserting Fair Use in the Age of Content ID

Fair Play: Asserting Fair Use in the Age of Content ID As YouTube's algorithm snags copyrighted songs, music educators struggle to assert their fair-use rights and keep their content online.

By

Sarah Godcher Murphy

June 2, 2023

Illustration by Bruce Wymer

Over the past decade, many music educators have embraced YouTube as a platform to share educational content, reach a broader range of students, and, hopefully, supplement their income with a bit of ad revenue. The platform is hugely popular with music students of all skill levels, providing everything from beginner guitar lessons to in-depth analysis of iconic jazz solos. More than any other social media, YouTube connects independent learners with teachers who can help them.

While this may sound like a match made in heaven, the platform's copyright management policies create roadblocks for educators who post instructional videos on the site. YouTube uses a digital fingerprinting system known as Content ID to automatically scan every video uploaded to the platform, searching for copyright-protected material. Excerpts of songs as brief as five seconds can result in a video being flagged or taken down for copyright infringement, even though the video may be perfectly legal under the fair use doctrine, which allows educators to use copyrighted songs as examples of the concepts they are teaching.

Adam Neely

Image by Liz Maney

But what is legally considered fair use isn't always straightforward. What may be fine for a closed educational system like a college or middle school becomes much murkier in the wide-open-and revenue-generating-world of YouTube. Let's say, for example, you are teaching a lesson on how to reharmonize a jazz standard. In all likelihood, your lesson would include excerpts of recorded music, illustrating various harmonic approaches used by artists over the years. In the classroom environment, this undoubtedly would be considered fair use.

But if you were to record this lesson and upload it to YouTube-sharing your lesson with the platform's 2.6 billion users-your right to fair use isn't so clear cut. Because Content ID is fully automated, the system cannot distinguish fair use exceptions from outright piracy-which means that educational content gets ensnared just as easily as bootlegged copies of Beyonc 's latest single. And, once a video has been flagged, the copyright holder can opt to have the video removed, thereby deleting the educator's lesson.

Adam Neely B.M. '09 has experienced this problem firsthand. As one of the most popular and beloved music educators on YouTube, with 1.69 million subscribers, Neely says that nearly all the content on his channel has been flagged for copyright infringement.

I think-and many of the other people on YouTube also think-that this is an issue of fair use, he says. We legally have the right to use these small snippets for purposes of commentary and analysis.

Neely creates video essays and lessons that use brief clips of recorded music (each less than 10 seconds long) interwoven with his thoughts on everything from music theory and history to psychology and pop culture. The resulting videos feel like a lecture delivered by your favorite college professor crossed with a clever talk show host; and they're highly polished, cleverly edited, and consistently funny, says Spin magazine.

If I'm trying to make some kind of broader cultural or music theory or historical reference, I need to be able to use that bit of the copyrighted work; otherwise my commentary is meaningless, Neely says. There is no other way of doing it in the medium of YouTube.

Associate Professor Tomo Fujita, who launched his YouTube channel in 2019, strongly agrees, adding that YouTube has become an essential tool for connecting with students online. It's the only way. On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, people say amazing stuff, but that's all. They just talk, talk, talk, he says. Those [platforms] are just making buzz. It doesn't do anything about anything unless you have a YouTube.

Fujita's approach to videos feels more personal-something akin to a private lesson in his home, during which he shares not only guitar instruction, but also life stories, jokes, and footage of his cat, Dexter. Fujita has built a following of 505,000 subscribers. But, he says, he cannot count on YouTube ad revenue for income, because of copyright issues. I don't really expect [it to make money], he says. But if it does, great.

That's because whenever Content ID nds a copyright-protected song in a video, YouTube allows the copyright holder to appropriate any ad revenue generated by the video. This practice, known as monetization, means that large corporations like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Chappell Music can take revenue away from educators like Fujita and Neely simply because they used a snippet of a song in one of their videos.

If I'm trying to make some kind of broader cultural or music theory or historical reference, I need to be able to use that bit of the copyrighted work; otherwise my commentary is meaningless.

- Adam Neely

Monetization began as an attempt to protect intellectual property, but has turned into a cash-generating machine for rights holders. According to YouTube's most recent Copyright Transparency Report, because of Content ID, YouTube has created an entirely new revenue stream from ad-supported, user-generated content-paying more than $7.5 billion to rights holders from ads alone as of December 2021. And while Content ID has helped ensure that artists rightfully get paid for their creations, it also ensnares content creators who are acting above-board.

The volume of Content ID claims is staggering. According to the transparency report, copyright holders made approximately 759

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