Another era of copyright claims on Youtube has once again begun. Sony Music Entertainment (SME) is currently nailing tons of musicians and general Youtube channels with copyright claims on anything at all involving pony music. Not everything has been hit yet, but the claims are still continuing to build.
Here on EQD, Sony actually managed to claim the San Diego Comic Con panel from 2012 for an army of bronies singing the My Little Pony theme. Yeah, it goes that deep.
More below!
The way these claims work so far is a simple country block and monetization. Sony will claim it and put ads on the video, then block it in 244 countries (Most likely stuff outside the USA since currently all the EQD claims still work here).
As you can see from the image heading the post, everything from the theme song, to simply using the voices of the main 6 is triggering this one. Musician Nicholas Dominique sent two images in, one from his channel and another from 174UDSI both claiming remixes:
Quite a few others have apparently been hit as well. This is bad primarily because these guys can no longer earn Google Adsense money from their remixes, at least some of the older ones, and it blocks people from certain countries from seeing the videos at all.
I can confirm on our end, that these copyright claims are still continuing. How far they will go is still a mystery. Past waves of bans were typically temporary unless it was legit clips from the show simply being mass uploaded on specific channels, which have been Content ID'd by Hasbro for years now.
Chances are, this is due to the increasing collaboration between both Hasbro and Sony, and the inevitable scooping up of Content ID usage for pony things. While they have only really combined forces for the holiday album, there is a chance that they have more things in the works causing these issues.
Typically these waves are temporary and in this case don't appear to be effecting new things yet. Fair Use should technically cover remixes, but that entire segment of law has been debated for a few years now with little actual gaining of ground. The hope would be Hasbro stepping in to tell Sony to cool it, but if they have done that in the past, there wasn't ever any evidence other than the actual claiming coming to a halt.
