I think in the case of Jazzgirls Edison record, WMG managed to pick up the rights to the music & words of the song somewhere along the line, rather than the actual Edison recording.
I'm not quite sure how it works, but it seems once Warner uses a song in one of their movies, or if the actually recording was done by a company they've swallowed up, it becomes their property.
I had the audio pulled on "Singing in the rain" by Gene Kelly about a month ago.
As you'd know, this was the title song from the "MGM" movie, and as far as I'm aware, MGM is now part of the Sony group.
However, the song was pulled by WMG because they used it in the Stanley Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange" which is a Warner Bros film
I've also got other versions of Singing In The Rain uploaded, but they haven't been touched, so in this case WMG must own "Gene Kelly singing the song" rather than the musical score itself.
I've now got a video featured on my channel page which shows you how to get the audio back, by putting in a "fair use" claim to youtube, and it worked the first 4 or 5 times & the audio was back within a couple hours. All of these songs had fairly small view counts like 145 or whatever, and the videos are back how they were originally.
BUT the 3rd last one to loose the audio was "Civilization" by Danny Kaye & the Andrews Sisters. I filed a fair use claim on that one, and it was knocked back & instead they've put country restrictions on it, and have automatically done the same to 2 other videos since filing that claim.
Civilization is very popular, and has 166,000 views at the moment, but they've now added an advert across the bottom of the video which contains a link to Itunes where you can buy the song. The other 2 videos they put Country restrictions on were also fairly high view counts & now have the same "Itunes" ads at the bottom.
Funny thing is, I can't work out just which countries can't get the videos now the Country restrictions have been placed on them.
I'm still getting hundreds of views every day on Civilization, from USA, UK, Australia, the Netherlands etc etc.
I can't say for sure, but it looks to me as though the "country restrictions" is just an excuse for WMG to put an "Itunes" ad on your video in hopes of making some money out of it.
UMG doesn't seem interested in playing these sort of games though.
The first video of mine UMG pulled the audio on was reinstated after I filed a claim, but the second UMG I had was deleted completely- I assume so I couldn't file a claim to start with
It's all bit annoying at times, and I'm not quite sure how these 2 companies expect you to check if they own a certain recording or the musical score of a 60 or 80 yr old song. I'm sure they'd soon get sick of me emailing them once a week with a list of 20 or 30 songs for them to check & ok. And then should I be checking with every music group/corporation on the planet just in case a recording or lyrics are under copyright??
I've tried a few times to check online if something I'm uploading is under coyright still, by searching the recording or writers etc, but 9/10 times you'll come up empty handed.
Then in the case of "Singing in the rain", you really don't know if you're searching in the right place. I've got maybe 30 MGM labelled recordings on youtube, which you would think are all now the property of Sony, yet it seems this one record is owned by WMG!
It's all very confusing!
I'm just going to keep uploading whatever I feel like, and if the audios disabled I'll file a claim, and if it's deleted well so be it. ;D
