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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

The big problem with classical music is that the compositions are all in public domain, however most performances are not. Given the subtle differences between performances, algorithms are not smart enough to figure out the difference. In fact, even humans would have a hard time to distinguish between two performances of certain classical pieces.

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I don't think it's so much that the algorithms aren't smart enough to tell, it's that Google have had to make the algorithm still match in the case of people altering music with filters/effects, time stretching, pitch shifting etc. - so it's been made deliberately a lot less sensitive to most of the factors that a musician brings into their interpretation.

That's fine - it's probably necessary for Google to not be constantly dragged into the courts by actual infringement slipping through with small alterations. The issue is that there is absolutely no recourse for an incorrect match. There's no option to say 'no, the algorithm is wrong' or 'the claimant has made a false claim' - the nearest option is to claim fair use, and that kicks it back to the claimant to be able to lie again if it was fraudulent, with no fear of consequences.

There needs to be some process where it can be appealed to a human. I think the best way I have seen suggested is to stake a small amount of money on it to have somebody review it - say, $15 from each party, and then you lose it if it's ruled against you, or get a refund if you win. That should easily pay for half an hour of somebody's time, so they could hire staff to do it.

If the claimant lost and still didn't agree, it could be escalated to DMCA, where there are potential penalties for fraudulent claims (even if it doesn't happen much).

Seems like a great solution if it doesn't get abused by claimants. Maybe the verification status should remain permanent, or further disputes should escalate the sum staked for the claimants.

But why would you want anyone to have to pay anything? Google is one of the richest companies. This should be simply the cost of doing business. Google wants to make money by removing humans completely. They should have to pony up the expenses for when their system fails...

The cheaters and liars need to be penalized. If they're spending others' money they won't stop trying.

>The cheaters and liars need to be penalized.

You want Google to adjudicate on more things?! Now you're going to need an appeals process for when they get it wrong here as well.

They already are, this is the same process and it already has an (ineffective) form of appeals. The suggestion is only to add cost to it to disincentivize abuse.

Make it $50 and give half to the winner.

Or you could even turn it into a system where you can post a (prepaid) bond for a video. Ex: $50 gets automatic human review. $500 gets a phone call from a rep. The catch is you lose the bond if you're legit infringing. Make it channel wide and I bet there's a class of YouTubers that would be willing to post multi thousand dollar bonds to assert their legitimacy.

We don't necessarily disagree, but what bothers me is when people blame Google for this, as opposed to focusing on the draconian laws that have forced their hand.

poor Google, making billions of dollars out of other people's work with an automated system where it's impossible to talk to a real person. feel real bad for them

Poor me for the results our idiotic laws have produced. I do in fact feel real bad for me.

These laws didn't appear out of the blue, they're created and lobbied for by rich companies making money off copyright. Blaming Google for facilitating further abuse of copyright laws is a fair thing to do, and frankly, the unlikely event in which Google uses its money to put pressure towards fixing these laws is still more likely than the laws getting fixed because "we the people" somehow coordinated enough on the issue.

Still sounds like a Youtube problem, not with copyright.

The amount of false positives Youtube's copyright system has generated is crazy. It's clearly broken and wide-open for abuse by bad actors.

Even with the complications of copyright there are so many examples of people having entirely fair-use videos taken down. It goes well beyond just the difficulties of two works one copyrighted/one not matching.

This is a side effect of having onerous copyright laws. It takes quite a bit of engineering effort that could have been spent on other projects. This means economic loss and frustration for consumers.

As an aside, without copyright, we could have both Disney and Sony Spiderman movies. The consumer wins, and there's more than enough money to go around for competing studios.

>> "As an aside, without copyright, we could have both Disney and Sony Spiderman movies. The consumer wins, and there's more than enough money to go around for competing studios."

Wouldn't that be trademark, not copyright?

The problem is fair use isn't something that can be algorthimically determined. All you can really do algorithmically is say 'this bit of content matches this bit of content' determining if that match is part of fair use requires determining the context in which it's used which will be a hard problem until we either figure out uploads (and some poor schmucks' uploads have to watch and filter YT videos all day) or general purpose human level AI.

There are some heuristics that could be used but so many of them break down in pretty common cases. Eg: If we say using a small portion of someone else's video in a larger video won't strike it leave out some types of videos like Destin from Smarter Everyday or the Slowmo Guys where the most interesting shot could be 3-5 seconds total or if we just measure by length of copyrighted material vs the whole video we'll wind up with bit 10 hour compilations of copyrighted stuff from different places maybe. It's a hard problem and unfortunately Google (pushed somewhat by the law and somewhat by their own internal decisions) take a flag and contest approach that favors the 'original' creator.

Yes! And Kubrick knew this: for "2001: A Space Odyssey" he bought the right of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" directed by Böhm and replaced it at the last minute by the one directed by Karajan hoping no one would notice.

Citation? That doesn't seem to match the story as given in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(soundtr..., for example.

There is some reference to this in French:

> Les droits d'enregistrement de Karajan n'étant pas disponibles, c'est la version de Karl Böhm, avec l'orchestre philharmonique de Vienne, qui fut créditée au générique. Mais au cours de la postproduction, Kubrick remplaça discrètement l'enregistrement de Böhm par celui de Karajan et personne ne le remarqua3.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainsi_parlait_Zarathoustra_(St...

I own many recordings of Liszt. Some performances are better than others.

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