Copyright disputes

A while ago I uploaded this little video to my youtube channel.

It's nothing spectacular and it was just some video I had kicking about and it isn't that bad to just delete it. Anyway, I tried to spice it up a bit with some music. Vivaldi - Four Seasons Spring seemed to be a great fit for this video. So I found a copy of this track (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:01_-_Vivaldi_Spring_mvt_1_Allegro_-_John_Harrison_violin.ogg), licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic (License available here http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/deed.en) and finished my video, uploaded it and all was good. I monitized it and that was that. I doubt it ever made a penny from the monitization but I'll never know as that was before the youtube revamp to list Ad Revenue per video. That isn't important anyway.

Some time later it was flagged as "Matched third party content" and the claim was made by CD Baby. At the time I just set the video to private and decided to deal with it later. Later came, about a week and a half ago when I filed my dispute with this claim. I cited the source and license of the music and the claim was released. I tried to enable monitization again on the video and CD Baby claimed ownership, again. So I disputed it again and it was released again. I tried to enable monitization again and this time an anonymous "Rights collecting society" claimed ownership. So once again I disputed the claim and it was released. Once I tried to enable monitization again it was then claimed by APM Music and again I disputed the claim. Turned monitization on again and had another claim for ownership of the music filed. This time by the Harry Fox Agency.

So here I am, 5 disputes into this one video and every time I dispute it another claim is filed.

It does leave me with some questions:

a) Why are claims submitted one by one by different companies?
b) My dispute has been accepted once and nothing has changed in my video - why do I need to submit it again and again for each company?
c) Why is the company involved the only one reviewing these claims?

Royalty free and commercial use audio

I've struggled for a while to find good sound effects and music that can be used on my youtube videos. There are a lot of sites out there that offer royalty free content however, they want you to buy the music or sound effects first of all. Other sites give you Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licenses. These are mostly good to use but, as the license states they do not allow for commercialisation of your video on youtube (or else where for that matter).

It's taken a long time to track these sites down but so far I have these 2 main sites as the best source of audio content online that will allow you to commercially distrabute your videos and animations on youtube. Or else where.

http://incompetech.com/
http://www.freesound.org

The first site has a lot, and I mean a lot, of music. Especially considering that it is all produced by one person (Kevin MacLeod) and the only condition on use is that the audio is listed within the video as coming from that site, by the musician and which track it was you used. The second site is a collection of sound effects. Well, the audio there is not specifically made as sound effects and a lot of it can be a bit raw as it's just a site for people to upload any and all noises to. Most of them are within context (tagged, titled, etc) to make it easy to find the type of noise that you want and you just need to register a free account to download a track. All of the sounds there are listed under the creative commons no rights reserved license, so you can download them and then edit them and include them in your own videos, animations or other works for commercial distribution without any problems.

Of course, the best way to get sound effects is to make them yourself. The music on the other hand is not as easy for those of use less musically inclined. Producing the content yourself is time consuming though.

The one site I found that was of interest as well is http://www.fiverr.com it's a site that lets people offer services for $5 - hence the name of the site, everything is $5 - and they have a lot of voice over artists listed there. Most of the ads say it's limited to 60 seconds which sounds ideal for my own videos as I tend to be between 2 and 5 minutes in  length and I don't think any of my characters would have more than 1 minute of dialogue in the whole video. I've not tried this yet but I will and report back here once I do.

Does anyone else know of good resources to use or what do you use or do?