Intellectual Property Rights Are In Grave Danger

I’ll sum up this post quickly-The examples below provide reasons that make me not want to share too much of my creative output and ideas online.  As an artist who makes their living through their creative endeavors, I shouldn’t feel this way. Yet, I do. I know I’m not the only one; I’ve heard other musician’s frustrations and struggles. 

As a society, we are at an artistic and creative crossroad. One that could lead us down a very rocky path. For some things, new legislature is in order. For other things, it’s been understood for awhile. You just don’t do that. Yet, there are people that are fine taking other people’s material, taking credit for it, using without permission, and more.

You can’t possibly make it go away and you’re left hoping people will police themselves (good luck!). In some cases, there are laws. However, the little man without a pile of cash to take things to court, isn’t going to bother.  

A few examples of Intellectual Property Right Violations:

• Picture Usage
• YouTube Shorts- Original Guitar song taken, ZERO credit given
• Other content creators stealing ideas
• Social Media Copyright take down notices against the COMPOSER
• AI and Generative Search not giving citation and sources.

Picture Usage

Last year, I was perusing YouTube, and suddenly saw the picture of my Romero banjo sitting on the piano.  Another banjo content creator was using it as their video thumbnail. This is the main picture I’ve used for many years on this site, my YouTube channel, and album covers, etc. (It was taken by my friend Danny Davenport, ex-Warner Brothers producer). 

I’m not so sensitive that it REALLY bothered me.  After all, we live in an age where such things are an everyday occurrence.

It’s been normalized to some extent. You should assume anything you put up on the world wide web is fair game for someone else to use.

This line of thinking is fine if it’s for harmless actions; however, things are copied for nefarious activities. For example, what if someone copied your picture or video and then made it say racist or obscene things? By the way, I’ve seen this on TikTok! People take other’s videos and change the audio. At some point, you’re going to have deep fakes running amuck on the internet and people doing who knows what to your pictures and videos.

Getting back to that picture-This is the least offensive action but worth mentioning. Interesting enough, I came back a few weeks later and couldn’t find it anymore. Not sure if they are using it somewhere else or not? If the person had asked me if they could use it, I’d said, “Sure, no problem.”….but they didn’t ask.

Original Music Being Used Without Credits

Last year, I uploaded a song to my YouTube guitar channel.  It was an original song I had written over the course of two months.  I got a notification from YouTube that my song was ‘re-mixed.”  At the time, I didn’t know much about what this meant. I thought it was a good thing. Someone thought enough about my music to use it? Yay!

I gave it a look a few weeks later. To my surprise, not one ounce of credit was given to me on the re-mixed video.  I quickly went to the video description hoping to see my name and the title of the song. It wasn’t there. NOTHING was there regarding myself. Disappointing.

My song was anonymously playing in the background of this cooking/food channel’s video.  The video had 2000 views. Unfortunately, my song didn’t get much traction on my own channel. It only had 75 views.  One might say-This is good exposure for you. 

Yeah, provided I was given ANY credit. It might as well have been the cookie monster playing the guitar. My hard work was seen as something not even worth crediting.

Worse, I later discovered I couldn’t go into my YouTube account and disable re-mixing happening again without creating some sort of other YouTube account with two factor authentication.  In other words, the DEFAULT isn’t to protect creators.  It’s to add another step for them to opt-out.  It’s allow others to use their material without any reference. Despicable!

If the DEFAULT is not listing the track credits, it concerns me and I’m not participating. I haven’t posted any more original guitar music since.  I’ve also limited new uploads to unlisted videos.

You know how I solved the original problem? I deleted my video. After I deleted the video, the audio was removed from the cooking channel’s video and now that video is “Unlisted.”

I guess they wondered what happened to the song.

I later had a banjo video remixed as well. Once again, no credit given. Once again, I deleted it. I’m not going to be bothered to do whatever YouTube wants me to do to get credit for my work.

Content Creators Taking Ideas

This one runs amuck with content “creators.” I think much of it is better characterized as Content COPIERS.

Over the last year, I’ve had other content creators take my ideas because they can’t think of what to do next. 

They see something I (or someone else) does and pretty soon they are doing it on their channels.  Let’s say, I ran a “bridge experiment.” A few weeks later, there they are running a bridge test.  If I post “She’ll be Coming Around the mountain” in the key of R to the Z power, sure enough, they’ll do that too. I wonder, if I stand on my head playing “Randy Lynn Rag” backwards, if they’d attempt that as well. It could get entertaining….or not. 

At this point, I haven’t posted on my main YouTube channel in months.  I have a small channel; when creators with a large group of followers take my ideas and use it as their own, it’s a drag.

I realize people are going to overlap and cover similar topics. There is only so much you can talk about with music.  At the same time, the function of a content creator is knowing enough about a topic that you can discuss original thoughts. If you can’t, you probably shouldn’t be a content creator. There’s quite a difference in overlap and REPEATEDLY following up with the same thoughts and ideas weeks after someone else does it.

Another related story-I once had an established professional banjo player take four lessons on a VERY SPECIFIC topic. Fast forward six months later and they have written a book on the topic we discussed. You can guess where the idea sprung from. At the same time, no one can copyright a chord , scale, or music theory. The idea is silly, but I do believe some level of decency is involved.

One of my own teachers told me a story of how a student of his had done something similar (and made lots of money!). I remember the bitterness in his voice.

There’s nothing legal that exists, nor am I arguing there should. It’s a case of doing the right thing and not being that person.

You can see this unfold on Twitter. Content creators yelling at one another for taking each other’s stuff. This is where we are as a society. This is what we have encouraged in the name of content creation.

Content creators; yet, no creativity is involved in the process. Copy cats are actively rewarded and encouraged by the systems in place. This only works for so long until it plays out-people are tired of seeing it.

Anonymous People Taking Credit for Compositions 

This one hasn’t made its way to me yet. However, I’ve witnessed it happen to musicians numerous times.  Last year, guitarist Alan Gogoll posted videos of his ORIGINAL GUITAR MUSIC.  He only plays original music; he doesn’t do covers. 

Yet, someone comes in and marks his videos for a copyright violation, as if they wrote it.  Then his video gets removed.  I believe it’s happened to him multiple times. There isn’t even a system in place to accurately review these processes. 

We can’t protect the original creator of music by making it default to give them credit. Yet we can somehow allow anonymous faces on the internet to pretend they wrote our songs and get our OWN music removed?  What kind of upside down world are we living in here?

At some point, creators will decide it isn’t worth posting their stuff due to all the hassles involved. These sorts of things don’t bother those that are only posting videos of themselves playing other people’s solos. These sort of things don’t bother people that aren’t doing anything original. These sort of things don’t bother people that only copy content.

It bothers people that have sat for endless hours with their instrument, crafting it into a vessel of unique expression.

RANDOM FACT- Google has said 60% of the internet is DUPLICATE CONTENT.

AI and Generative Search Concerns

Lastly, with the advent of AI and generative search, the world of content is about to be blown WIDE open. If guards aren’t put in place, it will be for the worse.  In short, the algorithm takes content from a page like this, mixes it with a couple of other pieces of content and then the search engine delivers the answer to your query. 

One of the ‘mixed authors’ may or may not get credit or a citation. Currently, with some systems, you are given a footnote (Bing chat search). With other systems, you are given zero credit.  If you use ChatGPT, you’ll know no source is given for the information. It’s a mish-mash of historical data (before 2021).

I’m not against AI.  The image on this blog is AI created.  It is quite useful and saves time. However, I am against people not being given proper credit for their work.  I’m against people not using their own imagination to create. I used my own imagination to prompt the AI.

It’s not only text and images, AI is coming for music as well. People are already taking samples of famous people’s voices and making them sing new lyrics. What will be the new laws established regarding that? I’m curious to see. I think banjos are probably safe for awhile, haha.

Closing Thoughts

If you put something up on the internet, there’s little to no protection and it’s getting worse.  It is fair game for content thieves to take and do whatever they would like with it.  People are okay using your material and ideas and not giving you any credit for it. They are fine not even putting you in the footnotes.

In addition, technology is currently not apt to police intellectual property rights and makes mistakes. The system is not set up in your favor if you are an artist or creator.

Personally, I think this will eventually put a SERIOUS dampener on useful content in the future. Like myself, some artists will start to question whether it’s in their best interest to distribute their material everywhere. We shall see….