All this is very interesting but the original question is going off the rails, haha. To bring this train back on track...

Yes, we can post a cover on YouTube. Yes, YT may take it down. No, it doesn't appear that causes any problems with the uploader, the vid gets taken down, s/he moves on. No harm, no foul, right? Welll, not quite imho.

From Google's Help page concerning this:

It’s up to the copyright owners to decide whether or not others can reuse their original material. Copyright owners often allow their content to be used in YouTube videos in exchange for having ads run on those videos. These ads may play before the video or during it (if the video is longer than 10 minutes).

It's up to the copyright owner to decide. There is the moral rub because YT is forcing those owners to police YT looking for illegal uploads. It's also the answer to Rogers question that the owners do not get paid if YT doesn't have a huge database for that. According to this they don't need that because they simply wait for an owner to contact them first. Now they know who it is and now they know who to pay if they want to get paid. If they don't then YT will happily take it down.

If the rights holder is a huge corporation then I'm sure this is not an issue. They probably have some automatic algo that searches YT continually looking for this. But if it's an individual that's a burden to put on them but then maybe not. Maybe there is free or inexpensive software that can do that for them too. If not then they have to spend time maybe monthly to do YT searches and then the question is how to search?

If the uploader doesn't put the name of the song in the title, how do they search? YT itself apparently knows by their software that it's a copyrighted song but they don't automatically remove it, they wait for the owner to contact them. I may be wrong but it sounds like a catch 22 at that point. But OTH, if there's no or an incorrect song title then nobody else is going to hear it either except by accident. For the purposes of posting a cover just to show family and friends or for me perhaps to post a Biab version of a copywritten song just to demo how Biab works, I don't see any harm there because the link would need to be posted on this forum for example or to your friends only, the general public including the rights holder would never find it anyway.

Anyway, from a legal POV it seems like it's ok to post covers on YouTube and Soundcloud and probably others who use that same system. If someone is morally bothered by the fact that the burden is on the rights holder to catch it then don't do it.

Bob

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