How Warner Chappell was able to steal revenues from 25% of a popular Minecraft vlogger's channels

Oliver Brotherhood is a British vlogger with over 3 million subscribers who has produced a string of very popular Minecraft-related videos under the name Mumbo Jumbo; yesterday, in the space of two hours, a quarter of his videos were claimed by music publishing giant and notorious copyright fraudsters Warner Chappell, who will now get revenues from those videos, and can take them down at will.

According to Brotherhood, the issue is that he paid to license music for his channel, not knowing that the music contained uncleared samples from Warner Chappell’s catalog. The question of whether sampling is fair use has never been fully adjudicated, but thanks to Youtube’s Content ID system (which will shortly be expanded to cover all online media from all services in the EU), the fact that these samples come from material claimed by Warner Chappell means that they get to hijack his revenues without ever convincing a judge that either he or the musician he contracted with had violated copyright law.

Brotherhood says that many other vloggers have had their content taken by Warner Chappell this week.

Brotherhood plans on disputing the claims, but doing so will take many hours, as each of Warner Chappell’s claims have to individually disputed.