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Comment by lake99 | Hacker News Reader

I don't watch children's videos, so I'll leave that factor aside. All your citations are to opinion pieces written by people with an agenda to push, i.e. not fact, not by a long shot. I watch YouTube for education and entertainment. The loss of all the educational content, by itself, would be a massive loss to humanity. If YouTube were to go down, some educators will re-upload their content to other places. Moreover, radical activists would be the among the first to adopt YouTube's replacements, thereby solving nothing.

> No one is responsible for content, and look what that’s gotten us.

I suspect your views are coloured by the kind of things you watch. YouTube's algorithms have adapted to your viewing profile. Most of my recommendations are for science, math, and music pedagogy. From where I stand, YouTube has gotten us to a great place.

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Let's not forget that the CEO calling the EU's proposal impossible is also an opinion piece written by someone with an agenda to push.

At the end of the day, I can't help but atleast partially agree with the reasoning behind the proposal; copyright is broken on the internet and it's nearly impossible to have it enforced on even larger sites if you're not one of the bigger players like music labels or hollywood studios or high profile game studios. And the current DMCA process deployed by most platforms is broken as well since all of the burden of proof lands on the creator with no repercussions for those who send them if it turns out to be fraudulent.

That needs to be fixed somehow, though the EU proposal is likely not a perfect approach.

I agree completely. Copyright is badly broken, and it's broken in favour of the big players. Independent classical musicians are the most severely affected by it. A few of my favourite classical players have received copyright strikes by the likes of Sony, BMG, WB, etc. for their own live performances. And then there are cases such as the video of a guy strolling through a forest, which received copyright claims from the big bullies because of the live bird calls.

EU's proposal would only end up making the already flawed ContentID system more aggressive. Heck, I'd go in the opposite direction. I would be in favour of penalizing those who falsely claim copyright for works that they don't own the rights to.

I totally agree. Claiming copyright over other people's work and using that claim to block other people's work, is a far more serious abuse than merely violating someone's copyright, because it actually takes something away from the victim. It's much closer to actual theft, because the victim loses their 'property'.

And yet there doesn't seem to be any punishment for that. I'd rather see the EU protect the rights of independent artists and regular citizens, than those of large corporations with a tendency to abuse their rights.

Maybe what needs to be fixed is our concept of copyright.

We've spent enormous resources creating a miraculous machine that does one thing: it makes unlimited copies of any information and distributes it all over the world, almost for free. But we can't use it to its full potential because we're stuck in a mindset that dates back centuries.

There should be the distinction or at least allowances for, is X "good" and is X a "net good", which a lot of responses to the GP aren't admitting.

I've watched plenty of Youtube, even the now cliched defenses of DIY home improvement stuff (sink de-clogging and drywall patching for me). But for as good and helpful as the pedagogical content might be there is still the other side that subsidizes all that, that fosters some crazed asshole shooting up a yoga studio and killing two people (YT ref'd in first paragraph)[1].

Is YouTube good? Sure. Is YouTube a societal net good? Absolutely not.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hot-yoga-shooting-tallahassee-f...

edit: spelling

> there is still the other side that subsidizes all that

Connect the dots for me. How is the existence of crazy people uploading videos to YouTube subsidizing educational content? Advertising is subsidizing educational content because that's how the money flows.

If you were to put everyone literally in a straitjacket, you'd cut down on the number of crazy people shooting up random strangers too. If you want to build such a society, I will help you build it, and help you move there. I'm staying out. I think freedom is a societal net good.

Absolutely not? Strong opinion. Care to justify it? I'd be surprised if anyone was convinced by what you've written so far.

Nice subjective opinion presented as fact.

Would that content be lost, or simply decentralized and demonopolized?

It would most likely to be lost, as most youtubers would not be able to set up and run streaming video servers on their own.

There are options between "one giant YouTube monopoly" and "every single individual must run their own server". There is reddit, there are blogs, but where are the forums?

Those things, none of those things, host video. They link to YouTube. Ocassionally vimeo. Once MediaFire? Mostly YouTube. Video is EXPENSIVE. And any measure of cost sharing centralization runs into the same problems that YouTube is having very quickly.

Khan academy started with YouTube videos I believe.

Khan academy could have easily started with another video service. Archive.org had a free video service at the time I believe. There were others that took it's place when it shut down, including YouTube.

> Khan academy could have easily started with another video service.

Not all video players are created equal. It's really hard to make a good video player. Case in point, look at all the crappy video players created by news sites that don't want to embed the YT player. Some can't even pause properly using the space bar or even let you select your preferred video quality.

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