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's 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.

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—the holders of 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 earned by the video, which has been viewed more than four 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 John 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 simultaneously 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 a "fair use.")