I’ll admit it, I’m a huge fan of Google. I can search and find just about anything, I love my Gmail, they have great maps and I’m starting to like Google+. We’ve gotten some good response from our pay per click ads on Google Adwords and we’re even getting paid by placing ads on our Youtube videos.

Which leads me to my most recent experience. We market office space in Boca Raton. We also try to think outside the box and be a bit different. We had a unique space come available, which is 8,292 square feet of offices formerly occupied by a rock and roll memorabilia company. We shot a video (click on image below) of the space which looked interesting thanks to the various posters and photos stored there.  One of my favorites was a framed Bob Marley poster. I was looking for some good background music and found an instrumental version of Marley’s Jammin’, which worked great. Upon uploading the piece to YouTube (owned by Google), I got an e-mail warning me about the use of copyrighted material. This was pretty impressive on Google’s part as I’m assuming they must be using a “fingerprinting” program like you would use on your Iphone to identify a song on the radio.

While I respect the rights of the Marley estate to receive royalties, I am not profiting from the use of the music and I’d be happy to include a link to sell a few of Bob’s CDs or do whatever I need to do to credit and promote the music clip.

Google suggested that I use some of their royalty-free stock background music instead. I did a quick search for reggae and found a somewhat usable clip to use in place of Jammin’ While I certainly prefer authentic Bob Marley to some Google-ized quasi-reggae instrumental, the video still works. But when I played it, I noticed that Google, in exchange for my using their music, had sold an ad on my video. Interestingly it was a promo for the Dog Whisperer, as Google must know we do a lot of promotion with our dogs. The question is whether Google is more concerned with protecting the rights of the artist or feeding itself.  OK, I understand that I shouldn’t be using copyrighted music and Google needs to make money. I still love you Google, but I think I have the right to be just a bit ticked-off.

I’m hoping the video helps us to lease the space.  Meanwhile, I’ll be researching various alternatives to using copyrighted background music.  These run the gamut from royalty-free music to using Apple’s Garage band.  I’ve found that there are independent artists on sites like dig.ccmixter.org and www.jamendo.com which allow free use of their music using with attribution using a creative commons license.  Creative Commons is simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work.  I’d like to see if any of our readers have other suggestions.