Before getting involved in technology/new media research and analysis, I made a living as a  musician and composer.  Frankly, at times it was more of a living than at others - but suffice it to say, I was active enough to leave a fair amount of online evidence of a musical career still laying around up there in the cloud.

Although my days of releasing CDs (back when they still released CDs, that is) and writing for TV commercials are largely behind me, every now and then I still google myself (who doesn’t occasionally self-google?) - and a few weeks ago, I started noticing videos with my music showing up in search results on YouTube.  The recordings being used (demos from various older projects) were all otherwise unencumbered and were still being licensed occasionally for other uses, so in an effort to protect myself, I decided to contact YouTube and see if I could draw their attention to the issue.

Luckily, it turns out YouTube has a simple and convenient web form for copyright holders to fill out in the case of possible infringement -  after submitting the YouTube URLS of the dozen-plus clips I found by searching for my name in the credits (from the posters’ perspective, clearly a case of no good deed going unpunished!), within 24 hours I received an email notifying me that the infringing material had been removed.

As easy as that.

Until the next day, that is - when I started receiving emails from some of the surprised folks whose videos I had caused to be taken down: each one informed me they had obtained my music directly from YouTube! They had loaded in my recordings from a new YouTube music library service called AudioSwap.

Now it was getting interesting.

It was easy to understand their concern: they had selected my music in good faith from within YouTube, and now here was YouTube taking their content down and putting a “strike” against their accounts for copyright infringement!  Upon researching AudioSwap a bit further, the mystery was solved, though - I discovered that one of the several companies I had an agreement with to license my music was in fact the primary supplier of content to the AudioSwap service.  The use of these tracks was, in fact, perfectly legal.  I immediately wrote back to YouTube, alerting them to the situation and asking that the clips be reinstated.

One of the worried posters had warned me that YouTube would be slow in responding and that cleaning up the mess up would take a while - but to Google’s credit, I received another prompt email response notifying me that all the clips were now back online, the strikes were removed from each posters’ accounts, and would I mind filling out a customer satisfaction survey.

In other words, simply excellent execution on Google’s part.

• Could the licensing company have alerted its artists that this agreement was in place and that YouTube videos containing their music would start popping up?  Sure.
• Could YouTube’s copyright infringement system have been self-aware enough to flag the music on these clips as from their own AudioSwap service?  Sure.

But while the whole thing could have been avoided, my firsthand experience indicates that almost a year after the Viacom settlement, YouTube and Google are still taking this stuff very seriously - even in the case of the little guy.

So now most of the clips are back online - videos and slide shows of flowers, cats, skateboarders, and one first-person-shooter video game excerpt creepily scored with an inanely cheerful track of mine originally written as a demo for a vegetable detergent commercial.

And who knows how many other clips with my music are up there that don’t happen to credit me by name?  I eagerly await a letter from my licensing company  …hopefully with some of those “digital pennies” NBCU’s Jeff Zucker is always talking about.