A little while back I posted an insanely cute video of my baby daughter taking some of her first steps on YouTube. The quality was pretty bad because I took it with my camera, so I spiced the vid up a bit with an intro title, outro message, and one minute of music; namely the song “Tree Hugger” by Antsy Pants and Kimya Dawson. The song is on the soundtrack to the movie “Juno”.

Being a musician myself, I know it’s not 100% kosher to take copyrighted material and slab it onto a little YouTube action. Still, given the high-scale rampant copyright violation constantly taking place on YouTube, I hardly expected to have my little video muted by the powers that be.

To put this into perspective, my video has 60 odd views. It contains no hidden advertisements or agenda. I know this is YouTube trying to cover its ass, but I think this is going a bit too far.

(WMG is Warner Music Group.)

I decided to do a search for “Tree Hugger” on YouTube. (Note that this was not the name of my video.) So without further ado (deep breath):

• Tree Hugger by Antsy Pants and Kimya Dawson (has over 80,000 views)
• tree hugger by antsy pants (entire song for the purpose of just posting the entire song. over 900 views)
• Tree hugger by antsy pants (over 133,000 views)
• For Kimya. (and Juno) (almost 3,000 views)
• Tree Hugger (over 500 views. I like this one.)
• treehugger (over 500 views)
• tree hugger

The list goes on. Just do a simple search on YouTube for “Juno Tree Hugger” or similar. There are something like 70 listed based on that search. By the way, I did not tattle on (“Flag”) any of these people.

I don’t really see this as an issue of the music industry not “getting” the internet. I agree that artists need be compensated for their work. My problem here is that this is either a bad case of micromanagement, or (worse!) that one of the family members and friends to which I sent my video tattled on me.

Filed under: Computers, Music by A.B.