It's possible, but most bots take a sample of the work and match it to the recording in question. If the recording has enough similarities to prove positive according to the bot, it issues a DMCA. Unfortunately, this has plagued many YouTube uploaders for the last few years that have been well within the safety of fair use. That and YouTube doesn't challenge DMCAs, even if not valid, so take downs occur even when the cover is perfectly valid. There have even been recent cases where people got DMCAed for their own work, literally being so good during a live stream that they got too close to the official MV and the YouTube bot detected it as a violation, which is both unfortunate and hilarious that they were able to fool the bot like that.The way music copyright works, it's possible it's done in a completely-legal way.
DMCA takedowns are targeted at specific recordings. The Cohen estate (or whoever they have managing song rights) can tag Leonard Cohen's recording of the song on Youtube, but not any of the multitude of covers that have been recorded over the years. Each recording of the song is its own copyright, and that recording's copyright owner would handle that (if they care).
Once a song is released, you don't need permission to record and distribute your own cover of the song. The publisher is entitled to a royalty as rights to the mechanical aspects of the song (melody, note progression, lyrics), but they cannot issue a takedown over it unless all other attempts to collect that royalty have failed.
There may very well be a musician who recorded the song as an instrumental piece and released it to the world as an open license.
Or, ever safer for Selebus, he could have comissioned a recording from someone specifically for this purpose. This way, the royalty burden is on the musician (and would likely have been figured into the commision's cost), and there's no murkiness to navigate. Frankly, if I were developing a game, this is how I would handle the entire soundtrack.
As far as how I would handle it, I would use my own work to avoid the threat entirely. The bots can't DMCA what I own exclusively and have never released, which also means no covers exist of it. Of course, that's just how I do things, I don't like to leave things up to other people in my own projects, I like to be directly involved in everything I have the skills to be a part of.
Why be concerned? There's nothing here but HOPE and HOPE is a good thing, isn't it?Sel probably brought
Should I be concerned?