In short:
- He likes the sounds of the city
- Copyright issues.
He cites an example of a Minecraft YouTuber called Mumbo Jumbo who had correctly licensed his intro music, until it turned out that the musician he licensed it from had sampled someone else, and Warner Chappell decided to enter that original source into the YouTube copyright database, resulting in 1,800 copyright claims that meant he had to go through and, over multiple days, cut out the intros of the videos manually.
resulting in 1,800 copyright claims that meant he had to go through and, over multiple days, cut out the intros of the videos manually
So you do everything by the book and then you still get mauled by this crooked system.
I’m anti-copyright in general*, and especially in favour of stronger fair use–type laws to allow remixing. But as far as copyright does go, this doesn’t actually sound all that egregious to me. The fault lies mostly with the musician that Mumbo Jumbo licensed from, rather than with Warner Chappell themselves. The ideal would probably be that MJ could keep the music up and the licenser would have to pay the entire cost of it to WC. But that’s a rather difficult thing to expect.
* sort of… Under capitalism it’s absolutely necessary that artists can protect their works in some form to be able to make a living, and I’m not entirely sure how to square that with the idea that artistic expression should be free.
