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Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth the time/effort.

This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.

Without YouTube's system, you'd have automatic takedowns based on nothing but keywords in the title: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner-admits-it...

There's no cost when you have bots sending emails. You'd have to fix the law first.

But as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion there are legal repercussions for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request. The problem is Youtube have their own version of the law and just automatically believe the claimant.

there are legal repercussions for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request

Can you find a single entity that has ever been hit with these "legal repercussions"?

The responses to you will mostly be people who haven't read the details of the Diebold case and assume that it set a precedent for false claims of infringement; it didn't, and it's still basically impossible to get someone penalized for that.

The issue, as other commenters noted, is that the only claim made under penalty of perjury is that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, of a copyrighted work.

The claim that someone has infringed your rights (or the copyright holder's rights) is not made under penalty of perjury. The only way to get someone penalized for it is, essentially, to get them to admit in court "Yeah, I knew it wasn't infringing, but I sent a notice anyway out of malice". Which is, well, pretty much what happened in the Diebold case. Other issuers of mass automated takedown notices are dumb, but not quite that dumb.

Are YouTube beneficiaries of copyright? I think they'd make more money if users were allowed to copy and remix video.

Edit: And Viacom sued them for a billion dollars because YouTube executives knew most of their money was coming from straight-up movie rips anyway. Viacom only lost the lawsuit because the memos didn't name specific videos.

> For the sake of argument, assume that we want to protect copyright on sites like YouTube. What is a good, fair solution here?

Well, it may not be a “good, fair” solution, but the process provided a safe harbor by the DMCA is a better, fairer process than the actual process used by YouTube.

The problem is that, as it stands, YouTube likely has no liability to users for taking content down without any good justification, and do has no incentive to follow the part of the safe harbor process that provides protection against liability to the accused user.

The problem with the current system is that it‘s the opposite of due process. Instead of letting some copyright violations slip as the cost of freedom of expression, the current system restricts freedom as the cost for minimizing copyright violations.

The solution is to review claims and punish abusers on both sides of copyright. There is essentially no review process. All claims are automated, which is pretty bogus, and false claims are not punished.

There doesn’t need to be a charge to remove legit content violations but if the removal is contested and found to be false the original claimant should pay up. I’d like the penalty to be steep enough that if you’re using machine learning to flag content a human should still be incentivized to take a look before the claim is submitted.

This certainly does not deal with gray areas, but quite well copes with blatant cases: monetize false claims on both sides. The protocol:

  * Copyright holder fills a copyright claim, video is not taken down or demonetized, ad revenue is held in escrow
  *  * If content uploader agrees with claim - video is removed/demonetized/ad revenue directed to copyright holder
  *  * Content uploader fills a dispute *claiming fully original content*, under potential monetary penalty of false claims
  *  *  * Copyright holder does not dispute the dispute, ad revenue is released to video uploader
  *  *  * Copyright holder fills counter-dispute, under potential monetary penalty of false claims
  *  *  *  * Content is reviewed by human, decision awarded, false claim party penalized, human reviewer expenses paid from penalty

In cases where the content is clearly not what copyright holder claims to be or content is clearly original this system disincentivizes automated, "what we have to lose" counter-claims. Of course, in gray area cases like "does this still fall under fair use" cases this is probably even worse than current setup, therefore I stress fully original content in the protocol, which should be different for fair use disputes.

One entirely fanciful solution would be to DDoS YouTube's copyright system with bogus takedown requests. Place multiple takedowns on EVERY YouTube video. Then they would have no choice but to come up with a system that relies on more than just the say-so of a so-called "rights holder."

They'll just shut down/limit the easily accessible ones and let the ones for big customers running as is.

As I understand it, appeals against these Content ID strikes are assessed by the (alleged) rightsholder.

A good start would be having appeals handled by an impartial party, though I'm sure everyone involved would be loathe to pay for that.