By Cory Doctorow at 8:14 am Saturday, Jan 28 [via boingboing]

An unsigned rap group called After the Smoke couldn't post their song "One in a Million" to YouTube because every time they tried, it generated a YouTube content-match error saying that Universal Music owned their song.

It turned out that UMG had laid claim to a leaked video that had a UMG artist performing the unsigned band's track in it, and this effectively gave Universal the power to censor the unsigned band's song.

YouTube's content-matching system has a lot of problems, as archivist Carl Malamud discovered when corporations started to claim that they owned the public domain US government videos he posted, threatening to cost him his YouTube account. And Universal attained notoriety for abusing content match by claiming to own the song that MegaUpload commissioned from major artists criticizing Universal and other rightsholder groups for their copyright stance.

What an unbelievable crock of shite. Goes hand in hand with how Google have started treating all our data, but this is an epedemic in society where we believe we can get what the hell we want for free. The powers that be want to come down hard on Joe Public for watching or listening to something for free made by people like Universal, yet move like snails when those same companies making cash off our intellectual property. Total Bullshit.

Well, what's good for the goose and all that. Now I think I'll go and "claim ownership" of that Gretsch Falcon I've had my eye on.

YouTube's problem goes beyond their content-matching system. They also let some companies walk all over people in claiming ownership of content published there, and it has nothing to do with copyright infringement. There are companies that will actually claim ownership of your videos, and YouTube lets them! IODA is one of them. This just happened to a friend of mine recently with two videos that he shot, edited, and published entirely himself with the artists' consent and everything. IODA claimed and received ownership rights from YouTube! Once the claim is filed, YouTube gives them the option to either take the video down OR put ads on it and make money. IODA never takes stuff down. So a video that you posted will then have an ad running on it, and IODA makes the money from that ad. Look what happened to this guy:

http://consumerist.com/2012/02/youtube-user-i-received-copyright-violation-notice-over-bird-sounds.html

Unbelievable. YouTube fucking sucks.