Every director knows that the score can make the scene. Anyone who’s ever watched a rough cut without soundtrack music can confirm this. Case in point: Something weird happens to the beloved throne room scene that ends the original 1977 Star Wars if you’re crazy enough to delete John Williams’ brassy music from it: Instead of a triumphal award ceremony, it becomes an awkward mime interrupted by sporadic coughing, an occasional strangled yell from the hairy humanoid alien Chewbacca, and tepid applause from a crowd of Rebel troopers.

Jeremy Hsu is a science and tech journalist based in New York. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

Fans of the YouTube channel Auralnauts, which posted the doctored Star Wars scene in 2014 as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the emotional power of Williams’ score, loved it for that weirdness. But another set of viewers—those with the rights to the movie’s soundtrack—tuned in to these sounds of silence and heard something else: the ka-ching of a cash register.

That’s what the Auralnauts discovered earlier this summer when they received word that Warner/Chappell—the global music publishing arm of Warner Music Group—had filed a monetization claim on their “Star Wars Minus Williams” video through YouTube's Content ID System. That’s right: The copyright holder was claiming ownership of something that wasn’t there. Under the claim, Warner would receive any future ad revenue the video earns, which has been viewed more than 4 million times. The company’s effort to monetize silence transformed the Auralnauts video: Once just a clever gag, it quickly became a flashpoint in the broader YouTube conflict between freedom of expression and copyright protection.

Since 2012, the Auralnauts—Zak Koonce and Craven Moorhaus—have paired original, electronica-inspired music with parodies of internet culture and popular Hollywood franchises on their YouTube channel. Koonce, the filmmaker and main comedic voice of the duo, occasionally shows his face; Moorhaus, the composer, hides his features behind a helmet during his rare appearances.

Neither appears in their “Throne Room” parody. The video does feature a few seconds of (copyright-free) music at the beginning, a Williams-esque passage from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” And it concludes with four seconds of a brief loop from the original Williams score’s familiar ending—a cheeky musical reminder of what listeners are missing throughout most of the video.

The Auralnauts channel has steadily grown to more than 48 million views and 200,000 subscribers in total—enough so that the New York City-based creators have harbored hopes of focusing on their YouTube channel full time instead of working other jobs. The Warner/Chappell claim, along with others filed against their work, threatened to thwart such ambitions. (The Auralnauts didn’t face similar challenges to their reuse of video material in the “Minus Williams” piece, perhaps because it represents such a tiny fraction of the full movie that it qualifies as fair use.)

The music industry has long complained about YouTube making ad money at the expense of music copyright holders under “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that excuse service providers from being liable for copyright infringements. In response, Google-owned YouTube points to its automated Content ID system, which gives copyright holders the option to either take down videos based on copyright claims or take the ad revenue generated from the videos.

The monetization option has proven especially popular among music publishers. A 2016 report by Google found that music companies chose to monetize more than 95 percent of YouTube videos involved in copyright claims instead of blocking the videos, and YouTube ended up paying the music industry $1 billion in ad revenue that year. Still, YouTube isn’t paying copyright owners the way subscription-based streaming services are: A 2017 report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimated that a for-pay service such as Spotify paid record companies $20 per user in 2015, whereas ad-supported YouTube paid less than $1 per music user.