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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

>>Since Spotify does not have a machine learning AI copyright filter like Youtube's ContentID

If true, this is worrying. It basically gives a handful of companies a monopoly over a potentially wide range of things. It is unreasonable to require everyone to meet a standard that relies on cutting edge technology.

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Welcome to government regulation 101. Regulatory capture is a term that should be in everyone's vocabulary.

If Im not mistaken, youtube contentid filtering is not working as good as Google hoped it will. People find more and more backdors or workarounds for it. Google hires like thousends of editors to watch youtube content and filter out stuff. That was one big defeat of Google. The same way they fail to filter kids content.

Im yet to see a filtering mechanism for a platform like ytb that works.

It's a very tough problem, with thousands (or more) of smart people constantly trying to circumvent it every day. But I think YouTube has the upper hand at this point. You hear way more about false positives than false negatives, and every single successful circumvention I've found is barely watchable/listenable. >50% cropping, rotation, major pitch shifting, color shifting, speed changes. They're getting by, but really just barely.

I would call that a lost battle because you need like 1% of all content to break the laws similar to the ones EU recently passed to still heavily fine them.

1% of all content on YouTube? I imagine a far lower percentage than that is copyright-infringing.

Is it worrying? I see it as an opportunity to create and use a competing service.

It's worrying because the regulations are designed explicitly to prevent the creation of competing services. Startups are requires to either pay an arbitrary tax to a company that's likely owned by record labels, or do like Youtube and create an internal service that performs just as well as other systems and probably still face a flood of lawsuits.

It is very worrying. It is like regulatory capture, but not implemented at the request of the company. It was done purely by the EU. By requiring cutting edge and practically non existent technology, it somewhat requires a monopoly by the one company that can do it (YouTube, or do it the best because there is no perfect filter). And the EU will then turn around and fine them for being too big.

I believe in well regulated capitalism, but I find that the EU takes things too far and does not worry enough about the unintended consequences of their rules.

The problem is less one of regulation vs. not regulating and more the fact that most of the politicians are dinosaurs with little or no understanding of modern technology.

They probably don't realise how unreasonable the demands are.

Laws where the government requires some business intermediary to “police” for compliance are the most worrisome to me. The bar for these sorts of regulations should be very high. Unless life or limb is at risk regulatory compliance should be left to the regulators.

>I believe in well regulated capitalism

Then you really should avoid crying wolf for what's effectively pure speculation in this case. I also fail to see what "capture" you have here, people are still able to upload their track to Spotify, they'll just have to go through a 3rd party that will have to screen copyright infringement and make sure the metadata is in order. Meanwhile Spotify is free to focus on the big fish which is probably what they really care about. So who is capturing what in this scenario?

Regarding Youtube it's already effectively a quasi-monopoly, not because of regulation but because operating a free video streaming service at this scale requires insanely deep pockets. The only others that manage to stay afloat are mainly those who offer content that can't be hosted on Youtube (dailymotion, liveleaks, porn sites etc...).

>By requiring cutting edge and practically non existent technology, it somewhat requires a monopoly by the one company that can do it (YouTube, or do it the best because there is no perfect filter). And the EU will then turn around and fine them for being too big.

It doesn't really require a monopoly or any advanced technology at all in fact: there's nothing requiring anyone to offer music online in digital download form. They could just go back to only distributing it on CD, or even cassettes or vinyl. The rules are all because some parties really want to distribute music over the internet, and lots of consumers want this too. Remember, as someone else here said, the politicians are mostly dinosaurs, and to them, you don't need to download music when you can just go to a store and buy it.

> It is like regulatory capture, but not implemented at the request of the company. It was done purely by the EU.

The EU is pressured (and paid off) by media companies. It's the same root problem. Corporations having too much influence in government.

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