Blackmailers use false copyright claims to shut down victims' YouTube accounts
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
This is possibly one of the key points in this report. Google is synonymous with their blackbox/magic "AI".
These systems become remarkably interesting to game (their ad platform has been subject to fraud, but on a different layer). I wonder how many levels of "AI" they think they can automate before they realize that it's probably not possible.
For some good news though, there was a story a little while ago for some educational platform that noped out of YouTube and migrated to self-hosted.
With Google, it's like, here have an email.
This is the ai apocalypse happening right before or eyes in slow motion.
Pretty soon the ai will make the content and humans won't be allowed to upload at all.
A class action suit might give it the motivation it needs to start behaving responsibly.
They accept and process counter-notices. Going to disagree with you that they don't work.
This would, in fact, cause them to lose their safe harbor under DMCA. There is no provision to simply ignore claims.
>stealing money from content creators and violating the copyrights of content creators.
Who's copyright is being violated? What money is being stolen?
>they should lose their safe harbor for facilitating copyright infringement due to their 3 strikes system that has no way to circumvent the false claims.
I strongly recommend that you actually read the DMCA.
The safe harbor is given to the service provider for accepting DMCA notices, and protects them from suits from the complainant. There's a separate safe harbor against claims from the uploader, and they get that by accepting counter-notices. But there's no obligation to accept counternotices, since they can delete videos at any time per their terms. So there's no relevant safe harbor they would lose here.
You've provided no source for the claim that they often reject valid counternotices. I don't believe this is the case.
They were nice before they had the monopoly. Now they don't care.
That's why I really hate all those speeches about how it would be great if everybody used chrome.
A lot of thing the privacy savy tech community predicted about Google 10 years ago arrived exactly as expected. And the reason is not that they are seers seing the future, but because it's always the same story with entities growing and getting power.
Twitch has recently encroached on that front, and therefore YouTube Livestream was made.
The real reason YouTube doesn't care about content creators is that they are trying to woo more mainstream media onto their platform. With the decline of ad revenue since the ad-pocalypse of 2015-ish, they are trying to change their platform to look like traditional media where big advertisers would pay for spots (the likes of Coke and Nike).
The fuck.
25 minutes seems to be a new record. Congratulations!
I did wonder if it was an experiemnt to see just how far they could push ad-tolerant people like me.
I actually connect everything through Algo and use that ad-blocking.
This didn't work because the ad was just merely another youtube video. One I've watched before, even. They're definitely trying to boost the view count of that video (it's the first 23ish minutes of that new Gundam movie).
Google was never nice but it didn't matter before the monopoly. They would literally ban and shutdown all accounts based on automated 'strikes' but most users had other emails/search engines/maps/whatever.
Now that Google has firmly entrenched itself, it's impossible to jump ship. Look at the other thread about Google Analytics and integration with Google Ads; its quite a difficult task to switch from GA
And when they bought youtube, they were very, very nice with content creators first. Bot were not banned. No detecting of your white noise video as a copyright material.
The danger with you narative is to forget the evolution from underdog to leader. Because people need to learn this happens all the time, and they need to learn what it looks like.
You only have to look how journos were not even being suspended for calling for the complete destruction of the maga kids.
While if your a conservative, make one offensive joke about looks and your permabanned.
False complaints are meant to be responded to with a counter-notice.
Also if the outcome is determined by some capricious and unpredictable algorithm, it creates a massive risk for the copyright holder.
Or we could develop a functional copyright system...
YouTube, Adsense, PayPal, eBay... the list is long and stories are plenty.
Use platform for what it’s good for and have plan B always ready and active
Obviously it's better if you haven't trusted 100% of your business to a platform you don't control. But for some businesses (such as many youtubers) the choice is either do that or don't have a business (since that's the only place with a large enough audience). In such a case it can make sense to do so.
There is always plan B.
Google of course prefer 100% dependence on their platforms.
For most of them there isn't. They might have seperate portals which they earn money from, but the business still goes poof fast if they get banned from youtube. Without publishing on youtube they won't reach enough of an audience to have a sustainable business.
Twitch alleviates this somewhat for some youtubers. But we don't have to go far back in time to consider an era before that existed.
Of course, how you ever get remotely famous or established in the first place if the content you create is remotely vulnerable to false copyright claims is another question entirely...
Patreon unfortunately can also not be trusted as they will dedcided privately what they accept and what they shutdown.
The solution is videos hosted on a service that the artist controls, with a donation option that the creator also controls directly.
It is a hard problem to solve. I would not know what for example Jim Sterling would do if he got blocked on patreon, as all his videos has multiple false copyright claims to them. I know Linus tech tips (an other large youtube creator) has created their own platform as a massive Plan B, but that relies on payment services which could at any time destroy that option.
Why then arent we seeing rampant copy claims against huge channels.
Youtube being sued by Hollywood company with big pockets vs angry uploaders of personally-generated content who don't have much money. At the moment, it makes business sense for Youtube to ignore angry uploaders.
People sharing music at home got fined heavily and yet Google does the same and nothing. Even worse Google earns money on it.
This content id system is aruse. And they lover because they can see we are not only effective but TOO effective.
And yet I can watch pirated content with ads on it on YouTube 24x7 - forever.
When you get a claim, there is an option to appeal it, all the way to a formal counter-notification which will remove your strike and require the claimant to institute court proceedings against you.
I have even used that a few times, years ago when I still got fired up by this. Now, I just appeal it once on fair use grounds and if it doesn’t get dropped I move on with my life.
Has something changed that doesn’t allow this particular channel owner to challenge the claim? (Genuinely interested as a channel owner myself.)
I also disable monetization on principle, but I think if a video is claimed by a copyright holder, then YouTube will add adverts in it, even if you disabled it.
As to your other point, a claim is different from a strike from what I understand. A strike is a more serious offense that may lead to blocking the account entirely. A strike can come if you dispute a claim and the claimant is considered to be in his right.
You can appeal a strike and it will be removed unless the claimant provides documents that they have instituted proceedings within a fixed period of time.
You have to provide your contact details if you appeal a strike.
Description of the various stages of the process: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454
It is a very shaky argument, hence I give it one try and move on (it does work about 20% of the time).
But you are right in that because I do it for love rather than money, I am in a much more comfortable position.
As I mentioned in the comments below, there is the option to appeal it to a point they would have to sue you. If you are sure that you own the copyright that is an option. This may be of limited comfort if you happen to live in a jurisdiction with a f’d-up legal system (e.g. the US) but that’s not Google’s fault.
That said, there is apparently some sort of underhand agreement between Google and some major music publishers that Google will just take down the content privately with no appeal. That sucks, but it’s not what is happening here, I don’t think.
People have been treating pornhub as a site to put random non-pornography content at least since a couple years ago according to my friend, I haven't encountered it though
I think it was mostly a media stunt.
dtube.com
ugetube.com
steemit.com
Works well. You don’t get YouTube’s traffic, but the traffic I want should come from my website anyway.
The problem is that Big Media doesn’t like the idea of safe harbor. It also doesn’t like the potential to have their unlicensed content available while a court decides (they file a DMCA takedown, but the account owner claims “fair use” and YT puts it back up - now it’s online until a court orders it offline.) Hell, Big Media hates the idea of fair use.
ContentID came about because Google decided it would be cheaper to just allow Big Media more direct access than to keep defending themselves in spurious lawsuits designed to make example cases and have parts of the DMCA nullified.
Everyone knows that. YouTube built itself on stolen content. Any of us could go on there right now and watch any number of pirated movies, songs, TV shows. .. you name it.
Also easier. Even corporations have finite resources to work with.
Behind the smoke and mirrors they can make money on pirated material.
All the while throwing their hands up in the air. When all they have to do is hire a human being to evaluate the facts. People know what copyright violations are. Pay people to make the call.
It's as simple as that. Hire people to do the job and it will be done. Computers don't do it right.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/viewers-find-objectionable-c...
Are you suggesting Google can't slow uploads to a human reviewable rate?
It's basically saying ai should be allowed to break the law, because it can't avoid breaking the law well enough.
The law breaker is the uploaded of copyrighted materials.
An OSP must "not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity" to qualify for § 512(c) protection. However, it is not always easy to determine what qualifies as a direct financial benefit under the statute.
One example of an OSP that did receive a direct financial benefit from infringing activity was Napster. In A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.,[10] the court held that copyrighted material on Napster's system created a "draw" for customers which resulted in a direct financial benefit because Napster's future revenue was directly dependent on increases in user-base.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringemen...
The only way this can be fixed is by reversing the incentives. There has to be consequences for making false claims. There must be some amount of risk when making a claim. Also, Google could at least improve the situation easily by e.g. holding a video's revenue in escrow until the claim is fully resolved instead of giving the money t to the claimant immediately (I call that "theft").
[1] YT allows successful claims to force monetization on a video and take the resulting revenue. There are numerous examples of e.g. musicians having their own music claimed, or people losing the income from multi-hour educational videos[2] because ContentID matched 13 seconds of random footage.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_dhZjLxUzw
[3] On the 3rd strike, Google automatically delete their entire YT channel and a the "offender" is permanently banned of from all Google services.
TL;DR - video [2] has an outstanding explanation of YT's takedown system from a creator's perspective (YT took down His 4 hour thematic analysis of Made In Abyss).
Youtube needs to make it impossible for "VengefulFlame" to register a copyright claim, without a real-world identity attached to it and a ironclad agreement that they 100% have the right to enforce this specific copyright claim, under agreed up front financial penalties if they are wrong (even if they're accidentally or algorithmically wrong, they still owe the penalty). Youtube should pay (or perhaps 70:30 split?) those penalty payments with the content creator who was fraudulently or accidentally accused, if paid out via Youtube T&Cs and contractual arrangements, and Youtube should provide all required evidence and documentation (including verified real work personal identities and their digitally signed assurences to Youtube of copyright ownership) to the victim in a super-easy "boilerplate" form, so that it'd be a slam dunk legal case that any lawyer with an associate with an hour or two spare would happily take on on a no-win no-fee basis.
There's probably some cross jurisdiction legal difficulties to address, but I reckon YT should step up to actively take abusers of copyright claims to court in their own jurisdictions on behalf of their victim content creators. If you live in a jurisdiction without strong civil copyright law which includes penalties for fraudulent claims, maybe you should pay a bond before being allowed to file any copyright claims?
In theory you can register with the copyright office, but it isn't required and >99% of YouTube users won't have registered anything, so then what does that prove?
This before you even consider fair use, which is hard enough for judges after a year long trial, much less something they're expected to decide thousands of times every day.
So you have the claimants post bond. Then what? You still need a way to know which claims are false, which they still haven't got.
They're making decisions based on no information. They're trying to play a role they're not equipped to play. Google is not the court system.
(i) a legal signature
(ii) identifying the infringed content
(iii) identifying the infringing content
(iv) proper contact information
(v) statement of good faith belief the content is infringing
and (vi) statement the information is accurate and statement under penalty of perjury of authorization.
Last I saw every pseudonymous troll can make claims, not fulfilling (i) at the very least. I remember I used to click some of those chilling-effects/lumendatabase links google displays when they removed some things from search, and I remember I found it rather curious that a lot of these usually where incomplete notices, usually failing (i) (ii) (v) and (vi) (and they only got (iv) right because they emailed and every email has a From:).
"How the heck are they even supposed to know who the copyright holder is? The troll claims it's theirs, the user claims it's theirs, they have no basis on which to believe one or the other."
The DMCA has a procedure for that:
1) Copyright "owner" claims content with google
2) "Uploader" files a counter claim with google
3) At which point google has to put it back after 10 days if the "owner" doesn't notify google they filed an action against the "uploader" in a court.
Yes, this is still far from optimal, for all parties involved, however, it's still a lot better than what google does with ContentID.
What they should, in my opinion do, is ensure that if a claim is made, and it's then objected to - that the claimant has a realistic risk of direct financial penalty for doing so fraudulently. Google should demand all relevant documentation for both parties before accepting or acting on a disputed claim, so that either or both of them have a lawyer/court ready package of the specific claims, counterclaims, and identities of everybody involved.
I also think it would be smart and desirable for Google to have an internal mediation system with a penalty enforceable by T&Cs for Google Accounts. If, for example, Sony Music's lawyers incorrectly claim copyright on a content-creators piano performance of a public domain work (which has happened more than once), and the performer objects, it would be nice if Sony had the option to say "Ooops, sorry, charge our Google account the $500 erroneous claim fee, and pay it to the content-creator" to avoid having the content-creator's lawyer slam dunk them in court with the documentation Google provides as above.
There should also be the same sort of "three strike and you're excluded from all google services forever" nuclear option, that applies equally to copyright claimants as it does to content creators, and also applies equally to Sony Music and VengefulFlame's legal identity. Sony need 100% to be at-risk of having _their_ content deleted from Youtube and their Google accounts permanently revoked for sending fraudulent copyright claims, just the same as the rest of us risk having our Google accounts shut down for illegally uploading Sony's copyright works.
Even people with millions of subscribers are not immune to this, in fact they often have to hope their fans can cause a big enough mess on Twitter in large enough numbers for YouTube to notice and suddenly all those "manually confirmed" copyright flags disappear.
Even bigger of an insult to injury is that there are clearly corporate YouTube accounts that are above this system, the accounts of Kimmel, Trevor Noah, etc are immune to any of these.
And it's not just copyright, but monetisation, too.
For them moving to another platform doesn't make sense because they wouldn't get the same reach/make enough to justify the time and effort put into their channel in the first place. So it's either they are on YouTube and complain of its faults, or they aren't anywhere and you don't hear about them.
There's minimal effort in uploading to multiple sites, making the video is what takes multiple hours/days.
I would put my videos on as many platforms as possible, and try to convince people to move eventually to my own platform that I fully control.