Creator of 10-hour white noise YouTube video gets copyright claims

Australian music engineer Sebastian Tomczak has received five complaints about a YouTube video he uploaded that features only white noise for 10 hours. Several parties believe that they own the rights to parts of the monotonous, crackling, static noise.

These are four parties who believe that Tomczak’s video, called ’10 hours of low level white noise’, infringes their intellectual property, so he reports on his Twitter account. For example, the company Catapult Distribution finds that a specific seven-minute section of the ten-hour, monotonous white noise sound infringes on the music production Majectic Ocean Waves. This company also states that a specific minute from the video is too similar to the Soothing Baby Sleep production. Both issues of Catapult Distribution use white noise as sleep therapy.

According to Tomczak, the sound production in his 10-hour video was entirely his own work. For the video, he generated a murmuring sound wave, using the free sound software Audacity and the built-in noise generator. He then imported the file with six hundred minutes of noise into ScreenFlow, where the creator added text, and then rendered the file as a ten-hour video.

Tomczak tells TorrentFreak that the video in question with the ten-hour composition was published in 2013 as part of a number of different videos with only long, monotonous, specific tones. He was then interested in listening to different types of continuous sounds and how the perception of these sounds can influence people’s concentration.

Tomczak created and published the videos as part of his tenure at an Australian university. As a music engineer, his research focuses on topics such as the intersections of music and sound, modular synthesis, digital production and sound design for games.

So far, only the white noise video has been the target of copyright claims. Tomczak opposes the complaints and believes that YouTube’s automated system of flagging a video as infringing will ultimately backfire on the video platform. According to him, YouTube should adjust this system so that any false complaints cannot be submitted just like that.

In principle, an account of a YouTube user who infringes someone’s copyright with a video can be suspended, but that has not happened with Tomczak yet. The complainants instead opted to automatically claim and pocket the revenue Tomczak generates from the video through the ContentID system.