What is going on with SoundCloud?

But the commercial trance songs themselves are sampling other tracks (although doing it much better), and also licensing issues down to the one-shot drum samples they're using.

One of my tracks takes a Beyonce vocal stab and it processes it so much you won't recognize who the singer was - unless you knew the steps to reverse engineer it - and, you'd be surprised to find many talented audio engineers who are much better than I can do this easily. When I hear songs on the radio which use a similar technique, I can pick this up instantly. AFAIK, my track hasn't been pulled off SC yet.

Did you also know that many companies (Verizon and TMobile have been known to do this) have audio engineers who will "reverse engineer" a song their marketing team likes from an indie artist to recreate it so they don't have to pay royalties? Its not hard to trick these algorithms, and in many cases they come up with false positives anyways.

Most of the (commercial) "Industry" itself is running off uncredited samples, many of which have been cut from 1960-1980s Jazz/Blues tracks. These tracks still are technically copyrighted[0], but the artists are often not knowledgable over who is sampling their tracks, or in many cases they don't care / want people to sample their stuff. Most of their record labels have also long since died off which would have tried to protect their works as well. You would be shocked to find how wide the range of genres are of producers that are doing this.

In sum, it stinks of a moneygrab. Soundcloud became big enough to get into DMCA's non-artistic crosshairs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...

The point of the DMCA Safe Harbour provision is that the OSP is protected if they don't involve themselves and just proxy claims assuming their are in good faith/correct. So no. You may have a claim if the OSP does not restore service after a counter-notice with no followup legal action from the claimant but they're allowed 10-14 business days for that one so you may be out for 3 weeks without any recourse, but OSPs can also rely on their TOS to make that moot and even ignore the counter-notice altogether.

You probably won't even have a claim against the originally alleged copyright owner: the notice of copyright infringement only requires "good faith belief" under no penalty of perjury.

Largely, to fulfill whatever is in their terms of service, though so long as they follow the counternotice procedures in the DMCA -- which require you first to file a counternotice -- they have no liability to you for removing content in response to a facially valid (even if substantively completely false) DMCA claim, even if they would otherwise under general principles of law or your terms of service (that's why the DMCA notice/counternotice provisions are called "Safe Harbor" provisions -- they provide a shield from existing copyright liability and liability to the user whose hosted content is removed, provided, in the first case, that the notice provisions are adhered to, and, in the second, that the content was removed in response to a DMCA notice and the counternotice provisions are adhered to.)

Is it for educational purposes? Using only a small portion of the original work? Is the creator deriving no commercial benefit?

(PS: Fair Use is a legal defense, not a positive rights clearance).

See also: Bridgeport Music Inc vs Dimension Films (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport_Music,_Inc._v._Dime...)