Facebook Is So Sure Its Erroneous Blocking Of Music Is Right, There's No Option To Say It's Wrong

from the do-not-doubt-the-copyright-filter-gods dept It’s hardly a secret that upload filters don’t work well. Back in 2017, Felix Reda, then Shadow Rapporteur on the EU Copyright Directive in the European Parliament, put together a representative sample of the many different ways in which filters fail. A recent series of tweets by Markus Pössel, Senior Outreach Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, exposes rather well the key issues, which have not improved since then. Facebook muted 41 seconds of a video he uploaded to Facebook because Universal Music Group (UMG) claimed to own the copyright for some of the audio that was played. Since the music in question came from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and Bach died in 1750, there’s obviously no copyright claim on the music itself, which is definitely in the public domain. Instead, it seems, the claim was for the performance of this public domain music, which UMG says was played by Keith Jarrett, a jazz and classical pianist, and noted interpreter of Bach. Except that it wasn’t, as Pössel explains: Either I am flattered that a Bach piece that I recorded with my own ten fingers on my digital keyboard sounds just like when Keith Jarrett is playing it. Or be annoyed…
Read More