Though it seems that this is simply a case of a greedy company making false copyright claims on YouTube it does raise the question – has anyone heard of companies copyrighting bird song and, if so, were they successful? And how much of a disaster would that be for birders?
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
Supposedly this is a case of Google scanning uploaded videos for possible third party content. Google tells You-Tube and You-Tube puts ads on the video and sends the money to the company Google thinks owns the copyright. It’s all an error because robots are doing all of it and can’t tell that birdsong isn’t music that someone else owns.
All this brought to you by companies that made a big show of opposing SOPA.
They might have phonographic righs (? circle P) for bird song recordings.
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/copyright_symbol
Funny you should ask, I just happened to have a copy of the Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America DVD on my desk. And yes, at the end of the booklet it says
Recording (C) Lang Elliot & NatureSound Studio
@Kirby: Good point.
@Jason R and Paul Clapham: Individual recordings can be copyrighted (and I don’t really see an issue with that) but the situation linked to here is a video where there was ambient birdsong.
Subsequent articles have pointed out that this was an error in YouTube’s automated copyright detection algorithm. A spokesman from Rumblefish posted that this was not their doing and worked with YT to have the copyright flag removed from the subject video.
Bill, the only reason this was resolved was because Slashdot and Fark and a bunch of other websites noticed it.
The Macauley Library, the audio/video collection of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, copyrights all its recordings: http://macaulaylibrary.org/terms-of-use. That’s 100,000 bird recordings. I think there needs to be a distinction between ambient bird song and bird song that is recorded for research and publication, as Cornell and Lang Elliot do. In those cases, they have put resources into acquiring quality audio.