Coming soon to a court somewhere …

… The Empire Strikes Bach — Algorithms and copyright laws are stealing music from all of us. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The fact that James Rhodes was actually playing should have been enough to halt any sane person from filing the complaint. But that's the real point of the story. No sane person was involved, because no actual person was involved. It all happened mechanically, from the application of the algorithms in Youtube's Content ID system. A crawling bot obtained a complex digital signature for the sound in Rhodes's YouTube posting. The system compared that signature to its database of registered recordings and found a partial match of 47 seconds. The system then automatically deleted the video and sent a "dispute claim" to Rhodes's YouTube channel. It was a process entirely lacking in human eyes or human ears. Human sanity, for that matter.