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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

From YouTube's perspective this makes total sense. Their takedown system is heavily automated because they deal with hours of new video every minute. There are two possibilities for error:

1. False Positive -- Video is brought down despite it being technically legal. Creator is mad, but YouTube suffers no more liability.

2. False Negative -- Big corporate lawyers sue YouTube for hundreds of trillions of dollars for copyright infringement. Also, these corporate lawyers would very much prefer it if you didn't believe in fair use at all. They will try to convince the court that fair use isn't a thing for weird technical reasons, and they might succeed.

So naturally the system is tuned to error on the side of generating excessive false positives. Unfortunately the enforcement side doesn't seem to understand how bad the false positive problem is and hits creators with draconian punishments for errors on YouTube's part.

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> 1. False Positive -- Video is brought down despite it being technically legal. Creator is mad, but YouTube suffers no more liability.

Solution: Create a law that makes it possible for the creator to sue YouTube for a false positive for the same sum that a media company could sue YouTube for for a false negative. This would counterbalance the scales of both types of errors.

The problem is that a lawsuit takes time and money. MegaCorp Inc. has plenty of both of those, whereas Bob Youtuber probably doesn't want to (or can't!) fight a protracted court battle against an adversary with effectively infinite resources about getting paid for their videos.

Soutions: a) youtubers can collectivise b) expensive law firms pick it up with the resouces to win (bob gets nothing but knows MegaCorp gets stung) c) use bad publicity - MegaCorps hate bad publicity d) rich people pretend to be bob, get sued, unleash lawyers on MegaCorp and make lots of money, so MegaCorps get very wary of the 'little' people.

A and B still mean YouTubers have to dedicate a lot of time and energy to a lawsuit. C is possible today (this article is an example). D is interesting but I am skeptical that even in this hypothetical scenario, "do a thing, wait to get sued and then counter-sue" is the most efficient way for rich people to make more money.

Unfortunately, even if that law existed, how many creators have the financial resources to go to court with someone like YouTube (i.e. Google). I don't think this is the only case where even if you are technically right, you will go bankrupt before you prove that in court. Case in point: the whole existence of patent trolls.

Creators could join together into a class action. Perhaps even form a union to collectively bargain with YouTube!

You are not a worker of YouTube. You just used the service and contributed some content. A professional association would be more appropriate.

It isn't just the detection algorithm that is tuned to benefit big corporations. The end to end process is asymmetric with automated issuance of copyright claims which need to be manually disputed which appear to be automatically rejected. Then the appeal process has a three strikes rule against channel owners but no apparent punishment for corporations.

I can understand tuning the detection algorithm but to balance the dispute process needs to take this into account. The fact that it doesn't shows where Youtube stands on the issue.

I don't think there's anything wrong with erring on either side, but at least the appeal process should be better vetted. If you know your system is going to fail, which YouTube has so often it generates drama every month, at least avoid putting more salt in the wound by auto-rejecting everything.

The media cartels are going to get quite testy if they flag someone's videos time and time again and yet the person is allowed to continue posting. They get especially testy when YouTube tells them "no, you are wrong" and put a video back up even though it contains a 2 second segment that your algorithm clearly believes is infringing on something you own.

Remember, these are the people who sued individual Napster users for $1.9 million for sharing a single album, and won.

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