This is beyond shameless but I'm not surprised that this happens. Big players of copyright seems be doing this sort of thing all the time and getting away with it.
This comes from the same mindset that allow a original video by the author to be put off youtube by a big studio.
I think I read that big recording studios similarly uses lesser known artists songs in records under some weird law (pretending they couldn't find the copyright holder) and basically strongarm them if they come out and complaint. Does anyone know if its true and provide reference?
Essentially the legal system worldover is extremely for the power broker. The ones who needs the least protection gets the most and those that need it in most cases cannot even afford the least.
Yes. This is becoming ever-more-salient as large portions of the programming that airs on multi-national news organizations comprises original content posted to social media and owned by the user that originally authored it. Just in the last month we have Nice, Dallas, and Turkey, where it felt like all the news orgs were doing was reading tweets and playing back 60-second clips that people were posting online.
On the one hand, news orgs probably have a reasonable fair use case there, but on the other, they are profiting off content that the OP owns, and OP is rightly entitled to a portion of that evening's advertising proceeds if their content comprises a substantial part of the programming.
If someone snippeted CNN and played it repeatedly on their own channel as fair use, they'd get pursued hard, be unable to fund the legal battle, and be forced to do whatever CNN said lest a long and ruinous legal battle occur with spotty if any representation for the little guy. It'd a big multi-national law firm that bills at $1k/hr v. an innocent little person who probably doesn't know any legal terms at all and would be lucky to have $10k in savings.
Meanwhile, CNN and other large companies will openly trounce anyone and everyone they can because they understand that only a tiny fraction will actually be in a position to hurt them for it, and they'll try to leave that tiny fraction alone if they can help it. You'll try to sue them for an injustice and for the $20k they owe you and it'll explode into an 8-year, multi-million legal battle. The little guy still gets completely screwed over. Since big companies know this, they take full advantage and effectively, operate under a different set of laws from the rest of us.
The easy way to mitigate this specific problem wrt copyrights is to reform copyright law so that we no longer divert a grossly disproportionate amount of money into content companies and so that they don't file lawsuits that there is no hope of winning, but it doesn't really solve the larger issue, which is that the legal system is only really available and functional for those with the capacity to spend $10 million on lawyers at any given time. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that we're going to resolve that during the lifetime of anyone currently living.
This comes from the same mindset that allow a original video by the author to be put off youtube by a big studio.
I think I read that big recording studios similarly uses lesser known artists songs in records under some weird law (pretending they couldn't find the copyright holder) and basically strongarm them if they come out and complaint. Does anyone know if its true and provide reference?
Essentially the legal system worldover is extremely for the power broker. The ones who needs the least protection gets the most and those that need it in most cases cannot even afford the least.