I am currently writing an article involving videos of cover songs posted on social media (specifically Youtube and Facebook) and I am being asked to submit an ethics application on this.
I don't oppose this move, and I support this in fact, but I believe this kind of research will be exempted or at the most undergo expedited ethics review. However, issues such as copyright, consent and anonymity are arising as I go deeper in my preparation of the ethics application, which I think should be out of question since the video is publicly available and copyright claims should be processed by the copyright holders via Youtube and not my concern.
This does not mean that I won't acknowledge or cite the materials, of course I will. I also understand that anonymity and consent could be obtained (from whom?) if there's any risk involved (which from my perspective is none).
While there may be differences in terms of institutional, geographical and disciplinal contexts, I'd like to know your thoughts on this?
By "cover songs" I understand you to mean songs recorded by people who were not the original artists and as a result likely did not have copyright license to make the recording public.
I do not know the laws and rules in your country, but in the United States, the rules about research using human subjects would be the relevant ethical framework, and the rules require (1) not exposing the participant to harm and (2) preserving the anonymity of the participant.
In the United States, anything that has been published, including posting on the Internet, would be exempt from the requirements above. Because the originators have made it public, you do not need their permission to include their work in your content analysis, and you do not need to preserve their anonymity. This is because they have placed their work and their name (or Internet handle) in the public sphere by posting it. So I agree with your original comments about this.
This is not all that different from my doctoral dissertation in which I did a content analysis of published news stories. No permission from the originator was needed, because the originator had made the content public.
In terms of copyright, your subjecting the video to content analysis is not a copyright infringement, even if the cover song video was not made with license from the copyright holder...unless you include excerpts from their video with your article (such as when posting the article online). If you intend to do that, your country's laws may address whether sharing a copyright infringed video is considered to be an additional act of infringement.
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