Open my eyes

Here is a recording of our choir singing the Gilbert Martin arrangement of an old gospel hymn: "Open my eyes that I may see." It is taken from our liturgy on October 25, and I am just now getting around to posting it.

We also sang the Howells Te Deum and Jubilate at that service, and it went pretty well. But I am not going to post the recordings; there are many versions on YouTube that are much better than we could ever hope to do.

But this one, "Open my eyes," has only one other YouTube version, a good rendition in Chinese, so ours is worth posting.

While working with the YouTube video manager, I noticed that several of my Bach organ recordings have had copyright claims placed on them. I suppose that I should be flattered that the computer who does these things for YouTube thinks that my versions are sufficiently close to their Property to warrant a claim. I am not.

But I do not see a good way to dispute the claim. The YouTube dispute form gives several options that could be checked off and none of them apply completely. On the one hand, the video is not entirely of my creation - J. S. Bach wrote the music, and the artwork is from WikiArt, by some of the Masters of old time. These things are in the public domain, but they are most decidedly not my work.

And on the other hand, I am not willing to claim that the YouTube clips are entirely in the public domain; they are not, for I have a performance right in them. That is to say: I am very pleased for anyone to listen to this music. But I am not pleased for some rights organization to come and make money on what is not theirs.

And, most of all, there is the danger that by disputing the claim, the publisher who claims rights can summarily shut down my YouTube channel and this MusicBox. I know of one blog that disappeared in just this fashion, without notice or recourse. Or I could find myself embroiled in litigation.

So I am going to let it go.

[Edited 11/20/15 to add this news story}

YouTube owner Google says it will help fund up to $1m (£650,000) in legal fees for some content creators who have received copyright takedown notices. It will step in if it feels their material is considered to be fair use. However the firm admitted that only a handful of people have been chosen to benefit from this support. Copyright holders are able to make requests to Google - or other sites - to take down content under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).....

"We are offering legal support to a handful of videos that we believe represent clear fair uses which have been subject to DMCA takedowns," wrote Fred von Lohmann, Google's copyright legal director, in a blog post....

"We're doing this because we recognise that creators can be intimidated by the DMCA's counter-notification process and the potential for litigation that comes with it.

"While we can't offer legal protection to every video creator - or even every video that has a strong fair use defence - we'll continue to resist legally unsupported DMCA takedowns as part of our normal processes."