Coding Horror: YouTube vs. Fair Use
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The recent example of this was the clip from Mad Men about the carousel (if you haven't seen it, look it up). Uploaded by an ordinary user but AMC left it up and instead collected on the ad revenue.
So the tech isn't just being used to prevent any clips from reaching the web - it is actually enabling copyrighted content to be shared and quoted on the web with a sustainable business model - a whole point that Jeff missed.
The Economist wrote about this a while ago.
And free publicity. Must be nice to have your cake and then get to eat it, too.
So, the computer program looked at the facts, passed the judgment and collected upon it. Looks like a very efficient RoboCop and no bloodsucking lawyers involved.
"If Content ID identifies a match between a user upload and material in the reference library, it applies the usage policy designated by the content owner. "
Or do you mean something else?
Youtube is operating as an OSP under the DMCA safe-habor laws, and this has been upheld in court. Youtbue must therefore act neutrally in each case -- that is, they have obligations both to the uploader and the alleged owner. If they don't fulfill these obligations, such as reinstating a video that doesn't actually violate copyright law (given the existent of fair use,) then they can lose their protection under the DMCA.
Granted, Youtube could opt to not seek protection under the DMCA, but it seems like this isn't their best strategy.
Denied by the copyright holder? Now we see that the system does not exist to uphold the law, but rather to serve copyright holders whether they have the law on their side or not.
Fair use entails criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use != bedazzling a blog post with humorous excerpts.
It was for personal use, not much was taken and there was no market effect so it very well could be fair use.
His blog is a commercial enterprise.
Don't equate fair use with classroom use. There are enough uptight librarians who do that already.
The clip in question this time appears to have been an excerpt from The Last King of Scotland regarding actionable advice. It was denied by Fox - I got the impression that it's a group-wide policy.
I uploaded a home made video of a world cup goal as seen from a plaza screening the game. Loads of crowd noise, AND a big chunk of the video did not have the screen visible (though I guess the commentator could be heard). About 20 minutes later I got a similar email saying FIFA had claimed the rights & the clip is now restricted in some countries. I guess they could have data mined from the title etc., but that's still damn quick for a live broadcast match.
Let's say you had a popular channel though, and you submitted the homemade clip. Depending how YouTube's system works, it could have been FIFA's video that was flagged instead of, or in addition to, yours.
Edit: The logic's a bit circular isn't it? You have to own the content to be a partner, and you have to be a partner to own the content.
No - he recorded a broadcast as seen on a screen, i.e. made a vastly degraded copy of a specific live video stream.
Wait, what? Why is it the copyright holder that gets to decide what constitutes fair use? The present system seems subject to abuse.
For whatever it's worth, look at the first comment:
In the context of youtube -- which is the context you were uploading the clip to, after all -- it's just a 90 second clip from their movie. No editorial, it's the entire thing. Someone browsing youtube who finds it will have no idea that there was a blog connected to it.
Regardless of the language used in the dispute form, this incident really has little to nothing to do with fair use, and everything to do with Youtube's hosting practices.
I think the disconnect between these two statements says something.
The 'plunk' you are describing is his ability to just 'get it done' - a trait I think most tech founders greatly underestimate. It's an ability or mental strength that makes a person able to will the project over the goal-line. I'm amazed how hard it is to complete anything - whether it's a startup app I'm working on or a piece of music - finishing it 100% and getting it 'in the can' is no small feet. It's special gift, and one that I would highly recommend anyone searching for a founder look for in their partner(s).
I have to admit I like Jeff, from his articles and such he seems to have a pretty clear way of thinking through big tech issues, and while he may sometimes surprise me with a 'lack of knowledge', I just remind myself that we all have gaps in our knowledge and at the end of the day, he's done some incredible work, and this 'lack' hasn't hurt him much (maybe it caused him to take longer to get to where he is, but he still managed to get it done).
For all we know it's his lack of knowledge that gives him an edge - he runs into something he doesn't get or hasn't been exposed too and dives in, eats it up because he needs to really know it. Compare that to a guy that takes a class on some esoteric aspect of coding, when he/she doesn't have any need to apply it, when they just care about getting a good grade - which person really has learned the material? Does the person that already learned it but didn't need it at the time have a really big advantage? They might work through the problem faster, so maybe that's the advantage - you save some time.
But I like the root of your point - one doesn't grow/learn without trying to hit their own limits and push past them. Good stuff man.
Theres one big difference between real life and (undergrad?) CS classes: the discovery phase. In most classes, the solution is laid out for you or implied in some way. Algorithms classes generally just consist of following a spec outlined by the book/teacher.
But when you run across a problem in real life it doesn't tell you to use a specific algorithm to solve it. Because of this, finding the solution usually requires a deeper level of knowledge.
When I graduated, that was the scariest part for me. Sure, I knew a bunch of algorithms, but I didn't have much practice in discovering when to use them and applying them to problems.
The funny thing is - esp. depending on how old you are - it is incredible how much easier it is to learn/find answers now. Pre-google it was tough - I frequented Barns & Nobles often to see what new books had arrived, or just to go find an answer in a book I knew they had.
But I digress... google/stackoverflow/etc have all made our lives so much easier.
The most important thing I learned in college was accepting/understanding criticism - not algebra or philosophy or how many moons orbit jupiter (all cool/good to know too btw).
Most other skills can be learned on your own. But think about how hard it is to learn to accept and understand criticism. If you receive it from your spouse, it usually causes a fight; or from a close friend or family member - ditto, also not good.
But being hammered in a peer-review style class where it would be somewhat absurd to think 'hey I'm right, my professor with 25+ years experience, not to mention the 15 other smart peers in my class, are all wrong'.
Of course there were always one or two people that really did think they were right and the professor/classmates were all wrong. They wonder why life is always so hard, and why the entire world is against them, never considering that it might be them having the problem, not the rest of us...
The other part of this though is that as a blog author, he has a desire and incentive to write about things that his readership might be interested in; so I have a feeling there is a certain amount of extra explaining, citations, and feigned not-understanding going on in his posts.
However, I would point out that formally trained people also have gaps. Just different ones that everyone is used to. The gaps of autodidatics stand out because they are unusual.
Autodidacts in general also have some strengths that are rare with formally trained people. (I don't have anything particular in mind. Just they spend their time with some different focusses and are bound to pick up some things that people who all follow the same curriculum didn't.)
So, yes autodidacts have some gaps, but this shouldn't be seen as a criticism.
The problem of matching up arbitrary degraded video to source video in polynomial time seems genuinely hard to me too.
I recall seeing a paper on how Shazam does their magic (ha!). Something to do with "fingerprinting" the audio in such a way that is resilient to background noise (that also can be indexed and searched very quickly). I imagine that a similar strategy to identify video would also work.
Maybe you could index key parts of the frame and use that to narrow it down bit by bit (pun probably intended)? So confused...
You chunk a song into small segments and create a sort of "fingerprint" for each piece using Fourier analysis or similar. (So a song segment is represented by a frequency histogram, similar to this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/svartling/4229109164/ ) The fingerprints are stored in a DB.
To match a song fragment, chunk and analyze it in the same way. For each segment, find the closest match in the database. If most of the closest matches belong to the same song, and appear in the same order as in the song fragment you are trying to find, you have a match.
Creating fingerprints from a series of video segments is roughly similar, Fourier can be used for 2D images as well.
Doing it like this, you can reduce the volume of data you need to compare against with several orders of magnitude. Scaling to YouTube volumes is still hard, but that's the sort of scaling a company like Google already has plenty of experience in.
- make the chunks small enough that they are essentially static images (one or a few frames)
- use some form of dynamic chunking where a chunk lasts until the image is sufficiently different according to some metric.
In both cases the chunks are fairly resistent to changes in speed, and the worst you need to deal with is that multiple chunks in clip A may map to the same chunk in clip B.
Edit: Also would be interesting to hear how many content-owners choose to block video uploads vs. add advertising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Otherwise he would see how easily his 90 seconds segment of the film can't be treated as the fair use:
"In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a news article's quotation of approximately 300 words from former President Gerald Ford's 200,000 word memoir was sufficient to constitute an infringement of the exclusive publication right in the work"
There are some VERY important points about this ruling. The judges ruled that this 300 words violated right of first publication. These quotes were effectively taken and printed PRIOR to publication of the book, and materially damaged the authors.
From Wikipedia: "The purpose or character of the use was commercial (to scoop a competitor), meaning that The Nation's use was not a good faith use of Fair Use in simply reporting news."
This is equivalent to PopStar X about to release a groundbreaking song that they are going to premiere on MTV and then VH1 gets a copy from an intern and plays 30s of it before MTV does. The court is saying that you can't claim Fair Use here... I think this is fair and reasonable.
However back to the wikipedia Fair Use article: "(...) the quantity or percentage of the original copyrighted work that has been imported into the new work. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, e.g., a few sentences of a text for a book review, the more likely that the sample will be considered fair use." and regarding the use of samples: "Samples now had to be licensed, as long as they rose "to a level of legally cognizable appropriation.""
His 90 seconds clip of the movie is the 100% of his video "creation" and is also a clearly "recognizable sample."
Finally "To justify the use as fair, one must demonstrate how it either advances knowledge or the progress of the arts through the addition of something new."
It's really hard for him to claim fair use, knowing how fair use is judged in court practice. There's huge difference in our idea of fair and what's considered "fair use" in the current law practice, which makes precedence.
It's impressive but it is the same idea as the normal text index. You could say it's mind boggling that Google searches through every document in 0.2 seconds, but they don't really search through them, they do lookups in an index.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...
I'd be worried to have such functionality baked into a mainstream OS. That'd definitely be a deal breaker for me.
Then again, if there was an application/feature that was a must have for me in said OS, I might stay anyway. It's not an absolute.
Thus, while YouTube eliminates overhead, it exposes you to mistreatment by algorithms. If this tradeoff is a problem, hosting the file yourself is a viable alternative.
Perhaps an alternate strategy would be the following: a fixed dollar amount of revenue generated would go to the copyright owner to cover a licensing cost for the content in question, with any additional amount going to the creative individual(s) who in all likelihood have a fair use of the content in the first place. The YT rep speaks of culture and joy, but watching others benefit financially from one's creative efforts is the surest way to smother such expression.
Basically, I never let my thoughts get owned and polluted by restrictive copyright owners, especially when it comes to entertainment.
The open question is: how long of a quote is permissible before you exceed "fair use"?
It was already ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court that 300 words taken from 300 words from 200,000 word material IS an infringement. That's only 0.15 %. Here if the movie was 2 hours and he took 1.5 minutes, that's 1.25 %.
There are criteria for judging "fair use"; Jeff refers to them in the article. All require judgment, and in the end, if both parties want to push it far enough, it is a judge who will decide how a particular case meets the criteria.