Longtime readers may recall, it was about 18 months ago that I went a little crazy making some videos for YouTube, one of which was a fanvid tribute to Rose Tyler from Doctor Who. After much deliberation over appropriate soundtracks, I chose that classic song by Sting, Fields of Gold.

Anyway, I just got a copyright notice from YouTube, saying that they’d scanned my videos and identified that my vid was using the Sting song as the soundtrack. I knew that they’d been using some of this newfangled tech to digitally match content against copyrighted material, and my hackles went up when I read the following:

This is to notify you that your video Doctor Who – FIELDS OF GOLD – Sting has been identified as containing content that may be owned by someone else. The material identified in your video, the person claiming ownership of the material, and the policy they have designated for its use on YouTube are detailed below.

“Damn,” I thought to myself. “They’re going to ask me to remove the vid that I’d worked so hard on.”

But then I read a little further, and as it turns out, the “policy designated for it’s use on YouTube” was… “ALLOW!”

God bless Sting and his altruistic nature, my favorite vid creation is safe from the copyright police! That is, until the BBC decides that they won’t let me use a mashup of their footage…