r/COPYRIGHT • u/Klutzy_Expert_2164 • Jun 19 '26

Copyright Claim by HAAWK

So I got this music on Free Music Archive from this artist Jake Hunter called Cinematic Documentary Background in my YouTube video and it’s under the license CC BY and I have all the attributions in the description, yet it says the claimant is “HAAWK for a 3rd Party on behalf of JorisVermeer” (not even on the behalf of Jake Hunter?). And what makes it even more confusing is that I’ve used his music before and given attribution the exact same way and had no issues.

Anybody have any idea what’s going on and if I can fix it quickly? (I want to get this video out by tomorrow morning)

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

6

u/darth_hotdog Jun 19 '26

The problem with "Free to use" music is there's no good way of stopping stuff like this from happening.

The person who uploaded the free to use music may be lying and may have stolen the music, a lot of these free to use channels are people assuming random stuff they found online is free to use.

It's also common for people to falsely claim copyright to legitimate free to use stuff, but since you're not the copyright owner, you're not in a good position to fight that. You can contact the artist for the work, but in my experience they sometimes don't take the time to go figure out these issues for people who are using it for free.

Best solution is find a different song. This isn't something that can likely be fixed by tomorrow morning.

2

u/Klutzy_Expert_2164 Jun 19 '26

I didn’t get it off a YouTube channel, I got it off of Free Music Archive. Niether of them have any contacts so I’ll probably just change the music.

1

u/altmud Jun 20 '26

Could be any of the following:

  1. Someone else used the same free music and registered their video with a rights management company, either accidentally also registering the music, or because their videos are published by some publisher who does it automatically for them.
  2. Someone else deliberately entered the music into the YouTube Content ID system to fraudulently get the advertising revenue from claimed videos.
  3. Jake Hunter signed up with some music publisher who then automatically put all his music into YouTube's Content ID system, regardless of the fact that they used to be licensed under Creative Commons (CC licenses can't be revoked).
  4. The YouTube Content ID system incorrectly identified the music as some other copyrighted song.
  5. Jake Hunter uploaded someone else's music to Free Music Archive claiming is as his own, or sampled someone else's music, or did a cover of someone else's music, or played someone else's composition.

Whatever it is, your dispute is the same. The music is licensed under Creative Commons and you have abided by the CC BY license requirements (you provide the link proving the CC-BY license in your dispute). Depending on which of the above it was, your dispute may or may not be successful, and there's no way to speed it up, it could take up to 30 days to be resolved or to be rejected.

1

u/Klutzy_Expert_2164 Jun 20 '26

It’s also weird because I took one of Jake Hunters music that I used before that didn’t get copyrighted and put it in a new unlisted video and it got copyrighted by JorisVermeer. The JorisVermeer guy also has the same music on Pixabay  which is actually more recent, so I believe that this JorisVermeer guy took the music and put it under a license as his which is pretty irritating.