On February 20, a Twitter user that goes by the handle solipsisticman tweeted two videos in which it showed that music in Shekhar Gupta’s ThePrint video was same as music from some pornographic videos. He shared a clip from ThePrint’s ‘Cut The Clutter’ video and a clip from a porn video to prove his point.
OpIndia looked into the matter and found the claim is partly true. Here, the music used by ThePrint towards the end of the video and the porn video is the same, but that music is available for free to use for videos. To search the music, OpIndia used Google’s Audio search technology. The search results showed it was song ‘Raw Deal’ by an artist named AZ, and it showed Spotify link as the first result.
Further, we also checked if YouTube has it available for creators. YouTube has a special section for creators known as YouTube Audio Library. The track titled Raw Deal by Gunner Olsen is available for free in the library.
Both the tracks are the same, and it seems the artist used different alias on different platforms.
Why do content creators use creative commons music in videos?
YouTube and other platforms have a strict policy against using copyright music in videos without the permission of the copyright owner. There are two options copyright owners can avail. The first option is to get the video with their copyright music from the creator’s channel, and the second is to show their ads on the creator’s videos. Both options are bad for the creators as they may attract copyright strikes and/or loss of revenue.
To overcome the problem, creators prefer to use creative commons music on their videos. These audio files are available on multiple platforms, including YouTube. In the case of YouTube, it provides a large selection of music in Audio Library from where creators can download the music as per their choice and use it without giving any attribution to the creator. These audio files are free to use and do not invite copyright strikes.
To understand the situation in simple words, in an unfortunate coincidence, a porn video producer and ThePrint’s Shekhar Gupta used the same copyright free music for their videos that stirred the controversy on social media platforms.