One of my hobbies involves capturing commercials from old VHS tapes and uploading them to YouTube. My YouTube channel is not monetized and I make no money from my actions. I don’t modify the commercials or add watermarks to them. I literally take the commercials exactly as they appeared on television, and upload them to YouTube so that others can enjoy them. As of last weekend I had 444 commercials in my VHS Commercials playlist.
If you’re wondering if anyone watches these commercials, they do. This McDonald’s commercial featuring Elvis I uploaded has 57,000 views. This one for CiCi’s Pizza, advertising their (then new) “$2.99 buffet,” has nearly 32,000. People watch them for entertainment and use them for research.
These commercials have been available on YouTube for, in some cases, almost a decade. (I uploaded the CiCi’s commercial in 2015.)
Over the past week I have received nearly a dozen Copyright Claims from YouTube. A Copyright Claim occurs when YouTube determines a user has uploaded a video containing material someone else owns the copyright to, like music or video. The company filing the claim has a few options: they can take no action, they can take over the monetization of your video (meaning that they keep any money your video makes from ads), they can block the content from all countries for which they own the copyright, they can force you to remove the offending content, and in egregious or after multiple offences, you can get banned from YouTube.
Users, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of options. Once identified, YouTube will allow you to trim out the offending material, replace the video or audio with royalty-free content, or delete the video. You can also attempt to dispute the claim, which has a very low success rate. If the copyright owner simply wants the advertising money, then no action is required. The video can remain online and the copyright owner gets paid for it. While it’s not completely fair, it’s the closest to a win-win situation.
For example — in 2016, I uploaded the opening intro to the Harry and the Hendersons television show. Shortly after uploading it, YouTube identified the song “Your Feet’s Too Big” (the show’s theme song) as being copyrighted. The copyright owner allowed the video to remain online. The video has been viewed nearly 50,000 times. Everybody wins.
But, that’s not always how things go. Some copyright holders are much more aggressive when it comes to “defending” their content.
In 2011, Mason dressed up as an Oreo cookie and sang Weird Al’s “The White Stuff,” itself a parody of “(You’ve Got It) The Right Stuff” by The New Kids on the Block. I was even able to find a karaoke version of the song that contained no vocals for Mason to sing over. Seconds after uploading the video, the YouTube machinery flagged the content as belonging not to Oreo or Weird Al, but The New Kids on the Block. Leaving the video online unmodified was not an option. My options were to remove the audio, or remove the entire video.
Which brings us to last weekend. Out of the blue, I began receiving copyright claims from YouTube regarding commercials that have been online for many years. In every case, the organization claiming ownership of the offending material was LDS AFFILIATE. These are not the harmless “eh, leave it up” claims. In every case, I was informed the content I had uploaded would be blocked from every country I have ever heard of.
I spent some time this week trying to find information regarding this company. Mostly what I found were other YouTube uploaders and content creators experiencing the same thing from the same company. LDS Affiliate, it seems, somehow (a) suddenly owns the rights to thousands of commercials from the 80s and 90s, and (b) really wants them removed from YouTube.
I got a few of these claims last Saturday, and a few more on Sunday. It wasn’t until Wednesday’s claim that I was able to figure out what was happening.
Wednesday’s email from YouTube was slightly different. My video “Commercial Campbell’s Home Cookin’ Soups” received a claim from LDS Affiliate, but the claimed matching content was “Oprah Winfrey Show Season 5 – 05170001_1_108183.” And suddenly, things began to make sense.
I don’t know how or why, but it appears LDS Affiliate has either acquired the rights to Oprah’s television show, or has been hired by the copyright holder to scan YouTube for offending content. What has clearly happened is LDS Affiliate has uploaded copies of the Oprah show that aired on television and contained commercials. There is no way LDS Affiliate owns the rights to commercials for Campbell’s Soup or the Scrabble board game, but neither do I, which makes disputing the claim difficult if not impossible.
The most frustrating thing about the situation is that commercials are literally designed to be seen. As I joked with my wife, it’s like someone getting upset about sharing a picture of a billboard! I get that there are a few commercials companies would like to forget, but if Hertz is willing to leave up old commercials featuring OJ Simpson, I don’t see what the harm is with most of these.
If there’s any light at the end of the tunnel, it’s this. In my latest copyright claim from LDS Affiliate, YouTube (or LDS) changed the type of claim being filed. Instead of completely blocking my California Raisins commercial, they are now simply monetizing it. While I’d like to think LDS Affiliate grew a heart and decided to allow these videos to remain online, it’s much more likely that, like most corporations, they realizing there was easy money to be made by leaving it online.
I’ve have a few hit some of my videos over the years. One I actually did contest and won. It was on a video I did comparing the audio differences in some Genesis games between one sound chip vs another that could be used in the console. Some company I’d never heard suddenly decided to claim copyright over one of the songs from one of the games I was comparing. But I quickly found out that the company making the claim had NOTHING to do with the original company of the game being shown and I contested it with that fact. About a week later the claim was removed completely.
That said, the last two times I was hit with it I didn’t have much of a choice but to remove those sections from the videos. Although strangely, one of them was a copyright claim again on music that is played during a video game. The odd thing was that the video was in my Unlisted videos section and not available publicly. It was one of the videos I make for my clients who I do game console services for. I make a video for each showing their systems working again etc. And it was one of those vids that was being contested. Since the actual purpose of the video had already ran its course at that time, I just deleted it. But it was odd that even unlisted vids could be flagged like that having NEVER been shown publicly?
I just uploaded an episode of Oprah with Natalie Cole from 12/18/1996 and LDS Affiliate blocked it. It’s not as if it will ever be broadcast again. Why not unblock it and monetize it?
I had some programs called 500 Nations. They were initially blocked but I wrote to the company and then they unblocked them.