YouTube shuts down music companies’ use of manual copyright claims
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is a step in the right direction, but YT's system is extra-judicial in nature, and they've decided to be more copyright holder friendly than the law itself requires (likely so the law isn't used, which is cheaper for YT).
I suspect in my lifetime governments will need to create better frameworks for content networks. The whole "they're a private company, they can do anything!" argument is growing weaker by the day as these companies have more influence in our lives (with both good (e.g. anti-hate content) and bad (e.g. copyright holders stepping on small creators) consequences).
This sort of event is either strictly incidental, or it's not. Which is it? The copyright industry can't have it both ways, or at least shouldn't be allowed to.
You can sue for anything. "Its just a car driving by" would usually be a pretty solid defense that youre in the right, both in that its not substantial and doesnt hurt the original work.
There's also the notion of a "vexatious litigant": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation
Right now there is no cost to labels for submitting these AFAIK, there at least appears to be no cost even if the usage would be covered under fair-use.
ris·i·ble /ˈrizəbəl/ adjective
such as to provoke laughter.
"a risible scene of lovemaking in a tent" synonyms: laughable, ridiculous, absurd, comical, comic, amusing, funny, chucklesome, hilarious, humorous, droll, entertaining, diverting, farcical, slapstick, silly, facetious, ludicrous, hysterical, uproarious, riotous, sidesplitting, zany, grotesque
Is it just because one industry lobbies YouTube and the other doesn't, or is copyright law materially different for the two cases?
Both are fair use. I think it might be lobby stuff and how they are consumed. Great music can transform / enhance a pivotal moment in a movie whereas the presence of an Apple logo or Mickey Mouse shirt, not so much.
Companies can and have sued for licensing fees or if they feel their product logo was shown and misrepresented in film.
Back to the t-shirt example, on the movie/funded production scale, a lot of this is prevented by the wardrobe department making sure extras are not clothed in licensed stuff.
Bingo. Content ID came out right around the settlement of Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. Even though the courts consistently upheld YouTube's claims, it wasn't exactly a smooth ride and more appeals were coming. I also imagine every other traditional media companies saw the potential and were equally interested in bring lawsuits.
I agree with your assessment: governments need to enact better laws to handle media as it is produced and consumed today. Until then companies of years past will try to suck every dime they can from their competition on their way out.
Could YouTube's handling of copyright be improved? Of course. Do I see systems like Content ID going away without a change in law? Absolutely not.
Considering the new EU Copyright Directive, especially with Article 17, if anything, the world is moving closer towards CID-like systems than away from it.
You're replying to a post about content networks lacking a legal framework to operate under, by complaining that hate content is currently poorly defined and content networks can do whatever they choose.
Your argument may have merit, or not, but odd place to make it regardless.
> The whole "they're a private company, they can do anything!" argument is growing weaker by the day as these companies have more influence in our lives (with both good (e.g. anti-hate content) and bad (e.g. copyright holders stepping on small creators) consequences).
I think it's fair to mention that censoring hate speech can indeed be a gray area. For example, there are cases were atheists that were formerly muslims speak out against their former religion, and are subsequently branded (by some, not all) as engaging in hate speech.
The better solution is to prevent individual private companies from holding so much power in the first place. If the major tech companies weren't allowed to drastically consolidate and push out competition, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Most hosts are more copyright-holder-friendly than the law requires, because of the structural incentives in the law. (Many structure there relationship with content-submitters so that they have no liability risk from an unnecessary takedown, and thereby avoid needing to do anything with the DMCA counter-notice process, which only provides a safe harbor against claims stemming from the takedown.)
This simply isn't true at all, and if fact the opposite is true. The reality is that corporations are becoming ever more powerful, and voters are enabling this with their choices in the voting booths, and electing administrations that very much believe private companies should be able to do whatever they want. It's not getting any better, it's getting worse.
It required only a decade of litigation to get it back up.
https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to-m...
Will this end up having an impact?
But great point though.
Ambivalent about stock tickers. Sometimes have to look them up, haha.
No it doesn't
"The panel held that the DCMA requires copyright holders to consider fair use before sending a takedown notification, and that failure to do so raises a triable issue as to whether the copyright holder formed a subjective good faith belief that the use was not authorized by law."
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/13...
Have I missed some precedent that overturns this?
The affirm part is you conceding you committed the crime, and then you argue it was justified.
Lenz didnt confirm it was an affirmative defense, they ruled the way they did despite admitting it was an affirmative defense, one that can only procedurally arise after you've been accused of a crime.
> According to the Supreme Court of Canada, it is more than a simple defence; it is an integral part of the Copyright Act of Canada, providing balance between the rights of owners and users.
"We agree with the district court and hold that the statute unambiguously contemplates fair use as a use authorized by the law. Fair use is not just excused by the law, it is wholly authorized by the law."
In defense of this (among other arguments) they cite portions of the US code that explicitly refer to fair use as a "right":
"See also 17 U.S.C. § 108(f)(4) (“Nothing in this section in any way affects the right of fair use as provided by section 107 . . . .”"
https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/13-161...
So while your understanding of fair use as merely a defense against infringement may be widely held, and arguably is even the historically accurate position, it doesn't reflect the way that the courts currently interpret the statutes.
Now I agree with your interpretation to an extent, however its only the 9th circuit court. Lenz is also odd in that the person claiming fair use is the plaintiff, and the suit itself is that a DMCA claim was frivolous. The video was restored after her counter-notification, and her lawsuit was later.
A DMCA taketdown request is itself not a lawsuit. So my interpretation of the ruling is not that "you cant sue someone" but that you "cant blast out DMCA notices." I read it as an anti-intimidation ruling. It is clear, that it sees fair use as authorized by law, but it also still categorizes fair use as an affirmative defense.
Ergo, fair use gives you a defacto right to not be harassed.
The only time it's closer to trivial to filter out is when the music has been edited in as an audio track, and no additional filters/EQ have been applied. But even then, subtracting a lossless original will leave funky-sounding audio compression artifacts, a "ghost" of the song left behind.
But 1. that's not YouTube's problem, and 2. most content-creators would prefer a segment of weird artefacted audio to their video being demonetized.
For example, let's say most of your voice falls within a range of 120hz to 160hz and there is a guitar playing in the background at various frequencies where a majority of it happens to match your voice's frequency. Now your goal is to cut out the guitar, leaving a pristine copy of your voice.
How would ML or any strategy be able to differentiate a voice or guitar at 140hz?
I deal with a similar problem when recording my voice for video courses in a non-treated room. I have to set up a noise gate to lower the volume of certain frequencies (background computer fans, etc.) until you can't hear them. They tend to give off a low frequency compared to a human voice, but the more loud the fan is relative to my voice requires setting the noise gate to a higher frequency.
If you try to filter too much, then your voice gets cut off for those frequencies and it sounds horrible. It either cuts out entirely or you sound super dirty and metallic since your wave forms are all jaggy instead of smooth lines.
I'm no ML expert but I think this problem would be insanely hard to solve in a way that's high quality. You can bend your voice's frequencies and the frequency of various instruments in a similar way. Then on top of that, there's going to be situations where the singer's voice is going to happen while you're talking. That'll be even harder to separate if you criss-cross frequencies. And on top of that, you might have 2-3 guitars, drums, keyboard, a singer and your voice all hitting the same frequencies. So much overlap!
I'd love to hear the quality of a tool that claims it can remove only the songs out of any audio footage that may include your voice, background voices of other people talking as well as other ambient sound (water falling, people shuffling around, cars honking, etc.). If I were watching someone's vlog I would want to hear the atmosphere of the place. Making it completely mute except for their voice would be extremely weird and unsettling (and still crazy complicated to do I bet).
A known song could be used as a time-series with a similar effect.
Yes, this is what I used to do with REAPER (a digital audio workstation tool). It was even able to do this in soft real time (that's how I recorded my more recent courses) with only 10ms of delay.
But from my understanding it does this by dampening or removing (depending on how aggressive you have it configured) the frequencies of your room or whatever sound you're trying to remove.
A relatively low volume fan hum is pretty easy to remove without distorting the target audio, but if the frequencies start to overlap with varying degrees of volume the whole thing becomes a jumbled mess.
To put this into perspective, the video at the top of https://diveintodocker.com/ used REAPER's noise reduction plugin to remove a pretty loud tower and power supply fan. Even with studio grade headphones at max volume you probably won't notice a hint of hissing or white noise when I'm not speaking, but if you have a trained ear there's a subtle clamping down on the lower end of my voice's range. 99.9999% of people won't notice it, but this is also a best case scenario for removing frequencies (a constant low hum at relatively low volume) that rarely interweaves with my voice's frequency. The whole game changes with multiple instruments and volumes that cut across your range.
Even outside the scope of removing copyright material there's a lot of interesting use cases, like being able to split vocals or instruments from any track so you can practice layering in your own music as a musician (such as playing your own guitar solo over an existing song).
On the other hand, there are a lot of music videos on YouTube that copyright holders might have been fine allowing to exist, and now their only option is to nuke them from orbit. Mashups, etc. may suffer. Essentially, this is a move that may reduce spurious claims, but may come at the expense of certain grey-zone expressions.
For one[0], they can choose "block" - prevents it from showing in some/all countries, "monetize" - takes the videos's revenue (note that there is now revenue sharing so that claims don't always take 100% of the revenue[1]), or "track" - just track the video analytics.
It might be worth it to set up "if 2 minutes or less of my 4 minute song appear in a video, monetize", "if 30 seconds or less is used, just track it", and finally "if the entire video is my song or uses my song in its entirety, block it". Not sure how advanced the Content ID system really is since it's easier to get the Copyright Match Tool than Content ID, but I wouldn't doubt Google's ML had something like "match certainty" copyright holders can use to filter content like mashups and remixes. It's most likely up to the content owners to use this to filter, though, since the entire purpose of Content ID is to help both YouTube and Copyright holders avoid DMCA lawsuits.
0: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9245819?hl=en ("Content ID" wrapper)
Content ID will not catch stuff like a guitar teacher teaching a 30 minute lesson on soloing in E minor Pentatonic and playing 5 notes of a copyrighted song with a totally different tone than the original song.
Manual ID was causing the record company to be able to claim all the revenue for the whole 3 minute lesson as if the whole video was a performance of their whole song.
Quite large portion of these potential claims are short videos that are being re-uploaded from other platforms, like TikTok and Instagram.
Disclaimer: I run a company that monitors YouTube and other platforms for analytical purposes, some related to copyright. Our system is able to identify segments as short as 0.5 second which allows us to produce this kind of information.
Then, the resolution would be to wipe out the original audio and black out any imagery similarly. Thus if a car drives by playing something copyrighted, it would simply cut the audio for a few seconds. No loss of revenue to the original poster. And beyond that, provide the video poster a chance to edit the video without the original sound/images. If they re-upload it with the sound/images still included, then they can have negative consequences for their account. If they re-upload with everything "fixed" then they shall have no negative marks on their permanent record.
This is already a requirement [0] that was introduced couple of weeks back.
Uh, no. Why would copyright holders do that?
The infringing 'works' are white noise.
Literally. I make open source software plugins and use Logic's signal generator sometimes to demonstrate the spectral content of these plugins. I'll get copyright strikes specifically for the purpose of hijacking the ad revenue of these videos, specifying that it's the noise (or filtered noise) content of the video.
They don't try to knock the video off YouTube, they are trying to mass claim all white noise on the platform to get whatever revenue they can until the real creator reassert their rights to their original content (at some risk: you are saying 'no, that is original content' to the YouTube machine and depending on the adversary to withdraw their claim in hopes of finding someone who is paying less attention)
This would directly affect those trolls, and those guys would indeed skulk away: it's what they do when you challenge them, because they want to operate without calling attention to themselves.