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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

This is rich. Every YouTube creator that I follow has at least one video whose purpose is to rail against YouTube's mystifying demonetization policies, their trigger-happy DMCA policies that aggressively favor major copyright holders, and their opaque and useless litigation process. Here's one for reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bGZ_a6gL0f4 . Listening to the CEO of YouTube cry "but think of the content creators!" is about as transparently self-serving as a US politician crying "but think of the children!"

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I don't think peoples complaints of YouTube are invalid at all.

But I think it is interesting how much credit these people that monetize YouTube don't give google at all.

Video hosting has always been expensive comparatively. They are large files. You tube stores multiple resolutions of your files.

YouTube hosting your video is free. You don't pay for it. These people that are bringing in $500 - $4,000 crying that 'youtube isn't giving me all my money' seem to also have a sense of entitlement in itself.

YouTube has a relationship with its creators. Creators get free video hosting, a video social platform and they can earn quite a bit of money doing it. YouTube in turns get a portion of the ad money too.

When YouTube demonetizes something they lose money too. They know their system can hurt their bottom-line in the end.

Understanding this is a business relationship between the two entities would probably make their attempts more professional. Maybe open a business that represents a large sets of these YouTubers instead of each one make a video about it. That way their collective views are significant chunk and they can apporoach YouTube as a professional entity.

Instead they post drama videos about it.

Monetized videos are not hosted for free. They are hosted for a percentage of the revenue.

Only free videos are hosted for free, so basically be de-monetizing the videos Youtube brings the hosting costs on themselves, among other things.

>Video hosting has always been expensive comparatively.

Torrents seem to be doing it perfectly fine for free.

People keep speaking about YouTube as if its main function is video storage, while if fact the main thing they bring to the table these days is suggestions, search and a massive pre-established audience. If there was a way to plug into their search/suggestions/ads without giving away control of your video files, a lot of high-earning content creators would likely to do just that. However, there is no such option. I'm not aware of any reliable video search outside of Google.

>Understanding this is a business relationship between the two entities would probably make their attempts more professional. Maybe open a business that represents a large sets of these YouTubers instead of each one make a video about it.

But that's the thing. Content creators don't want a business relationship. The promise of Web 2.0 was that there will be no editors or publishers, just a generic UGC platforms. This idea is massively backfiring right now in all kinds of ways.

> Torrents seem to be doing it perfectly fine for free

.. for quick 30s clips that you want to spread virally through a txt msg to my tech-illiterate mother?

I'm pretty sure BitChute uses WebTorrent, although I don't know if that's for mere hosting or just to reduce bandwidth use.

That's an UX problem mostly. I hope one day IPFS will be able to handle that use case reliably.

Their automated policing system is horrific. I make how to marketing videos with no music in the background, and randomly get strikes for copyright that I have to appeal to keep my account in good standing. I used to not understand all the love hate that creators have with the platform but I'm slowly getting it.

> their trigger-happy DMCA policies that aggressively favor major copyright holders

So which is it? Do you think YouTube is too much in favour of DMCA or too against it?

Perhaps mystifying and arbitrary is just the way it looks when this kind of law is applied at scale (with robots as prescribed in the law.)

The problem isn't DMCA. The problem is Content ID, which allows rights holders to take down other creators' content automatically.

YouTube goes out of its way to grant rights holders a level of control that wouldn't be possible with a strict interpretation of the DMCA because an illegitimate DMCA takedown request would be a felony whereas an illegitimate Content ID claim goes unpunished.

EDIT: Note however that Article 13 strongly implies a system like Content ID. So the irony is that for YouTube Article 13 doesn't really change anything and the filter they complain about is bad for all the same reasons Content ID is bad.

> an illegitimate DMCA takedown request would be a felony

No. DMCA takedown requests go like this

"I represent Bozo Media, they own all sharks wearing hats, and this video is infringing on their rights, take it down"

The only part that's under penalty of perjury (a felony) is the claim that you represent Bozo Media. If you do, you have not committed a crime regardless of whether the rest of what you wrote is obvious nonsense.

Maybe Bozo actually only owns "Toothy the hat-wearing shark", a large orange cartoon shark. Doesn't matter, not a crime to claim they own more.

Maybe the video is of a mouse wearing trousers, which is neither a shark, nor a hat, and definitely isn't the property of Bozo. Doesn't matter, still not a crime.

Is this awful? Yes. But it's the law. You are welcome to go to court, Youtube will even help you get that far if you're determined, but it will almost certainly bankrupt you even if you're right.

A DCMA request should also include a statement claiming truthiness at penalty of perjury, shouldn't it?

Yes, but only about the representation part, not the claim part, as tialaramex pointed out.

Warner vs Hotfile: "Warner adds that the DMCA only requires the penalty of perjury statement to confirm that the sender represents the copyright holder, not that the allegedly infringing links point to their copyrighted material, they say."

> Maybe Bozo actually only owns "Toothy the hat-wearing shark", a large orange cartoon shark. Doesn't matter, not a crime to claim they own more.

I didn't know that, why not? I would have assumed it was but then I'm not a legal expert.

Why would the big media companies, that basically dictated the law, have made things more difficult to themselves? Note that serving a DMCA takedown notice is not a legal action in itself. It is actually illegal to lie in only a few contexts.

DMCA is imperfect, so it's inherently a source of certain problems - recently the takedown notice abuse on YT.

And YT made sure it covers its ass by trading off perfection against making the RIAA/MPAA/etc happy with Content-ID and with who knows what systems and features only available to those big rightsholders.

I think you are right. However, almost any large company CEO often tries to skew policy/rules/politics in different directions, some of those may be beneficial to the society. What this is the case (as I think is happening here) I prefer to cheer them on instead of pointing that their real cause is self interest. My 2c.

I'd be happy to cheer them on if there were any indication that this represented a legitimate change of heart. But we all know that as soon as they get their way in Europe, their concern for creators will mysteriously and instantly evaporate. I believe that favoring small players over large ones is a benefit to society, so I will continue to dismiss YouTube's outright hypocrisy until such time as they have earned the benefit of the doubt.

Because they have some policies that are unfriendly in some circumstances to creators, it is hypocritical of them to oppose the imposition of other policies that are more unfriendly and/or unfriendly in different circumstances to creators?

It's hypocritical of them to claim they care about creators while treating creators badly.

Is it hypocritical for a farmer to care about his cattle's wellbeing when they're destined for the slaughterhouse?

The farmer never cares about the cattle's well being. The farmer cares about the meat.

If YouTube thinks like that, thinks of content creators as a consumable asset, that would explain a lot.

> Every YouTube creator that I follow has at least one video whose purpose is to rail against YouTube's mystifying demonetization policies, their trigger-happy DMCA policies that aggressively favor major copyright holders

To be fair, youtube was forced to do so because of corporate, news/media and political pressure. People forget that youtube also fought against the DMCA and corporate/media pressure before they lost.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezp4xa/youtube-is...

https://www.recode.net/2016/6/20/11974514/taylor-swift-youtu...

> Listening to the CEO of YouTube cry "but think of the content creators!" is about as transparently self-serving as a US politician crying "but think of the children!"

Of course it is self-serving. But it's also true. Youtube has been consistent in their support of fair use because as you pointed out, it's in their own self interest.

The problem for youtube is that content creators on youtube aren't organized or powerful like the media companies. And whatever you think, they have to follow the law and like most companies, they are going to err on the side of caution when they are forced to.

Youtube's contentID is pretty poor, and easily abused. The DMCA seems to be widely misued.

The new EU law isn't great, but it forces Youtube to design systems that don't catch non-infringing content.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20180906IPR...

> Any action taken by platforms to check that uploads do not breach copyright rules must be designed in such a way as to avoid catching “non-infringing works”.

Youtube is pushing article 13 as an attack of "fair use", when really for Youtube it's mostly an attack on the people uploading full episodes of tv shows with no added commentary.

> The new EU law isn't great, but it forces Youtube to design systems that don't catch non-infringing content.

combine this with:

> Parliament’s position toughens the Commission’s proposed plans to make online platforms and aggregators liable for copyright infringements.

(emphasis mine)

tl;dr: Design a system for a platform where you filter out every copyright infringement, because you're liable for them, but yo're not allowed to have any false positives.

I can see why they're having trouble with this.

YouTube doesn't support fair use though...

Your comment is essentially saying that because youtube currently needs to aggressively police content to the detriment of content creators due to current regulations, that them warning the EU that even more regulations would be harmful is hypocritical?

I don't follow, your comment makes zero sense and your analogy makes even less sense.

Regulations are not measured by "weight". More regulation might mean less restrictions or more, but at the same time could lead to a more efficient/fair market/environment.

YT warning about regulations means nothing, because the regulations don't force them to be biased against small producers. Though they are, because of business reasons. (But that's their hypocrisy, to show worry about content producers while their real worry is business related.)

While what you say is true, it does not really make their arguments incorrect.

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