7 month anniversary vid: takes 2 and 3

This Sunday during the day, after all the Independence Day festivities subsided, I cleaned my place. And I mean cleaned. Cleaning for me is one of those tasks that rapidly becomes scope creep piled on top of scope creep. I start with a simple list -- full bathroom, kitchen counters, laundry, picking up things. At the start, I write a few more items down, "Oh yeah, might as well organize my DVDs as long as I'm putting them away." By the end, I can't even get myself to look at my original list, it would be an admission of how far I have strayed. But at least my place was pretty spiffy by the end, complete with vacuumed rugs, swept floors, and a tub that looks like it's never been used.

So I guess it was in the spirit of housecleaning that I decided that, on Monday night, instead of making a new vid, I'd take care of some old business.

In early April, I was on my YouTube My Videos page and saw a notice in the "Into the Mantle 7 Month Anniversary" summary. After clicking on the details, I was shocked that my video may have audio content that is "is owned or licensed by <company>. As a result, your video has been muted.". This was a first for us at ITM, though Darius has been hit by it since (and by the same music conglomerate) in the Wizard World Part 5 video, which we both think is really crappy since we were both pretty happy with how the final vid wrapped up the series.

Well three months after I first saw that (honestly, to the day, oddly enough), I sat down to get that audio back on there. Yes, that's a hefty dose of procrastination, though I'm sure my place would be pleased as punch if I cleaned it on a three month basis. :)

As you can see in the video, there's an opening song and a closing song. I thought that the video was red-flagged simply because I cited the songs in the youtube description, a formality I did for their benefit and, while a nice gesture, is certainly not required on YouTube. For the new version, I have removed such citations. Net effect: Less awareness of the original artist. If I had uploaded it without citations in the first place, this most likely would have never come up. The view count was pretty slender (<50), the vid obviously hadn't gone viral. But since they've red-flagged it, it would probably be on their radar if I uploaded the same video again, even if I updated the title.

In the months of idleness, I had the thought in the back of my head that the song #2 was the one with which the company had it's unease. To be sure, I knew that #2's artist, the purple-clad name-shirker, plays by his own rules in the music industry, so this just must be one of them. However, when I looked through the warnings on YouTube, I could find no explicit mention of the song. But whatever, I'll record a cover of the song, upload it, leave out the citations, and that'll be it.

Epic fail. YouTube muted the new video right away. I tried again, giving it a completely different title and description just to see if their algorithm just dealt with text comparison, but no dice. (Not to mention that YouTube was down for a few hours, so I couldn't even begin this manual process until well after 1am).

Time for some research. I looked at the YouTube FAQ concerning content identifictation:

What is YouTube's new Content Identification tool?
The Content Identification tool is the latest way YouTube offers copyright holders to easily identify and manage their content on YouTube. The tool creates ID files which are then run against user uploads and, if a match occurs, the copyright holders policy preferences are then applied to that video. Rights owners can choose to block, track or monetize their content.

What are "ID files?"
The digital content identification file which corresponds to a reference file (a piece of content like a movie, music or other audiovisual material). This file is generated using Google software and is also known as a "fingerprint."

(Their FAQs are pretty poorly maintained, by the way. Just reading the top of this document, you can see that these Qs are so FA that they interrupt the answers, and then repeat themselves further down the page.)

Still a little nebulous how it actually works. So okay, maybe it was song #1 that they had gripes with. Once the doubt entered my head, I did google searches linking the company with artist #1 and artist #2. #2 has more results, but it's a pretty generic word and the #1 results look more relevant. I'll bite the bullet and record the first one, it'll take longer to make the video and upload it than it will to record the mostly a capella snippet.

Well... it worked! And it's up now. Although I was obviously put out by the whole process, I was somewhat in awe of YouTube's Content Identification logic. It's not like song #1 took up the entire video, my snippet was maybe 30 seconds long. True, I started the vid with the start of the song so that would lines up nicely, but still, I was impressed.

I was impressed, that is, until I checked out my chat logs. I wanted to double check when I first discovered that the audio had been muted (4/6, same week as my "Best Week Ever" excitement). I was chatting with Darius when I found it out and I copied and pasted the warning message to him. There it was, explicitly naming song #2 as the offending song. How is it then that the vid was still muted after I replaced song #2, and was allowed only after I replaced song #1 as well? Either a) the company owns #1 and #2 and lumped it's grievances into one or b) YouTube's Content Identification logic is a bit more trial-and-error than I gave them credit for. Either way, the fact that they used to explicitly name the offending songs but don't anymore makes me lean towards the latter. They're moving in a "the less you know, the better" direction, not risking a straightforward disclosure of what cards it has.

The fact that song #2 was the troublesome one makes sense when doing some quick YouTube searches on the artists. Which one of these has less presence than the other?

Bottom line: It's up now, and I don't think there's any chance it will be muted again. It does make me wary about YouTube. There's still the issue of Darius' video, and I wish there was a simple way to resolve that. It's possible that the reason this video got targeted is because it's seen as an ITM advertisement instead of a celebration. Ripping ourselves from YouTube at this point would be a difficult goodbye - we have metadata and established connections that would take a while to rebuild somewhere else. But if the grass is indeed greener somewhere else, and stays greener, then instead of spending our time cleaning this place, we'll just pack up and move.

(Note: We're still waiting on the 1 year anniversary vid. Mr. March to the front desk please :)