YouTube’s Piracy Filter Blocks MIT Courses, Blender Videos, and More
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
At risk of repeating my comment[0] from 3 days ago, I'd like to appeal to you to contact the MEPs that will vote on Wednesday in the EU's JURI committee. This was the first time I called politicians' offices to voice my opinion. The assistants were shocked that a private person actually bothered to do so and seemed quite humbled - I could hear the change in the tone of their voice when they realised an ordinary citizen is calling. I think it's a lot more effective than the 1000s of e-mails piling up in their spam folders.
Please help out to make sure this directive proposal is voted against on Wednesday by the majority of the JURI committee. List of Twitter handles of reportedly yet undecided MEPs:
@jbergeronmep @1PavelSvoboda @FrancisZD @KaufmannSylvia @mcboutonnetfn @rohde_jens @marinhopintoeu @mady_delvaux @emil_radev
And before someone gets on me...I realize that these are automated filters that are rarely asserted by the actual copyright holder.
Plain old money based fines should work. Even a tiny fixed fee of $50 per error might be enough, given the scale of the internet.
If you're right 95% of the time, you get a discount. If you're wrong 50% of the time, you pay the full fee.
Who would be in charge of setting these?
Google is blackmailing the Blender foundation to try and get them to enable adverts.
https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blende...
edit - and Blender have now got https://video.blender.org/ in testing already. I didn't think they'd be the ideal people to issue ultimatums to on video hosting, given their technical specialities.
A situation like this triggered the development of git, (after the licence to use bitkeeper was withdrawn from the linux kernel team) so I will be watching the fallout with interest.
The Blender team never did that, and also never reacted to any youtube support mails.
They said YouTube was requiring them to enable ads, but the ads checkbox was grayed out. Among other issues. Not that they wanted to enable ads on a not for profit site. But just taking this one issue, it's not clear how they could have possibly complied with Google's requirement, when Google keeps the checkbox UI element grayed out and unchangeable.
If the fine went to the person who uploaded the work, this would be good because it would force the filter to be robust in the face of adversarial attacks.
If it's possible to trigger those intentionally, then it's likely that it's also happening accidentally, and this policy would make that stop.
Which copyright should be lost, if the assertion was false?
I don’t understand. I put out a takedown request for something I don’t have the copyrights to and as a result the real copyright holder loses their copyright? How is that fair?
You use my song in a fair use way
I claim you are infringing my copyright
you challenge, I fail to prove my case
I lose copyright on the song and it enters the public domain.
I own the copyright on the song X.
Person A uses the song X in a fair use way.
Person B claims A is infringing.
Person A challenges and wins.
Then I lose my copyright, without any involvement?
That's so disproportionate that you might as well just abolish copyright.
Also, most of the world doesn't have fair use like the US does, though many places have similar but weaker provisions in some respects. US fair use law is somewhat controversial, because it arguably doesn't comply with international obligations.
Ideally that's what we would do.
The DMCA strikes a balance for the copyright holder and the host, by letting the host avoid any liability for the copyright infringement, as long as they enforce valid requests by no longer hosting the content.
The new EU law builds on this principle, giving hosts more responsibility to check whether copyright might be being infringed. I'm strongle against the idea, but I can see the logic that the host is best-placed to actively monitor all uploaded content.
A big issue I have, both with the DMCA and this new legislation, is that there's no balancing in the direction of the uploader. Aggressive solutions like your proposal do address this imbalance, but they don't do anything to address the actual concerns each side has.
If we want more reasonable copyright laws in this arena going forward, we should also be pushing for an uploader's right to appeal, as a balance against the rights of and affordances for the other two parties: * There should be an 'appeals'/'counterclaim' process for content uploaders to take responsibility for the content. Presumably, to balance against the copyright holder's needs, they should submit their name and address when they claim that their content is non-infringing. * From the host's side, the uploader following this process should remove all responsibility for that content from them, so they have no concern about liability and can re-enable access to the content. * From the copyright holder's side, they need to be able to seek recourse if they still think the content is infringing. This can be done by taking the uploader to court, using the details they have provided.
I desperately hope this new legislation fails, but I think you were spot-on about aiming for a 'fair balance', and even acheiving that would be a great improvement.
Expecting a solution that covers everything first time -- and trying to persuade people that the special cases are necessary without seeing the system in action -- is a great way to achieve slow/no progress.
I'd say that a pattern of such behavior should trigger a penalty. It's not a single claim that's the problem. It's patterns of such claims en masse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services
No one can build filters that are good enough beyond the big tech cos. They can build these libraries and hopefully open source them for everyone to use...but if they don't...
It is backwards: nothing but whatever can be build by big tech companies is good enough, because their lobbying and interests define what's good enough. It's also obvious, why it wouldn't get open-sourced then. Kicking the ladder and so on.
Philip Morris, the manufacturers of Marlboro cigarettes, lobbied in favour of laws restricting tobacco advertising. The logic behind this is that they have such strong brand name recognition, if tobacco advertising was banned they'd cement their position as the market leader, as there would be no way for other brands to gain market awareness.
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/07/thanks-axel-voss.html
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/eu-meme-war-article-13-regula...
http://melonfarmers.co.uk/eu.htm
http://www.alphr.com/politics/1009470/article-13-EU-what-is-...
But there is no requirement that at the same time protects fair use. To remove content just in case has no negative consequences.
> Article 13 is “incompatible with the guarantee of fundamental rights and freedoms and the obligation to strike a fair balance between all rights and freedoms involved”
This looks like a one-sided law. It takes into account "authors rights", you can read it as big media conglomerates financial interests, over any other consideration.
This is an example of a law that puts some companies profit over any social consideration and will impact EU socially and economically in a negative way.
Yet the law says:
> Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate.
Ignoring fair use is neither appropriate nor proportionate. Also, taking someone's works down falsely would be a violation of this same article, since the content provider is obligated to
> take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works
which obviously precludes YouTube from just deleting your content on a false positive and not providing you with any recourse. Furthermore, article 13 only applies to
> providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works
and not smaller companies. The whole article basically sums up the idea: work together.
Other than misreading or ignoring parts of the law, I don't really see how it is unreasonable.
EU "wisely" has chosen voting time to be in the middle of FIFA Soccer World Cup, so many people are just sitting watching matches. This is also almost the beginning of the holiday season and many people are just relaxing, travelling, etc.
Apparently someone really needs that regulation to go through (hopefully it will not).
Take away people's TV for some bullshit reason again, and they'll go to the streets.
EDIT: The article actually mentions some similar examples: http://c4sif.org/2012/02/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copy...
This is a good example of how AI can go bad.
The DMCA was the beginning of the end of a free and open internet, and now it's accelerating. I just hope the next generation understands what they're missing under the spectre of copyright law.
Also I do not understand why Google does not use a reputation system, if a channel has a good reputation then take this in consideration in the automatic detection.
If you are only worried about false positives, then the humans only need to review the content flagged by the AI. This has 2 benefits: 1) the "starting number" would be much much lower than 400 hours of content per minute. 2) If a 10 minute video is obviously pirated, you don't need to watch the entire video to decide that.
1. Only a subset of uploaded videos need to be checked by humans, those that were flagged by the automated system.
2. Only a subset of the runtime of each flagged video needs to be checked. In other words, if a human decides within 12 seconds of a video that it is infringing, there is no reason to check the remaining portion of the video.
It's partly using you for free labour to train their next generation of SkyNet.
We've reached a point with CAPTCHAs (originally conceived as a way for humans to exert their will over machines) where the machines are now setting tasks for the humans, and the humans are carrying out the tasks without putting up too much of a fight.
This thread is complaining about the fully automated process used by Google to check for copyright violations, and how infeasible it is to hire someone to check each video.
You're talking about how CAPTCHAs are now being used to get free labour.
> Prove you're human: Does the following video contain Beat It by Michael Jackson?
Recall the goal of Google is to avoid liability via the statement "we are pretty good and have really low false negatives", and have as few false positives as not to make the platform unusable.
Google does not care about content creators or propagation of knowledge (instructive videos) and ideas. Simple statement here. Google engineers might (at least the friends I have), but not as a whole organization.
But yeah crowd-sourcing is a good way to do a second sifting through results. I know it is being used, by Google and others, already to classify video sources.
Because it's free, reasonably hard to beat by bots and reasonably low-effort for the user if they let Google track them (enabling the single-checkbox captcha).
It took longer to confirm I was human than it did to download the software. My partner came through to see if I was alright, after I was shouting abuse at the computer for an extended period. She sat through one of them with me, confirmed that I had it right, then swore and walked away when it decided I was wrong.
If I'd known that it was going to screw me over that much, I would have recorded it and put the video on YouTube.
It's been a huge boon to independent content creators that you can just send somebody a DMCA takedown notice and they'll comply. Before the DMCA, you had to pay out the nose for a lawyer, and you'd be in for a long and very, very expensive legal process. Your average photographer can't afford that, so copyright enforcement was solely a privilege of the rich prior to the DMCA.
Here's an example. I know someone who shared pictures of herself in a private women-only group. Someone who ran a really disgusting cyberbullying page on Facebook had a mole in the group and posted the pictures publicly while making fun of her appearance and calling her slurs. Since the photographer was a friend of hers, the photographer simply sent Facebook a bunch of DMCA notices telling the cyberbullying page to take down the pictures. Facebook complied in under an hour. The cyberbullying page tried to post the pictures again; more DMCA notices were sent, and the whole page was unpublished.
Edit: I think I hit the wrong reply button, meant to reply to parent, haha.
All sorts of computer applications that are not considered AI have replaced humans. For instance, databases replace clerks having to shuffle papers to and from filing cabinets.
1. Copyright owner provides written notification of the alleged infringement.
The notification has to provide reasonably sufficient information to allow Google to locate the alleged infringing material; provide contact information for the claimant; include a statement that the claimant has a good faith believe that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and a statement that the information the claim is accurate, and that the claimant is authorized to act for the owner.
2. Google then has to remove or disable the material, and take reasonable steps to notify the uploader of the issue.
If the uploader does not make a counter notification, it looks like that's the end of Google's obligations.
If the uploader files a counter notification, Google has to notify the claimant. If the claimant does not file a lawsuit against the uploader within 14 days, Google has to restore the material.
Note that nothing in here seems to require Google to actually look at the material and decide if they think it is infringing. Nor does it require them to proactively seek to find infringing material and notify content providers or block such material. They just have to check that the claimant (and the uploader if they get a counter notice) have included the things in their notice that the law requires. They should be able to automate that for most claims.
The ContentID system seems to be going far beyond what DMCA requires them to do to keep their safe harbor. I wonder why they are doing that? Maybe because they want to also be content sellers, and so want to keep the content providers happy with them?
Right now things are stacked entirely against one class of content creators (video creators). Additionally if I'm a public institution or someone else that's against having ads I can't control what happens during the contest period* (or so I've heard, it's never happened to me).
As someone that has posted a few 'how to do X' in software videos before, who believes that ads should be far more limited (like the old soap operas / PBS sponsors at the end of programs), I'd rather my videos were in 'hold on publishing limbo' while not under my control.
1) Classical music is still being composed today, and there’s a huge volume of post-1927 work that is very much under copyright in the US (excessive though that may be IMO).
2) Even if a composition is PD, the recording is absolutely copyrightable if it’s post-1927, and the arrangement may be as well. This isn’t a matter of confusion; it’s an actual piece of intellectual property.
Not to say that any of this is right; I believe fair use protections need to go much, much farther than they do.
AFAIK the content id system was built to monetise works on YouTube. The system must know where a song or a video is being included to direct advertising money to the original author if s/he wishes to participate in that scheme.
I disputed, explicitly pointing to the other ones which I assume was identified correctly and how they had basically nothing in common with my video, even explaining that I'd be perfectly fine with it being monetised if it was actually the right one, and was... (not) surprisingly denied. I have a feeling that either no humans were involved at all, or if one were, it did not listen or have any common sense. In the end, I just deleted the video.
Now that I think about it, perhaps reuploading with the (wrongly) detected name, letting it monetise, and show up in search results might be a better idea --- at least that will make it more likely for others to stumble across it, listen, and possibly leave comments like "this isn't X, it's Y"...
It's highly probable that you can get the name of such a song much faster by asking about it in the comment section.
FWIW, in addition to their awesome disk stats Backblaze also provides blueprints for their chassis as well as a BOM for the parts inside
Wow, I had no idea they did that. I definitely have a new respect for them.
`youtube-dl -f best -citw -v <url of channel or playlist>`
If I recall, that's going to ignore errors. At an airport right now so I can't remember exactly what those flags are.
> Do I always have to pass -citw?
> By default, youtube-dl intends to have the best options (incidentally, if you have a convincing case that these should be different, please file an issue where you explain that ( https://yt-dl.org/bug )). Therefore, it is unnecessary and sometimes harmful to copy long option strings from webpages. In particular, the only option out of -citw that is regularly useful is -i.
But OK, here's explantion of the options you used:
• -f best: Select the best quality format represented by a single file with video and audio. (By default, yt-dl will merge best video with best audio if that's what's available.)
• -c: Force resume of partially downloaded files. (By default, yt-dl will resume downloads if possible.)
• -i: Continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist.
• -t: Use title in file name. (Deprecated. This is the default.)
• -w: Do not overwrite files.
• -v: Print various debugging information.
ArchiveTeam also has a recommended list of flags for archival: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=YouTube
It does that by default. (If you have ffmpeg)
and there are plenty of others too.
I learned my lesson after Nintendo went berzerk and requested takedowns for gameplay videos and walkthroughs; smashrockgroin's series for Goldeneye 64 was both funny and informative when playing that game, but now those videos are gone forever. I've vowed never to buy a Nintendo product again because of that alone.
Going after pirates and such I can sort of understand, but people enjoying your product (and obviously helping to promote it)? WTF.
It reminds me of the complete opposite of this old meme: http://lurkmore.so/images/9/94/360_Kid.jpg
The usual rationale is that walkthroughs / let's play videos show enough of the game that people may opt to just watch the video, instead of playing the game itself.
I can sort of understand this position when it comes to videos that e.g. show the entire single-player campaign with zero commentary. But I'm not convinced that people opting for such videos would have bought the game if the walkthroughs were not available.
also, if the game has nothing else to offer when compared to a video playthrough, may be it's the game that has the problem!
The "hosting" aspect of YouTube is really a small part of why the service dominates. The connections between channels and links from one video to another channel -- network effects and discovery -- are what make disrupting YT seem impossible.
Kind of crazy given how YT originated in juvenile joke vids, but YT may have the potential to become Google's biggest source of revenue despite any number of overbearing content policies. The new ads below videos for products of potential interest based on the video content are annoying but probably very profitable.
i highly doubt that. The youtube monopoly is due to both audience, and the monitization model available (which, atm is getting shoddier and shoddier every day with random demonitizations).
Hosting is a big issue, but it's a technical issue, and other platforms (such as vemeo, or some other platform) has "solved". But those platforms don't dominate (or even show up as a blip!) because content creators can't use them to make their living.
Not a bad idea, as entire channels have gotten the boot for much less, from Youtube itself.
- Intellectual discussions
- Fan made instrumentals and remixes (especially for Rammstein)
- Found footage, old shows, and other nostalgic material from VHS tapes. (wouldn't surprise me if they get flagged for having Folgers commercials from 1993)
- Random funny videos with swearing or vulgar language
Not a whole lot of things that are likely to be relevant to most people, but I've a culture of my own and I'd like to preserve that. To forever lose something I enjoy means losing a bit of myself and not being able to share that with others.
Would you be at all interested in software that helps to construct a permanent showcase of the stuff that matters to you? It would handle things like archiving to enable a focus on curation and presentation.
I've been thinking of making something like this because services like the internet archive don't seem quite right. There's no context. I just worry that nobody would be interested in doing the work of providing that context.
And what software do you use? Streamlink?
Streamlink looks like a great project. Thanks for mentioning it!
hopefully a completely decentralized replacement will arise.
(OT: wow, HN strips emoji!)
1. high-speed net access is becoming more and more common; higher speed help makes the possible overhead of distributed solutions less of a barrier
2. there is more awareness now of the downsides of having a centralized provider. many youtube creators and users have been burned by google; i think that'll generate real demand for a decentralized solution.
3. existence/arguably success of decentralized currencies provides a lot of psychic energy/motivation for making decentralized things.
Ironically, we used to have a nice, decentralized Internet, and services like YouTube have been probably the biggest cause of damage to it.
Not so many years ago, everyone got a bit of web space and their own URL along with the connection from their ISP. You could put your own web site there, for all to see. Many ISPs would allow running some basic software. Visitors would find these sites through search engines or [gasps] manually created links from other sites with relevant material.
An analogous service today would probably involve providing a useful amount of space and bandwidth, and probably some ready-made blogging or video hosting software so non-geeks could just start creating something instead of having to install anything first. But in reality, almost no ISPs (at least here in the UK) routinely offer that sort of service any more, because the likes of YouTube and Medium have killed it.
practically speaking, people creating their own webpages and hoping to get indexed by a search engine or included in a hand-curated directory is not going to get anywhere close to that. you restrict your creators to a tiny, tiny fraction of the population w/ those skills.
so the trick is how to have the great ux of these centralized services without the downsides of centralized control. seems like there's a good chance it's possible.
(for other services, we did used to have (well, still do) pretty good decentralized variants. slack vs irc, reddit/hn vs newsgroups, email vs fb messenger. but even the more minor usability improvements of the centralized alternatives seems to be enough for them to displace what came before. maybe the tide will swing back.)
They're certainly useful. I just question whether we wouldn't have found other ways to achieve these kinds of benefits if we didn't have YouTube, with the entire Internet interested in the results and well over a decade to come up with something.
random example of youtube shittiness i just stumbled over:
Hopefully the next great online video service will have support for displaying the original encoding for uploaded videos, saving them all another generation of quality degradation due to transcoding.
They were filmed on a Nikon DSLR in 1080p. A few weeks after uploading they were fine, 1080p. Several months later, I noticed a few were 720p, and now many are 480p, but a extremely poor quality 480p that looks more like < 240. For a few that are still 720p, and some that are 480p, the framerate has been reduced to maybe 4 fps.
Maybe it was the codec Nikon was using, but regardless, they're basically gone, and I no longer consider Youtube a "safe" place for videos.
I would send links, but I don't want to dox myself.
He put the contract up for review as well: http://download.blender.org/institute/Contract%20between%20G...
[1] https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1009010581549060097
However the situation around YouTube is not a direct consequence of poor technology, but rather poor policies. YouTube built 2 separate products, a) Content ID (CID), b) partnership program.
CID is the system that, based on fingerprinting algorithms, is able to identify videos containing same segments (both audio and visual). Technically it's actually pretty good. However through the partnership program, YouTube allows rights holders to abuse the system by providing reference files that they may not have direct rights for, or allow them to claim any content just because they say so.
This however has nothing to do with the technology itself, but rather with YouTube's decision to not to have to challenge right holders directly (they can and will sue, while users uploading content will most probably not).
There are ways to deal with this kind of situation, but most of the platforms, especially YouTube and Facebook are somehow not interested.
Microsoft has a YouTube like service but limits it to enterprise.
Since video hosting is such a resource intensive undertaking, I wonder why many free porn sites don't have outages and have no limit on uploads for free users - unlike YouTube competitors.
Youtube still offers RSS and it's reliable and chronological unlike youtube's subscription feed algorithm.
They already run a high functioning video network. They really just need a SFW frontend with alternate branding (and no adult videos).
[0]: https://vpnhub.com
Because they can run far riskier and less-vetted ads. They can also run as many of them as they want - the "target audience" doesn't really care if there's 1000 banner ads on a page. There's a reason much of malware is spread from porn sites.
For consumer facing video sites, they have to compete with YouTube on UX, which means much more stringent ad vetting, and far fewer ads. This likely tips the balance just enough that normal online video startups are not feasible without 3-4 years of runway.
I thought this was no longer the case
If I can't get data off bitchute easily using de facto standard tools (I get that I could use a bittorrent client, but that's beyond the point), I have little interest in putting data on it.
(I know you're not a developer, but this is a perfect use-case for forking and continuing.)
The problem isn't in the content hosting industry, it is on the policy & legal side.
The issues we are seeing can be easily fixed by some simple common sense controls on what levels of certainty are required to take down a video and/or channel that scale with how established the channel is, including requiring escalating levels of human review.
With the "advertiser friendly" issue, the same approach can be taken, topped off with a monetize time prompt or form that allows them to assert how advertiser friendly the uploader understands the video to be (weighted by the history of how accurate their answers have been in the past).
These are such solved problems, that youtube really shouldn't be having them.
This is solved already, but there will always be false positives.
What isn't solved, and likely never will be, is copyright.
But it seems that the issue isn't due to content ID, but contractual issues.
It seems like an odd play, increase supply of ad slots while dealing with a demand decrease from random companies dropping ads during drama. They must have signed some kind of deal recently.
If they are trying to increase the ad slot supply expect actions against ad blockers to come next.
("Politicians, about to vote in favor of mandatory upload filtering in Europe, get channel deleted by YouTube’s upload filtering")
If users are on YT, that is where the content creators will be. And if the content creators are on YT, that is where the users are. Moreover, users have curated lists of subscriptions and creators have large lists of material. Finally, YT has access to a lot of data on viewing behavior, and likes. This means YT should be a lot better at recommending videos to users.
Finally, the creators that most want to switch to an alternative are those who are the most censored. These tend to be more controversial, which means these alternative services gather controversial content. This tends to give these places a bad reputation which pushes away the non-controversial content.
The best bet would probably to take a non-controversial niche, start there, and try and integrate well with YT to keep down switching costs. Its still hard to provide actual added value to such a niche. Alternatively one might take a controversial niche with wide acceptance. For example, gun channels or LGBTQ+ channels. Both are currently demonetized, but both are still widely accepted in broad swathes of society.
this is hardly the case, as any avid youtube watcher can tell you. Recently, the algorithmic suggestions are terrible, and either show repeated content, or content that's not even close to what's being watched (but the SEO/words in the description/title matches), or is a huge list of videos from the same channel.
Facebook only has network effects, there isn't anything particularly efficient or advanced about what it does. Given its minuscule infrastructure when compared to Google and Amazon, it would be very hard for it to achieve the same level of cost that Google has on YT. Pure search doesn't rely so much on scale as well.
Any other provider doesn't have either the network effects that YT does nor the scale to be able to compete with Google on YT.
From a scale perspective, the only companies who could effectively compete with Google would be Microsoft and Amazon. Microsoft is still trying to figure itself out, especially on the consumer side. Amazon is geographically limited and has very little expertise in open content and ad-funded platforms, but it is trying with Twitch.
Now it seems Phase 2 will be trying to control the massive amount of media users share. It's a whack-a-mole game against things like Kodi and sharing media.
For YoutTube it's trying to delete copyright violations and it gets rid of hundreds of accounts which are just created again and the material uploaded again. Even an "AI" can't cope.
At some point it would be nice to see all video, all music available to anyone for a reasonable price. "You will!" as Tom Selleck said. Really it's going to be that way eventually otherwise enormous amounts of money and effort will be spent trying to chase down endless illegal copies.
but: "PeerTube uses the BitTorrent protocol to share bandwidth between users. It implies that your public IP address is stored in the public BitTorrent tracker of the video PeerTube instance as long as you're watching the video"
Does this have GDPR ramifications?
Apparently they didn't do it, and they didn't respond to any outreaches. YT legal team _had_ to react.
I do hope they get there, though. Probably without the verbing of their name, though, since it's a bit of a mouthful.
The problem isn't in the content hosting industry, it isn't even on the content producing industry. It is on the policy & legal side.