The Recording Industry Association of America is on a take down notice spree

 Out of the blue I got a very formal sounding submission to my contact form from a rep from the Record Industry Association of America. It read as follows...

July 24, 2020 Dear Sir or Madam:

I am contacting you on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) and its member record companies. The RIAA is a trade association whose member companies create, manufacture and distribute approximately eighty-five (85) percent of all legitimate sound recordings sold in the United States. Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet, and including with respect to the copyrighted works identified below. 

We have learned that your service is operating and/or hosting the below-referenced infringing web site(s) on its network. These site(s) are offering files containing sound recordings which are owned by one or more of our member companies and have not been authorized for this kind of use, including without limitation those referenced at the URL(s) below. We have a good faith belief that this activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. We assert that the information in this notification is accurate, based upon the data available to us.

We are asking for your immediate assistance in stopping this unauthorized activity. Specifically, we request that you remove the files from your system, including any mirrored or duplicate copies of those files, and/or that you disable all access to the infringing files and associated links, and that you inform the uploader/s and/or site operator(s), as applicable, of the illegality of his or her conduct.

We also ask that you consider the widespread and repeated infringing nature of the uploader(s) and/or site operator(s)' conduct (as applicable), and whether that conduct violates your terms of service and/or your company's repeat infringer policy.

This e-mail does not constitute a waiver of any right to recover damages incurred by virtue of any such unauthorized activities, and such rights as well as claims for other relief are expressly retained. In addition, our use of your service's required notice form, if applicable, is merely meant to facilitate removal of the infringing material listed below and is not meant to suggest or imply that your activities and services are within the scope of the DMCA safe harbor. You may contact me at RIAA, 1000 F Street NW, 2nd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20004, Tel. (202) 775-0101, or by e-mail at antipiracy@riaa.com, to discuss this notice. We await your response.


Sincerely,
Traci Crippen
Online Content Protection RIAA

 So as it turns out my old defunct podcast Rockast (which is still available on iTunes) contains "Don't fear the reaper" by the Blue Oyster Cult...and that's the problem. Each podcast had a theme and the song was a part of that theme. While this seems really random, legally speaking I suppose I'm in the wrong. I removed the file and wrote back to the provided email address. I have not heard back from them. Meanwhile I decided to do some googling and find out if this happened to others...and it did.

 RIAA shenanigans - Radio Clash podcast gets its first takedown - looks like Radio Clash Podcast had an almost identical situation to mine. There seems to be a pretty clear trend of the RIAA recently sending out copyright notices. For example my podcast ended 9 years ago; so it's been online for probably 10 years and only recently is this coming up. Apart from podcasts like mine and Radio Clash, the RIAA went after Github, making them remove their "Youtube-dl" software. As far as I can tell, it allowed users to download the youtube video/music track. I haven't actually used it before.

"The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites." - The RIAA

 While this incident was a bit jarring for me, many are interpreting this as an "egregious abuse of the notice and take down system." Apparently youtube-dl doesn’t infringe on any RIAA copyrights. More info can be found here: RIAA Abuses DMCA to Take Down Popular Tool for Downloading Online Videos As for me I'm a small creator and taking down my old podcast is not a huge deal. Also it turns out GitHub reinstated youtube-dl after RIAA’s abuse of the DMCA so there's some good news on that front. Naturally it seems like there will only be more of this to come; especially for people who have music related podcasts. 

Have you got a notice from the RIAA?