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Comment by sharkski | Hacker News Reader

I plan on uploading a BD rip of Steamboat Willie to YouTube at midnight January 1st, 2024. I'm curious if a copyright strike will happen and if I can defeat it.

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If I recall correctly, it will and there’s nothing you can do about it. This came up recently on HN. Someone tried to post something that is definitely in the public domain as of this year, got a strike, and was asking how they’re supposed to appeal but was told the system is designed to be abused. It implicitly favors copyright holders even when it shouldn’t. There’s no built-in fairness, and to be honest I’m posting this because I hope someone will tell me I’m wrong.

It sounds like the “malicious compliance” move is to mark Steamboat Willie as your own copyright work so that you are the one to decide whether it sticks.

For those that don’t know, this is based off an often-abused tactic: take the original music of someone who has not registered it and register it instead of them. Once done, they file copyright strikes and/or file to have the creator’s monetization funds deposited in to the abuser’s account since the abuser is the “rightful owner”.

Content creators should band together and make a platform they equally own or is put in a public trust.

Not all heroes wear capes! Taking one for the team, my good fellow!

p.s. make sure to exfiltrate everything of value from your attached Google account before you hit Upload.

I wouldn't do it on an account with anything important in it, I think you're still likely to get striked.

There's little recourse for false claims, so they'll probably do it anyway, and since it's the claimant that gets to deny your appeals, there won't be much you can do unless you can create enough publicity about it on social media (although I guess doing that to get attention could be enough reason to do it!)

Might be careful about discerning which midnight applies.

Such nuance only matters if you end up in a courtroom, which you never would because it would be beyond absurd.

Absurd court cases exist.

Is a rip from a BluRay fair use? I would think that you would need to own the film reels and scan them/master it yourself.

In the US, Bridgeman v. Corel ruled that faithful copies of public domain works don’t gain copyright protection for being copies of an original. To be copyrighted requires some sort of creative spark, and that spark was entirely contained in the original work; none was introduced in the copying process.

Whether this applies to a Blu‐Ray rip, I will not attempt to discern.

The classical music pieces are old.

The recordings of the classical music pieces are under the copyright.

There was a good article about there at [probably] TorrentFreaks.

Typically the copyright of the recordings derives from the copyright of the performance, and only indirectly from that of the original classical piece. Most recordings are copyrighted, but that’s because recording technology only became hugely prevalent during existing copyright terms.

Looking at it another way, an uncreative recording of a classical performance will be copyrighted for a period of time, but after it expires, a recording of the recording won’t add any further copyright. It’s a bit like how a photograph of a public domain painting is uncopyrightable, but a new painting based on the painting might be copyrightable.

Color correction and transfer to another medium don't create a new copyrighted work as far as I know.

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