Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online, and the bots are winning
A FEW Sundays ago, Camerata Pacifica artistic director Adrian Spence, aided by his techsavvy son Keiran, went live on Facebook to broadcast a previously recorded performance of Mozart’s Trio in E flat (K. 498), aka the “Kegelstatt” trio. At least they tried to.
The recorded performance was one of many that Spence had drawn from the Camerata’s extensive video archives.
When the Covid-19 crisis abruptly canceled its season, Spence launched a weekly series of rebroadcasts to fill the silence.
These broadcasts, even with their modest virtual attendance of 100 or so viewers per stream, have been essential to keeping Spence’s Santa Barbara, California-based chamber organization engaged with its audience.
That is, until that recent Sunday, when his audience started to disappear, one by one, all the way down to none.
“What the hell is going on?” Spence recalls shouting to his son across the living room as the viewer count conspicuously dropped.
Just minutes into the airing of the concert, Facebook issued Spence a notification that his video – an original performance of an hour-long piece composed by Mozart in 1786 – somehow contained one minute and 18 seconds of someone else’s work, in this case, “audio owned by Naxos of America.”
Spence, and presumably Mozart, would beg to differ. “They’re blocking my use of my own content,” Spence said later in a phone interview, “which feels dystopian.”
As Covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the internet, they’re having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots.
Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings.
You’ve encountered these bots in the wild if you’ve ever had a workout video or living room lip-sync blocked or muted for ambient inclusion or flagrant use of Britney or Bruce.
But who owns Brahms? These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly finetuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of “reference” audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies.
But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context.
After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of publicdomain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance.
Put simply, bots aren’t great listeners.
After the removal of his clips, Spence’s only recourse was to file a dispute with Facebook by filling out a single-field form. This was followed by six hours of fruitless chats with various Facebook representatives.
It took nearly four days to clear the spurious claim, and in the interim, Facebook suspended Camerata’s access to livestreaming.
Clearing copyright claims has since become part of Spence’s new routine, casting emails into an opaque dispute system he describes as “the DMV on steroids.” And the hits keep coming: YouTube blocked a recent live stream of a recorded Camerata performance of Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet, Op. 43, after it attracted a swarm of five automated copyright claims from different record companies.
It’s gotten to the point where Camerata videos are prefaced by a warning screen, explaining their anticipated disappearance in advance.
“I have no protection for my own produced material,” Spence says. “If you want to put a copyright claim against me, I’m happy to take the time to write back to you and say, ‘This is an erroneous claim and here’s why.’
But when you’re immediately blocking videos or streams, that’s negatively impacting our very mission in a time where this now has become mission critical.”