Two men in the United States have been indicted for running a $20 million YouTube scam where they would claim music on monetized videos.
If you know anything about YouTube or watched any vloggers, you’ve probably heard about the crazy copyright claims for music over the past few years. Even if there is a second of copyrighted content or music in the video, the person or entity who owns it can put a claim on the video. Then they make all the money from the video instead of the person who made the video. That has pushed people to use non-copyrighted music, make the music themselves, or have people make the music for them.
That’s where the scam came in, unfortunately. The two men had a music company called MediaMuv LLC that they allegedly used as a front to perpetuate the scam. They would go and claim all kinds of videos with open source or specifically made music. The claims are very easy to create if you have the right credentials. That resulted in content creators losing their advertising revenue on the videos, these two men would get every penny according to the indictment posted by Torrent Freak.
Two Men Indicted for Running a $20 Million YouTube Scam
Possibly the craziest part of all this, they made all this money in only four years! That is an insane amount of money for just making claims on YouTube! They claimed a vast catalog of 50,000 songs, none of which they allegedly owned the rights to… Obviously now they are paying the price, but it seems insane it took this long to figure out as there was even a dedicated Twitter account and hashtag, and even a whole thread on Google Help forum talking about it starting in late 2017.
Allegedly would even sometimes forge documents saying they had the rights when talking with YouTube. The other issue comes with the content creators themselves. Most are worried to have their channels taken down if they try to defend against something and fail. It could mean the end of their channel altogether, so most just let a video or two slide and move on.
As you can see from the document above that they never paid a single artist a penny of the music they claimed to own. After they uploaded the 50,000 songs to YouTube saying they owned them, they kept every penny over the four years and it really added up.
The Victims Knew for a While
The victims of the scam knew long before any indictment happened as like we said there is actually a Twitter dedicated to hating on the MediaMuv. It’s NSFW with language, but some interesting stuff on there (its wild). The company just started making claims on content creators all over the place and obviously really upset people, especially when the claim came on open-source music or music made especially for them.
Losing it All
As it stands right they these men are losing the money, assets, etc, and being charged, however, it’s going to be really hard to correctly redistribute the money as so many people and companies are involved. We’ll just have to wait and see if they actually get the money to the right content creators. Either way, the indictment seeks forfeiture of any and all property traceable to the pair’s offending, including a property in Phoenix, Arizona, the contents of two bank accounts, a Tesla and a BMW.
Did this music scam affect you, or any of your favorite Content Creators in the past few years?Â
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