"It even said some company made a claim against them (even though they were private)."
The claim system is automatic based on Shazam-style audio "fingerprints"; companies basically pre-complain about any uploads that match audio sources they supply to Google that the claim copyright on.
On one hand, I can sort of understand Google's position with this proactive system because the alternative would mean they have to manually deal with probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of copyright claims.
On the other hand, it is horribly broken in a lot of ways. In addition to not caring if your video is private, there are basically two classes of people (the ones with lots of subscribers who generate a lot of adwords hits for Google and everyone else), with the former class having a much easier time of disputing bad claims. Also I've run into situations where music that was creative commons licensed was flagged with attempts to unflag it automatically denied (with no legal basis to do so) and most amusingly(?) of all, Google offers a bunch of public domain recordings they suggest you use for your videos, but using them is almost guaranteed to generate a copyright claim from some third party that you then have to manually dispute.
I basically stopped using YouTube for videos because there seems to be like a 80% chance anything you upload will be auto-copyright-flagged, even if there is no recognizable music in it and it isn't worth the hassle to deal with the system.
The claim system is automatic based on Shazam-style audio "fingerprints"; companies basically pre-complain about any uploads that match audio sources they supply to Google that the claim copyright on.
On one hand, I can sort of understand Google's position with this proactive system because the alternative would mean they have to manually deal with probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of copyright claims.
On the other hand, it is horribly broken in a lot of ways. In addition to not caring if your video is private, there are basically two classes of people (the ones with lots of subscribers who generate a lot of adwords hits for Google and everyone else), with the former class having a much easier time of disputing bad claims. Also I've run into situations where music that was creative commons licensed was flagged with attempts to unflag it automatically denied (with no legal basis to do so) and most amusingly(?) of all, Google offers a bunch of public domain recordings they suggest you use for your videos, but using them is almost guaranteed to generate a copyright claim from some third party that you then have to manually dispute.
I basically stopped using YouTube for videos because there seems to be like a 80% chance anything you upload will be auto-copyright-flagged, even if there is no recognizable music in it and it isn't worth the hassle to deal with the system.