"If it sounds too good to be true..."

Last week, I devoted a lot of time to discussing the absurdities surrounding copyright claims of classical music performances. Some readers might recall how I mentioned that I would need to go back and edit the piano recital video that featured the Satie Gnossienne No. 5 (which had been claimed by Naxos of America). True to my word, I used the Movie Maker film editing program last Friday to remove the segment of the recital video that initially caused the trouble. This process was necessary because, after I removed that track from YouTube, I still needed to fix the entire video because YouTube muted the majority of the Gnossienne No. 5 in my original video: an omission that became too obvious the more that I saw and heard it.

Fixing the video in Movie Maker meant applying the "Split" tool  to the original video. Doing this required locating good starting and ending points and deleting that segment from the video. I found this tool more practicable than the "Trim" tool, because "Trim" had the tendency to accomplish the opposite: deleting everything else from the video and leaving the problematic muted section that I needed to erase. I uploaded the fixed version of the video to YouTube, albeit with an additional disclaimer in the video description explaining why I had to delete the Satie Gnossienne No. 5. I also decided to keep the original on my channel because the recital involved years of practice and hard work. I was not planning on taking down that video, anyway.

I thought that I had resolved the problem by re-uploading the video without the claimed content. That was, until I received an e-mail message about my re-uploaded video about a half-hour later that same day.

At this point, I grew both frustrated and suspicious. I felt frustrated because I just spent time trying to fix the copyright claim problem, but I was also suspicious because I needed to know more about this "SGAE_CS" (I had seen their name before in a similar message that I received back in May after I removed the claimed piece from the original video.). Upon checking the detail, this company had claimed the rights to the Prelude en Tapisserie (another Satie piece that I performed on my recital). Out of curiosity, I Googled "SGAE_CS" and found that the they are a fake company that scams YouTubers by establishing false copyright claims. What is worse is that this scam has been happening for years to many YouTube content creators. I recently tweeted to YouTube about this problem, but they have yet to respond. It may be time for me to dispute a copyright claim against SGAE_CS. Just saying...