The nuance with "public domain sheet music" is that while the instructions of how to play that music is public domain, the recorded performance of such music is not. So when you play moonlight sonata, you have the copyright to that particular performance (recording) and someone else cannot use that without permission. It is somewhat harder to distinguish between recordings of thousands of performances of the same musical piece.

The thing though is that youtube decided not to care. Actually, that is not about caring - the youtube we knew when it first launched was killed because it was an impossible business model if they themselves had the liability for uploaded possibly copyrighted content. So now they say "sort it out between yourselves, go to courts if you want but I will take it down while you do that to not be liable in the worst case".

This particular case is about a copyrighted "melody" and not the performance. Sheet music would cover this.

The same principle applies though: Youtube has no say in deciding what is copyrighted or not. They don't want to have a say in it themselves. Someone, somewhere, claims that they own the copyright to x and y. Youtube can't and won't decide if that is truthful or not. Almost a decade ago, youtube gave the keys to claims to people to remove themselves from the equation. "Someone says they own this stuff so they took it down. Sort it out between yourselves."

How much would you bet that the same wouldn't happen to e.g. Warner Bros.. YT is quite definitely taking a stance, the problem is they're not taking a stance on truthfulness, but simply on how much money does it make us.

They are taking a stance on how much headache and money it will cost them, which is really reasonable. The reason old and unsustainable youtube died is because of the Warner Bros and alike - because their kind tend to hold an enormous amount of copyrights. If they feel they benefit from copyrights, then they will feel the most attacked. They, with their influence, said youtube cannot continue in this fashion back in the day, and it was true. They could sue youtube to the ground and they'd have to close down (assuming manual moderation is impossible). I am actually amazed that they allowed it to continue with this solution, being, "youtube, you give us the keys and we do the takedowns when we feel like our copyrights are violated, then you may continue" and youtube said "fine" and that is where we are. Now if you feel like your content is taken down unjustly, you should take it up with whoever is claiming ownership over your content. Which is... impractical actually, but that is how it is. This is one of the only ways within the current legal framework where you can have a site where people post content to freely without being liable for aiding and abetting copyright infringement yourself. No easy solution to this.

So yes, Warner Bros can be an enormous headache to youtube. Legally and financially. "Piano teacher" probably can't. Youtube acts accordingly which is pretty rational. If you owned a youtube-like service, you'd have to do the same.

I see where you’re coming from. But a class-action suit from nearly every user that has used public domain copyrighted material and couldn’t monetize it seems just as bad.

> there are provisions in the CDMA precisely for that, and the platform is liable for indulging those in systematic cases.

(assuming you mean DMCA) Yes, that has provisions, but YT copyright claims are explicitly not DMCA claims. This is intentional to both protect the content creator (lawsuits are expensive!) and YouTube.

> YouTube lawyers must know that there’s a significant risk they’ll piss of a someone like a law professor and that they’ll use all their faculty to go after what is essentially fraud:

YouTube can ban you from the platform at any time for any reason. While it's not good publicity, you don't have a legal right to be on YouTube or receive money from them.

> Even if it’s not, they are risking a change in law.

I doubt Google is happy with the status quo, actually, since it is not good for their creators. But with the system being as it is, they're doing what's best for them.

> Compared that PR nightmare to having an engineer spend a few days to hack a “public domain” user that automatically accepts re-use, or re-train to distinguish interpretations from copies… I feel like I’m missing something

For one, recognizing this music is not an easy problem. You'll need to be accurate in a wide variety of cases, lengths and qualities, which in itself is already very hard. But, just because it's that piece, it's not necessarily free: Recordings of these songs can be copy-righted. For example, Beethoven's music itself is free, but the recording performed by the Sydney opera is not. So you need to decide whether the uploader has rights to this specific recording, which is nearly impossible.

And this is just the easy case. Fair use, for example, is a very gray area and something which can take courts years to decide. Same on whether a piece is derivative or different enough to be its own work. There is no chance for Google to automate away any of this.

> There is no chance for Google to automate away any of this.

I'm not quite so pessimistic. There is a chance, machine learning is pretty good these days.

But: the chance is pretty low and I assume other priorities are taking up most of their time, and this would be a risky project from a legal point of view.

There is no chance because copyright is not a data problem. It is a provenance problem. Provenance is not a function of data.

(Humans can't really solve this problem either.)

> Provenance is not a function of data.

Might not be a function of the data in the video, but they can throw more data from elsewhere at it.

>YouTube can ban you from the platform at any time for any reason. While it's not good publicity, you don't have a legal right to be on YouTube or receive money from them.

no, but being compliant in fraud goes farther than arbitrarily banning a user. Not a lawyer, and odds are there's not enough care to address this point legally anyway. But I don't think the potential case here is as open and shut as "we have the rights to refuse service".

Well they already managed to piss off the EU, but after intense lobbying by Google, it looks like that the resulting law hinders more YouTube's competitors?