Interesting that someone is trying to lay claim to "O Little Town Of Bethlehem". I think we may have just found a use for heavily armed christian fundamentalists. Get Glenn Beck on the phone, tell him some liberal internet conspiracy is doing bad things to jesus.
(1) Some artist covers a public domain song, it's on a record. That performance is still subject to copyright.
(2) Google's software matches the audio in the video with the copyrighted performance and auto applies a note that it "contains music from xyz corp", either directly or indirectly notifying xyz corp of potential infringing videos.
(3) Someone at xyz corp gets hundreds of notifications and presses the takedown button without following up to verify actual infringement.
You see, that's the other benefit of leveraging religious fanaticism to solve this. You are being reasonable and using known facts about the way these things probably work. Whereas to win this, ideally we need single-minded people who are completely immune to logic or reality. Hollywood would be perfect, but it has already picked sides.
