A few days ago, I received an email from a streamer, who wrote this –
Hi Jackie,
I came across your post, https://jackiem.medium.com/we-are-eras-guide-to-stealing-revenue-from-creators-like-a-pro-1adba1d1dd2e, thanks to a comment from this post on Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/1kwotwl/weareeramusicbv_copyright_claims/.
I am an individual who streams to YouTube daily for many years now. As such, I have been using the same music on my streams for years during my “intro” and “outro”, and just a couple of weeks ago, “We Are Era Music BV” has claimed this music.
While I don’t live, or rely, on YouTube for revenue, I have been finding it extremely annoying that I am getting daily emails now as I received copyright claims on all of my past live streams primarily due to the audio “Ahead of the Curve – Creo” and “Rock Thing – Creo” are used each time I go live.
Information about them can be found at the following links:
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Creo/single/Ahead_Of_The_Curve
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Creo/single/Rock_Thing
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Some other claims are on music from “Karl Casey” and White Bat Audio, their license agreement can be found here:
https://whitebataudio.com/license-agreement
Below are some screen captures of my inbox and some of the pieces of music claimed by We Are Era:
This person wrote me again a few days later, as follows:
Please feel free to use my story on your website. Thanks for asking! I have not attempted to contest any of these claims just yet.
One other thing I just realized, I believe that audio/music from Karl Casey/White Bat Audio, https://whitebataudio.com/license-agreement/, has actually been getting claimed for much longer than I realized. I only say this now, as previously I never really paid much attention to any copyright claim emails I received from YouTube. After contacting you the other day, and looking at some of my emails, I realized the dates on some of them, for Karl Casey/White Bat Audio, go back quite a bit further than the other audio from Free Music Archive and the Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) licenses.
Thank you,
Chad (Gozen)
Look, I totally get why Gozen and countless other people haven’t (yet) contested these claims – We Are Era inundates your inbox with so many of them and you have to manually file appeals on every single one, as you can see from the screenshots above. It’s overwhelming, and if you don’t rely on revenue from your streams (as is the case here), you figure your time’s better spent doing more productive stuff.
Even if you do appeal, We Are Era will reject every single one of your appeals like clockwork.
Then you have to file a final appeal, where you are explicitly warned that you could lose your entire YouTube channel if it’s rejected (after doing so, We Are Era are required to sue you within a set period of time, which they won’t because they are cheats counting on us to back down. If they don’t sue you, then all the copyright claims become void, but most people never get that far, unless their name is Jackie M.).
Meanwhile, no skin off their noses – they don’t get penalised by YouTube or anyone else for making these fake claims.
When we think about scammers, this is what comes up on Google Search (photo from Interpol website) – Nigerians arrested for fraud and for obtaining money by false pretense –
Now look at what I dug up –
This is the management team behind We Are Era – take a good look at them (photos publicly available courtesy of https://company.rtl.com/en/about-rtl/management/we-are-era/) –
Tobias Schiwek, Chief Executive Officer, We Are Era –
Nancy Julius, Chief Operating Officer, We Are Era –
Christoph von Schwerin, Chief Financial Officer, We Are Era –
Look at how respectable they present themselves. Think about all your YouTube revenue going towards their paychecks.
When do we get to see them on Interpol’s website for “obtaining money by false pretense”?
So if you’re a victim of We Are Era’s scam, raise your hand and speak out.