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Youtube Crime Music

Thieves Stole $23 Million in One of the Largest YouTube Royalties Scams Ever (mashable.com) 38

Posted by EditorDavid from the skimming-scammers dept.
"Need an easy way to make $23 million?" asks Mashable.

"Have you ever considered just claiming music others uploaded to YouTube as your own and collecting the royalties? That's basically all two Phoenix men did to swindle Latin music artists like Daddy Yankee and Julio Iglesias out of millions of dollars in royalties, as detailed in a new piece from Billboard last week.

According to Kristin Robinson of Billboard, Jose "Chenel" Medina Teran and Webster Batista set up a media company called MediaMuv and claimed to own the rights to various Latin music songs and compositions. In total, MediaMuv claimed to own more than 50,000 copyrights since 2017, when Teran and Batista began their scheme.

In order for MediaMuv to claim these copyrights and collect royalties through YouTube's Content ID system, the fraudulent company needed to partner with AdRev, a third-party company that has access to YouTube's CMS and Content ID tools and helps artists manage their digital copyrights. MediaMuv created a few fake documents and provided AdRev with this paperwork in order to prove ownership over the music it claimed. From there, AdRev not only helped MediaMuv collect royalties for those copyrights but also provided Terana and Batista with direct access to YouTube's CMS so they could claim copyrights on its own.

Teran and Batista's four-year-long royalties heist came to an end late last year following an investigation from the IRS. According to Billboard, the two were indicted on "30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft."
Mashable calls it "a huge reminder that online copyright is deeply flawed..."

"[J]ust think about how many more careful scammers are still skimming royalties off of an untold number of artists."
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Thieves Stole $23 Million in One of the Largest YouTube Royalties Scams Ever More

Thieves Stole $23 Million in One of the Largest YouTube Royalties Scams Ever

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  • Online? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14, 2022 @06:57PM (#62789774)

    online copyright is deeply flawed

    Not just online, all of it.

    • Future of Software copyright (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It will be interesting to see what happens to copyright in software going forward. As software companies move to more SaaS models the client side component becomes a freely redistributable component with a dependency on a server-side component that you pay to access.

      Soon proprietary software vendors won't be bothered about defending copyright because they won't be distributing anything that needs to be protected. The only ones caring about enforcement of copyright will be the subset of Free Software advocat

      • The promise of "SaaS everything" has been a promise ever since X11 was the shiny new thing. In reality, some stuff works best as SaaS, some other stuff works better as client-side software. Unless by "server-side component" you mean some piece of DRM that enforces activation and microtransaction verification and such. But even in that case, the software publisher still has to care about copyright, because if they don't, someone could start openly offering a variant of the software that doesn't depend on the
        • So, no, with the exception of true SaaS software (not client-side software with online DRM), software copyright will stay relevant by virtue of the fact that client-side software will stay relevant. Again, we've been hearing about the demise of client-side software since the days X11 was the shiny new thing. It still hasn't happened.

    • This isn't strictly a copyright problem (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Copyright is deeply flawed. How it's handled online is making it worse.

      But here, we have a company giving some other company direct access to its internal systems. Second company proceeds giving a third company access to first company's internal systems. Third company turns out to be a bunch of scammers.

      Not even over-reaching automated claimants, but wilful scammers. The other two companies can just... hide behind each other? Apparently the best way to scam is to start a company.

  • Does YouTube have to pay the royalties again? (Score:3)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @07:10PM (#62789808)

    After all the copyright holders weren't paid! If I buy something online and a fraudster diverts the money, the vendor won't give me the goods I thought I'd paid for.

    Or is that only how it works for ordinary people?

    • sue youtube or file an DMCA clam

    • I wonder how much is in that always shifting big opaque music money blob and if there is any way for 'ordinary' people to tap some of it, so maybe they can keep a roof over their heads and their kids have clean, nonraggity clothes.

    • Why do you think Google has the best copyright lawyers? The contracts and clickthroughs must protect Google for anything short of killing your first born.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The way it works is that if the video owner didn't monetize it then they would get nothing, but if they did then they would have had to dispute the copyright claim which puts a hold on paying out royalties. Once the dispute is settled the pay outs resume. Problem is, unless you are willing to sue these guys they just have to click the "dispute rejected" button and they get the money.

      So chances are YouTube won't pay the copyright holders anything, they will say that the holder needs to sue these guys for the

  • A guy made a video consisting solely of filter sweeps played on a number of analog synths, and nothing else. He uploaded it and got many copyright claims. Upon request for review, copyright claimants confirmed, after human review, that his track (consisting solely of filter sweeps), was indeed infringing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Of course. Youtube accepts their word on it as final and there is no recourse but to file a lawsuit in federal court, which most people couldn't afford to do and even if they won, the costs of the suit would be many times the potential income from the work in the first place. So there is zero reason for them to ever release a claim.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oh, what do you know.. One of the claimants in that video is AdRev :)

    • Re:A different example of how useless Content ID i (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday August 15, 2022 @06:20AM (#62790608) Homepage Journal

      Fran of Frantone had had copyright claims on white noise, birdsong and on clips from NASA films that she physically owns but which were used in some 90s documentary.

      It appears that there are companies whose business model is just to buy up old worthless IP and then use YouTube to falsely claim ownership of things and steal revenue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stikves ( 127823 )

      The problem with the current laws is that there is no punishment for invalid claims.

      Unless it is extremely in bad intent, like this specific case, the lawyers can easily claim "oops, we did not know". They won't even lose DMCA claim privileges.

      That makes a very one-sided system. Since they don't lose anything, except for the time to press a button, the companies will continue to mass claim on other people's uploads. Forget fair use, they will even make claims on public domain, or even somebody else's work.

      T

  • Youtube will not own one ounce of responsibility for this or the thousands of videos taken down from content creators that make it such a worthwhile streaming platform. They should set up a way to prove ownership rather than side with someone who makes a claim and censure anyone making a false claim. Submissions should be designated "fair use", "public domain", "original creation" with documents in place prior to availability.

  • It's amazing how this crap is held to higher value than heavy military equipment.

    But the "art" world has always been filled with clowns and lunatics, usually on the appraisal end.

  • It's happened to me. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @08:23PM (#62789926) Homepage Journal

    I have had companies copyright strike me for my own music. I always win on YouTube appeal, but how many people don't bother to fight it. And why does YouTube not notice the thousands (millions) of fake claims?

  • adRev has been scamming YouTube for years (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChrisKnight ( 16039 ) on Sunday August 14, 2022 @09:45PM (#62790052) Homepage
    Several years ago I posted a video of a bumblebee nest. I used a MIDI generated rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee as my music. They came after me. https://boingboing.net/2019/12... [boingboing.net]
  • When I had videos on YouTube I got false claims for all my videos, some just had me talking others used YouTubeâ(TM)s own royalty free music. System is beyond fucked.
  • Such as methods to end your need for insulin. The FDA, apparently does not care.

  • They should have walked away after 10 or15 million and just disappeared. So they weren't that smart.

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