YouTuber Copyright Struck After Others Layer AI Voiceovers On Video Game Music

from the fix-this-youtube dept

It’s barely been a few days back since we discussed just how open to mistakes and abuse YouTube’s copyright takedown system is, when NVIDIA’s demo video for its controversial DLSS 5 tech got briefly pulled down because an Italian news channel did a piece featuring the footage which it copyrighted. The copyright bots took it from there and the actual source material for the news footage got booted.

While that is a great example of an obvious simple error resulting in copyright collateral damage, there have been plenty of examples of abuse resulting in this sort of thing, too. And if you want a great example of how this could all get much, much worse thanks to AI, you need look only at let’s play YouTuber Nubzombie getting two copyright copyright claims on his video of Silent Hill 2 gameplay for most absurd reasons. It seems multiple people have taken music from the game, originally by Akira Yamaoka, and layered some lazy AI-created voiceovers on top of it and then setup automatic copyright enforcement for those sounds.

Earlier last night, content creator Nubzombie uploaded a video titled A.I. IS RUINING YOUTUBE (and my life). In the video, Nubzombie states that their latest playthrough of the original version of Silent Hill 2 was hit with a copyright strike by someone called “Agro memos.” As you can see (or rather hear), in Nubzombie’s video, the track that the Agro memos strike is protecting is a clear copy of Akira Yamaoka’s track “Promise,” but with an AI-generated voice over top.

Then, in the space of a few hours, Nubzombie uploaded a second video. As they explain in that follow-up, as soon as their first video had finished uploading to YouTube, their Silent Hill 2 playthrough was hit with a second copyright strike. This time, it was from a different artist, named “詹姆斯.K,” but the copyright claimer this time isn’t even trying to hide the fact that their track is a ripoff of Akira Yamaoka’s “Promise”…because 詹姆斯.K’s track is literally called “Promise.”

This has always been the problem with YouTube’s automatic and bot-driven copyright enforcement mechanisms. There is very little that gets in the way of bad actors claiming copyright on all kinds of content actually produced by others, sometimes with this sort of languorous and brief additions to said content, and then slap copyright enforcement on it to issue automatic takedowns or demonetization claims. That YouTube has allowed this problem to fester for years and the timeline is now colliding with the prevalence of AI tools that make all of this even easier for the bad actors is inexcusable.

Though it gets a little bit stranger with that first copyright notice, since it appears Sony Music might be involved.

While I couldn’t find any information on the second “Promise” rip-off, I did find something odd regarding the former. Agro memos’ most recent tracks on YouTube, like this one, state in the descriptions that they were “Provided to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises.”

Orchard Enterprises is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. Turns out Orchard’s got a bit of history of pulling this kind of stunt, dating all the way back to 2022. In this video, content creator EckhartsLadder details how he was repeatedly hit with copyright claims by Orchard Enterprises in 2024 because Orchard falsely claimed that the track  “Resonance” by HOME, which EckhartsLadder used as their intro and outro song for all their videos, belonged to the Sony Music subsidiary.

Sony hasn’t responded to questions about all of this as of the time of this writing, but it damned well should. Best as I can tell, Sony doesn’t have any of the video game rights to the Silent Hill franchise, and this specific game was produced by Konami in 2001, and then a remake was released in 2024. It doesn’t seem to me that Sony should have anything to do with any of this.

But even if some division of Sony is a bad actor in all of this, the onus is on YouTube to fix its platform and protect its creators. This is long overdue.

Filed Under: contentid, copyright, copyright strikes, nubzombie, silent hill 2, takedowns

Companies: sony music, youtube