GOOD artists copy, great artists steal.

Picasso said that first - or Steve Jobs, depending on which smartphone you own or Wikipedia entry you believe.

But neither sentiment is particularly reassuring for YouTuber Daniel, otherwise known as "eeplox", a 28-year-old writer who went out to pick some wild salad vegetables just the other day.

It's a harmless enough video. Charming, even, as eeplox goes about his way plucking such things as mallow leaves, dandelions and wild water-cured olives, before squeezing a bit of street tree lemon juice on it all and scoffing it down to prove free salad can be edible.

In the background, some native birds tweet their approval.

And just hours after he posted it on his channel, eeplox was told by YouTube that he was using copyrighted material.

Huh?

The birds, eeplox. Those tweets are stolen.

"This baffled me," eeplox wrote in a post on the incident to Slashdot.

"So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish's exclusive intellectual property."

Who's Rumblefish?

Rumblefish call themselves "the world's largest catalog for social media".

They represent artists who want to sell their soundtracks as well as claiming their own copyright over audio samples.

They currently have more than 5.35 million tracks listed. About half a million are songs; the rest are "social soundtracks".

The idea being that if you want a soundtrack for your hilarious planking highlights video, build it using Rumblefish's database and they'll take care of the copyright concerns.

They make their money by creating soundtracks for media projects. The artists make money from the royalties each time the projects are used.

And they're extremely active, in particular when it comes to scanning YouTube videos for use - innocent or otherwise - of their samples.

Penalised

YouTube's immediate response was to start posting ads on eeplox's video, with the revenue from the ads split between Rumblefish and Google, the owners of YouTube.

After he disputed the notice, the video was sent to Rumblefish for verification.

Yep, Rumblefish assured, that's our birdsong.

"This is the first time this has happened to me," Daniel - who lists his occupation on YouTube as "Guardian of the Earth" and posts monthly videos under the title "Simple Living" - told news.com.au.

"I didn't notice the birdsong until I played the video back at full volume to try and figure out what sound in it could possibly be under copyright."

So Daniel did what any individual hassled by The Man does these days and hit the internets. Notably, Slashdot, where his complaint gained worldwide attention and most notably, that of Rumblefish CEO Paul Anthony.

Eventually, it was all sorted out as a "misunderstanding". By that time, Mr Anthony had move into PR crisis control, setting up a AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread on Reddit and claiming it all came about because YouTube "ID'd a song in our catalog improperly".

You too can eat free weeds

While pleased with the outcome, Daniel was left wondering if it's "a freak occurrence".

"I feel pretty violated by this, a mysterious entity claiming to own my content and apparently profiting from it with ads," he wrote.

On a positive note, Daniel's video is rapidly gaining hits and he's on the verge of becoming a poster boy for vegan foragers.

"I'm very pleased that this whole ordeal has brought foraging to a wider audience," he told news.com.au.

"A lot of people seemed to have no idea that they could be eating free weeds."

And for the record, Rumble Fish is also a book by S. E. Hinton and a film of the book by Francis Ford Coppola.

Oh, and a UK pop band from the 80s. And a fighting game developed for the PlayStation 2.

So it seems great artists think alike, hey Rumblefish?