Neon Sex People gets pulled off YouTube wrongly?

Neon Sex People video is the latest victim of the spat between Warners and YouTube – it has been pulled from YouTube. Big deal, it happens etc (although for the record this is the first time for me).

The weird thing the eagle eyed might have spotted though – unless there’s some backscene dealing or selling of back catalogue I don’t know about, there isn’t any WMG content in the video?

Break it down:

Depeche Mode ‘People are People’ – MUTE (EMI)
Latour’s People are Still Having Sex – Polydor (Universal UMG)
Neon Neon – Lex Records which is supposed to be independent.

I’m scratching my head about this…Stupid YouTube, wondering whether mentioning it might get my other videos pulled or whether it’s worth fighting. Probably not if you read their dispute procedure:

Under certain circumstances, you may dispute the copyright claim from WMG. These may be any of the following:

* the content is mistakenly identified and is actually completely your original creation;
* you believe that your use does not infringe copyright (e.g. it is fair use under US law);
* you are actually licensed by the owner to use this content.

Hmm can’t fulfill the first one totally (although I’ve not been told it’s a problem either) but it’s weird YouTube are wrongly tagging videos as having Warners music when they don’t.

Has anyone successfully disputed these? I know YouTube has a deal with Universal, Sony and EMI that videos with their content get licensed, so it shouldn’t be an instant ‘no’ – but I think they’ve got it wrong in this case. Having them poke around my YouTube account might cause more aggro though.

Thankfully I uploaded it to Facebook and Myspace Vimeo – so it’s still available here:

EDIT in 2020 – that got eventually pulled off as well! Watch it on my site:

EDIT: Managed to find out more info – it’s People are People which it’s claiming is Warners – news to me, Depeche Mode are signed to Mute it looks like it was issued in Japan on Warners (nowhere else), which is spurious at best as the rest of the world was EMI or other record companies – just block it in Japan then – that doesn’t mean they own the rights to it for the rest of the world, esp. when EMI who controls the other areas including here in the UK DOES have a deal with YouTube. It’s a minefield.

Or did WMG buy the Depeche Mode back catalogue? If so a lot of DM bootlegs are going to get pulled? I doubt that since DM are signed to EMI still…who knows….