Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

The ethics of this move are quite questionable on Youtubes part.

Dumping a large cognitive load on shared volunteer infrastructure without some level of compensation? Not cool.

The fact that Youtube is doing this and is not:

* paying wikipedia for the service they are demanding of it

* offering wikipedia support in developing tooling to cope with the NEW TASKING that youtube is expecting

* talking to them about it before announcing it

Suggests that Youtube does not understand its own role in the media ecosystem and is exposing itself to systemic legal and moral risks that could have adverse effects on the company itself and possibly on the entire industry.

If someone gets to a Flat Earther video via autoplay ( start from watching aircraft videos.. ) are they better served by being directed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth orby being shown a countervailing video explaing that the earth is in fact round and there's evidence and how to check it?

Does Youtube have a responsibility to help society stay within shouting distance of the reality principle? I think it does.

Do you?

YouTube can't pay Wikipedia for the service because this isn't a service Wikipedia offers in the first place. And honestly if this problem could be solved by throwing money at it, Google would already have done so. They essentially want someone to point the finger at the next time someone blames them for inaccurate content, and knew that there was no way Wikipedia would agree to it with an official partnership.

The rude part is that Youtube is forcing Wikipedia deeper into the fake news wars, and not even talking with them about it, apparently.

Thank you. I was beginning to think that reading comprehension was a lost art here at HN

I rather think you're being extremely dramatic, and with zero justifications for why this would suddenly add a "large cognitive load" to Wikipedia (relatively to the load they are already sustaining today), or why it's a "new tasking" that will require new tooling to cope with (rather than reusing the tooling and processes they have been developing for more than a decade to deal with contentious topics), or why it exposes YouTube and the entire industry to "systemic legal and moral risks".

> and with zero justifications for why this would suddenly add a "large cognitive load" to Wikipedia

Because if a video about say, 9-11 conspiracy theories, will have an infobox added to it which quotes the first par of a Wikipedia article, makers and viewers of such a video will go to Wikipedia and edit the first par to front-load the information they want to see. This will happen extensively across hundreds of thousands of topics. Many of Wikipedia's policies and processes won't apply to these new edit wars because they are about whether or not information can be included, rather than which information appears in the introductory part.

Many controversial Wikipedia articles are already protected in some ways. This is nothing new.

How does forking over cash help with the burden on said volunteer infrastructure? Is there any relationship at all between Wikimedia's monetary expenditures and editor effort expended?

That kinda sounds like a failing on Wikipedia's end.

hiring developers to help develop software to make editing easier. wikimedia has stated this as one of their uses for donations in the past afaik

Youtube is indirectly compensating Wikimedia though; the benefactors page lists Google Matching Gifts as a major benefactor (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors). Looks like that's a 'matching' foundation of sorts that will match / double certain donations - maybe from googlers?

I agree with the first part of what you said.

As for the second part. Can you convince me of why I should trust Youtube's owners to police what I can see and hear, rather than rely on my own whims and judgements?

Let's say we do allow our largest corporations to police thought. In that case, would it be OK for me to question or dissent?

> Can you convince me of why I should trust Youtube's owners to police what I can see and hear, rather than rely on my own whims and judgements?

Asking this question is precisely the systemic risk to Youtube. If there's thought policing going on; there will be a host of players with "the best of intentions" who want in on it. From Animal Control to the Pentagon; every branch of .gov will want a piece of that pie as will most of the quasi-governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.

If only truth is allowed; whose truth?

If fiction is marked as such; who decides what is not fantasy?

If some powerful faction makes money from people believing that chemtrails are government mind-control drugs being spewed into the air to make us all more compliant and effeminate; should they be allowed to spread that belief at will? What happens if the profitable meme is that a certain ethnic group is diluting the purity of a majority ethnic groups heritage and should therefore be exterminated? Do we allow that?

What are the limits of acceptable folly?

Or what if Harvard scientists said that sugar is good, fat is bad, because they were paid some bribe?

So Youtube bans videos spreading "fake news" that disagrees with the "science" by "foremost industry experts."

What if it was about leaded gasoline? Or $500 million is missing Haiti charitable funds.

Or the catalyst for the Vietnam War, the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as the WMD claims that set off Iraq War, were all lies?

All these things really happened.

Maybe youtube is unhappy with their current solutions?

Some videos* are already walled up behind warnings and disabled features.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Qt6a-vaNM

Off topic, but it's damn ironic that a video decrying rich, pervasive manipulators is hosted on a platform controlled by the rich, which then tries to guide people away from the video, by disabling its standard attempts to guide people toward the video, which ends up making the viewing experience better.

I watched about 3/4ths of that conspiracy video for fun and I don't even get it being restricted under "hate speech." There are parts that are obviously either untrue or exaggerations but the whole thesis of the video is "american fascists are behind everything and world war II was invented to be a profitable enterprise for industry captains."

The hypocrisy is that if you tried scraping google results they would block you so fast your head would spin.

But is that really comparable? Wikipedia is compiled by volunteers, but Google search algorithm or results are not. If Wikipedia was really a paid service, it very likely would not have access to so many unpaid volunteers.

Abusing the work of volunteers is a morally worse act than abusing the work of paid services. I don't see the argument that the opposite should be true.

Why is this "abusing volunteers" but large coorperations using open source tools not?

Wikipedia is open for everyone, and in my opinion that means you don't get any right (legal or moral) when someone, anyone, uses that information within the rules you set in the license.

If they want to prevent this, they should change their license.

It is true that if Wikipedia wanted to use legal means to prevent it then they should change their license, but it is equally true that if Google want to prevent users from scraping their site then they should stop making the search site public available. The web is open for everyone, and thus following your argument the rights (legal or moral) should not apply.

Naturally Google won't prevent users form accessing the search since that would invalidate the purpose of their site, and equally naturally Wikipedia won't change the license since it too would invalidate the purpose of their site. Both however do complain and may invoke blocks when they feel that people are abusing the permission that is normally given.

From a legal stand point, Google can arbitrarily revoke access to their site and in similar way wikipedia could revoke access (which is not the same as changing the license) to Google. They could block Googles bots, or change the targeted information for which they intend to scrape. Wikipedia could publishing a explicit statement on how Google (as a legal entity) may access their servers and Google would be legally bound to follow it or be charged under hacking laws.

> The web is open for everyone, and thus following your argument the rights (legal or moral) should not apply.

I didn't say that, and I disagree with that. The web isn't "default open", and Google has a license that you agree to when using their product that says what you can and cannot do with it. And scraping their site is against that "license" (aka the "terms of service") giving them both the legal and the moral right to stop you while keeping it "publicly" accessible.

Wikipedia's terms of service specifically state that anyone is free to read, print, share, and reuse their articles and other media under free and open licenses. They have no more right (moral or legal) to take issue with youtube including wikipedia snippets in their application than Linus Torvalds has the right to take issue with Google using Linux in their application. As long as you follow the license to the letter, you are legally fine, and in my opinion as long as you follow the "spirit" of the license, you are morally fine.

I don't see this move by google as violating either of them. The director of Wikimedia might not like it, and that's fine, but Google is in no way under any obligation to stop what they are doing (again, legally or morally in my opinion).

Wikipedia can adjust their terms of use, but they themselves have a framework for how they can update their own terms, and part of that requires a 30 day comment period [0]. If they have issue with this, they can absolutely update their terms, but I would never donate to the wikimedia foundation again and would stop contributing if they are going to start deciding who is allow access to their data that they champion as "free and open".

[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en

The term of use is not the same as the license for the content. As is stated in the summery of the linked page, permission is granted under conditions such as "No Harm – You do not harm our technology infrastructure" and "You adhere to the below Terms of Use and to the applicable community policies when you visit our sites". Those conditions are not part of the license, which is a important distinction.

So all they need to do if they wanted a legal tool to prevent google is to create a community policy which dictate how scraping may be done for the purpose of youtube. No 30 day comment period.

Further down on that page, section 10. Management of Websites: *"The Wikimedia community and its members may also take action when so allowed by the community or Foundation policies applicable to the specific Project edition"

And finally in section 12. Termination: "We reserve the right to suspend or end the services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice."

In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.

But copying and reproducing snippets from wikipedia doesn't do any harm to their technology infrastructure. It would be a negligible amount of hits to their system to grab and update the cached snippets.

And you are correct that the terms of service and license are different (even if there is a bit of overlap) but it's the license that matters when you are "copying" the content and reproducing it on your own, and the license is either CC BY-SA or GFDL both of which have no ability to prevent any one specific person from using the information.

>In summary, they reserve the right to block access in response to abuse.

This isn't abuse, its use. If copying the data from wikipedia and serving it up with attribution is abuse, then they need to update their terms of service and licenses to explicitly say so (which would pretty much end wikipedia). If Google is harming their infrastructure by causing excessive load doing the scraping, wikipedia has every right to block them. But Google is not (as far as we know), and therefore wikipedia does not have any moral right to block access, and Google has no moral or legal obligation to stop scraping and reproducing the content on their own servers. And if wikipedia does block Google from the service, Google has every right (legally and morally in my opinion) to find an alternate way of getting the data and reproducing it that doesn't access wikipedia's servers directly.

The thing is Wikipedia is out there for anyone to link to, without paying a dime, and there are no legal requirements for compensation.

Now, you and others may think they have some ethical responsibility (I'm not sure I agree with that) but if YouTube had to parse all the ethical requirements their users thought they had to abide by, they'd never get anything done.

B2B interactions are never bound by the same ethical constraints that human-to-human interactions are. Corporations are not people - they can be bound by laws but not arbitrary social conventions.

Near as I can tell, Wikipedia is SOL unless YouTube wants to help them out. YT is certainly not obligated to.

> Corporations are not people - they can be bound by laws but not arbitrary social conventions.

Corporations are bound by social conventions for the same reason natural persons are: if they sufficiently violate them, people impose consequences on the corporation by actively avoiding interactions beneficial to the corporation.

This is not about linking. Anyone can link to Wikipedia articles without paying a dime. There is a very significant difference between linking to an article like what HN does, and copying new articles and publish them which HN does not.

because if it’s legal, it’s morally acceptable right? i guess the patent trolls are in the right then.

You make an interesting point, though I think you're placing a little more responsibility on YouTube than they currently warrant. Perhaps in 20 years the argument you're making would be taken seriously if YouTube continues on it's current trajectory to become as much a tool for information dissemination as it currently is for entertainment.

That's not 20 years down the road, that's now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...

This is an opinion piece, but the author is a respected professor who has done some really interesting research on this stuff, so I'm inclined to take it seriously.

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