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Comment by melcor | Hacker News Reader

> I don't understand how Youtube's management have succeeded in staying outside prison so far,

They manage this by letting the big media/music corps claim ad revenue from any video they feel like they own, no questions asked. That's how they manage to stay out of jail. I suspect Youtube is a pretty decent revenue source for these corporations.

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It's basically impossible to tell, as a human, on YouTube which videos are sanctioned by Copyright owners and being monetized, and which are evading YouTube's Content ID systems. Clearly some are - e.g. videos where the content is horizontally flipped, or in a small box, or the audio is heavily distorted - but that's not universally true.

I always assumed that VEVO were legal and the others illegal (unless uploaded by the artist, usually for amateurs or not-so-big-time artists)

You can usually click "Show more" in the video description and see if there's any copyrighted content identified by Content ID. If there is, most likely the copyright owners are getting the ad revenue (if it's not an official channel).

Actually YouTube doesn't ask anyone who claims the revenue of someone else's video :)

It's pretty amazing that content creators haven't left yet; of course, the problems with copyright claims are likely to chase them wherever they go. At least they've become less dependent on Youtube's revenue, thanks to Patreon donations.

I think the problem is that most people use YouTube to find content (I’ve heard it’s the most popular search engine after Google). If you’re not on YouTube you’ll likely not be found.

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