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Warner Music Mutes MP Angus' Radio Documentary On Youtube

By Michael Geist

In recent years, Warner Music has become infamous for "muting" the sound on hundreds of YouTube videos that include music over which they hold copyright. While takedowns of full copies of songs is their prerogative, the effect of muting user-generated content that may have a snippet of a song as background for a non-commercial work is precisely why the Canadian government introduced the so-called YouTube exception into Bill C-32.

This weekend, Warner Music's policy hit an unlikely target - NDP MP Charlie Angus. Angus reports that he tried to post one of his old CBC radio documentaries on Carrie Chenier, the first woman underground miner in the uranium mines of Elliot Lake, on Youtube. She discusses work as a single mother as well as the fight for compensation for the cancer victims in the uranium industry.  At least that's what Angus says the discusses.  Since there is apparently some Warner Music owned audio in the background, the entire video has been muted so that it cannot be heard.   It is these kinds of situations - non-commercial new uses of works that do not have a substantial adverse impact on the underlying work - that make the UGC provision in Bill C-32 a positive step forward that users and creators.

Full post as published by Michael Geist on February 28, 2011 (boomark / email).