Explaining copyright broke the YouTube copyright system
law.nyu.edu
law.nyu.edu
1- he was defending Warner Music
2- he didn't play any recordings, he just played 3 notes on a synthesizer (which is his whole premise that it's un-copyrightable)
3- Warner Music lost the actual suit (which implies they don't have copyright on those 3 notes?)
4- someone at Warner Music manually tagged the "infringing" part of the video, except the person tagged not the Dark Horse part of the play through but the Joyful Noise part of the play through (*^∀^)ノ彡┻━┻
changelog: improved ascii art
Doesn't that mean that Youtube is knowingly facilitating fraud and in some cases - when legitimate content is taken over - even commercial copyright infringement? It seems to me that the only reason why Youtube has gotten away with it so far is that nobody has systematically collected the evidence and sued Youtube in a country like Germany, for instance.
Edit: On a second thought, fraud seems irrelevant. It's about commercial copyright infringement.
Copyright and trademarks are different intellectual property concerns with different maintenance, declaration, and enforcement rules.
They are different sorts of protection and rights for different sorts of intellectual property.
All/Most countries that have trademark IPR require the holder to defend that right or lose it. It's not US specific. That's because you get the right to that mark because you're using it and watching for other people not to try to misuse or pass off their product/service as yours.
You are not required to immediately defend copyright, because its a right you hold whether you publish your work or not. You have copyright on something basically as soon as it is fixed in a physical form (written/recorded etc).
Finally, with patents, you're not required to have it in physical form, but you are required to describe it to the patent office in a way someone "skilled in the art" could reproduce. If they do that without getting permission then they have violated your patent.
So your premise in your message is incorrect.
However, I am not sure an argument by EFF, no matter how much I support it, can be considered a factual counterpoint.
Also, I’m bummed to see the parent post downvoted. I thought on HN, downvotes were supposed to be used on off topic/hostile/unproductive points, not just ones with which we disagree.
IOW, YouTube's system may be a response to copyright legislation, but it does not apply that legislation. Appeals to the fair use doctrine are missing the point. The doctrine does not apply since YouTube's actions are not constrained by copyright law.
IANAL, as you can probably tell. I may be wrong about what YT are required to consider, but in that case, I don't see how they can operate as they do.
The copyright owner would then verify if it is indeed a copyright infringement, and if they believe it is, and the user still believe it isn't, the case should be brought to some quivalent of "small claims court", where both sides would present their sides, and the loser has to pay some fine (not too large, but still high enough to deter pointless cases.. eg $1000 (to cover the court cost), and damages up to eg. $1000 due to lost views, or damages due to unlicenced distribution).
Basically, make it worth fighting for, if you're sure you're right in what you're doing, and not too expensive, when eg. Sonys lawyers build a multi-year case, destroying you financially, even if you're doing the right thing.
Again, just spitballing. I have no idea what the reality of the situation is.
There was, however, one time when I had to deal with an escalated claim. The piece in question was the slow movement of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. The Symphony has long been in the public domain. However, the slow movement was adapted into the song "Goin' Home", which is still under copyright, and there is a long-standing myth that the song was the inspiration for the Symphony rather than the other way around. Thus when I challenged the copyright claim on my New World video, the claimant came back and insisted their claim (on "Goin' Home") was valid. This notice was of course accompanied by the scary warnings about how if I persisted it could count as a strike against my youtube account.
I called their bluff. I responded with links to every online source I could find showing that Dvorak's work came first and was in the public domain.
I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels. Happily, they ended up releasing the claim - days before their claim would have expired anyway - with no elaboration. I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who stuck it through the scary youtube warnings and what the outcome was.
[EDIT: thanks for the clarifications on "own content" and "fair use". I never thought of it that way, but now it seems obvious.]
Copyright and free speech contradict each other - copyright is a form of legalized, privatized censorship. You can argue that copyright is OK - but then better take a look in the mirror and don't argue against the censorship in China etc. . Or you can argue against censorship, but then you must argue against copyright, too.
My wife's a choral composer and runs into similar nonsense with almost every video she posts to YouTube. There was one piece she posted that got taken down hard with a claim by Sony Classical within minutes, citing the applause - I think the video might have been part of a submission for a grant application or something to that effect, and if it was offline by the deadline, she was S.O.L.
Fortunately, her extended network is such that after some frantic tweeting from her verified account, the claim was reversed in under 48 hours. IIRC, both the Sony Classical twitter account and the composer of the work that the video was mistakenly flagged as tweeted back the equivalent of "We're not sure why this is happening, sorry!"
(I may be conflating two stories here, because there are so. many. But it doesn't lessen the absurdity of the situation, particularly for folks in the classical world)
Do you mean either "least false" or "most true"?
Since this was the reply, which explains how "this is my work" is the most true option, I'm not sure why you feel the need to post your question. Both sides have been explained and you can decide on your own.
> "this is my work" is the most true option
Obviously this was a typo, probably meant to be "least untrue".
Either they would sue you or the claim would go away.
> We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.
We need competition in this space.
After all, you can't compete on "we have a better legal process": if your selling point is is "once things have gone wrong, and we already ruined your day, at least your recourse is better than at Youtube", you don't have a selling point.
Copyright law still needs a reformation. The incentive to allow preferential monetization of orginal content in exchange for making it public is probably more of a hindrance for digital content. In reality it serves large publishers that technically should play a smaller role by now, since content logistics are cheaper now. At least for the vast majority of creators.
Cloudflare famously stood up to a patent troll and prevailed. In their first blog post about it [0], they wrote,
> This claim is a nuisance for us. The lawsuit will take our time, distract us from our work, and it will cost us money to fight. Patent trolls like Blackbird Technologies (@bbird_tech) exist to create these headaches so companies will play along and give them money to go away.
The only difference I can see is that patent trolls like Blackbird use the courts whereas copyright trolls use YouTube.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/standing-up-to-a-dangerous-new-b...
Hard to compete against a free service like YouTube. You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively, you'll have to build your own ad network to make any revenue, and even then you'll need some way to draw both content creators and users to your service to have any chance.
We had some competitors, but Vimeo effectively gave up and is marketing for B2B, and Twitch's video upload feature doesn't work since they haven't pushed hard enough for it (a huge marketing push, some UI work, and exclusivity deals on Twitch's side would go a long way if it can get any initial momentum).
The servers running in AWS are mostly metadata.
For non-streaming video web-torrent is probably the best attempt I've seen as it offloads bandwidth to the viewers.
However the real problem that is impossible to get around is storage. To run a moderately large site the largest cost is storage as you will be seeding a copy of the video.
The few competitors (which are about <1% of youtube's views) are built quite poorly IMO.
You won't beat youtube by copying it. You need to build something new that addresses many of the short comings.
I would wage most people won't even know they are being served by the web torrent mechanism when you hit the page. The video player looks like a regular html 5 video player.
You can just point youtube-dl at a video. However the vast majority of viewers just use the site / phone app.
“Gotta hurry past this café so the music won’t get my video copyright striked, lol!”
I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims.
To me that's $1/year lost revenue (no big deal, right?) but that company now gets the revenue from this video—and millions of other videos... so they're making mint and gambling that most users won't even try to appeal.
Obviously the problem is that it's completely unbalanced. Do people making copyright claims have the same threat? "By disputing this counter-claim, you agree that you could have your right to file any copyright claims revoked."
If not, then yeah, it's absolutely unfair.
It would be entirely reasonable for Youtube to block them from submitting the current style of claims and require them to submit actual, proper DMCA claims which open the claimant to all kinds of counterclaims, require the claimant to assert under the penalty of perjury that they own that content, etc.
But yeah, maybe requiring claimants to actually go through the official process would be better (albeit more work for YouTube).
Filing a claim automatically and conveniently is not protected by law. They could just as well say, "We have an automated system with a convenient interface for good-faith actors. If you show yourself to be acting in bad faith, you can exercise your legal claim in writing by sending it to this address: X. The postal system to that office is pretty bad, loses stuff all the time, so you'd better send it FedEx."
Remember, they don't have to be true.
edit: And as others have mentioned in their stories, people might get angry if you destroy their radios to evade a frivolous claim.
I expect that even toggling off Fortnite's "licensed music" setting can still run into audio copyright claims against other Fortnite videos which have the same audio.
AFAIK in that case it's at least not malicious, it's just the content ID system completely failing to handle this category of content, where a big chunk of the visuals and/or audio are guaranteed to match with other videos because it's a recording of interactive media.
It cost us maybe two full days of development resources + consultants + throwing money at different consultants to get an "in" to youtube to figure out why our video was taken down. About a week later we received official word from the artist and then we figured out that our consultants who made the video messed up and forgot the critical step of securing permission.
It was an expensive blunder, both from a media standpoint but also in the amount of resources we burned trying to figure out what the hell was wrong.
I'm not mad at youtube for taking the video down, but it's absurd that there's nothing in the system that would tell me why, and absolutely zero hope of figuring it out.
It says who did it, what they object to and gives you the choice of fixing it or filing a complaint. But if you lose the complaint, you get a copyright strike and can lose your channel.
I saw one video where they spent some time up front saying how great Stadia is so the algorithm treats them nicely before spending the next 10 minutes saying how bad it is. They were clearly joking, but it does make me think about the type of control the system has and what messages get promoted. Who knows?
Not through their fake on platform system, but instead through their "official" counter claim contact info email.
They would then be required by law to reinstate the content.
The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content.
"They would then be required by law to reinstate the content. The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content." is the followup process for a DMCA claim - but that's not what's happening here. Youtube is not requiring claimants to submit a DMCA claim (with all the associated process) and they are not submitting DMCA claims. Youtube could make their copyright claim process following these rules if they wanted to be on the side of users, but they have not. They can also choose to have a process where any complaint simply causes content to get removed with no recourse, and this is pretty much what they have done.
Because people don't know about it.
Also, for many people, even doing something like "sending an email to counter claim" is too much work for them to bother doing it.
You'd be surprised how many people won't follow through on something when there is even the smallest barrier to them doing so.
> And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics?
Things can get to be pretty technical, when people are talking about the minutia of a counter claim to DMCA. It does not surprise me that info like this is not well known.
It is provided on the official copyright.gov website.
All this stuff is in a searchable database that is helpful provided by the US government, and is required by law.
Ex for Google:
https://dmca.copyright.gov/osp/publish/history.html?search=G...
But it's more likely that you get a Youtube takedown, which is not related to DMCA. There's a UI for that in the mgmt. console.
> This is not a reasonable expectation to place on average users.
The rights holders may end up playing the two services against eachother, and use the more draconian policy of one as arguments for making the other more friendly to their interests.
They have a lot more skin in the game than users do.
DMCA requests usually don't result in a website shutting down unless the webmaster is non-responsive and the claimant makes further moves beyond the first request.
The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content, but this would likely just result in Google being sued for trillions of dollars by the media cartels to remove such restrictions under the argument that Google is aiding in piracy.
That's when ContentID and the non-DMCA takedowns started happening.
You hit on this in your first sentence. And this whole arrangement with Google is specifically to side-step those penalties. Your 'easiest solution' is for Google to return to DMCA takedown requests. I agree. I want that. I think most consumers and content creators would.
But Big Media doesn't.
I mean, how fast would Google move if a non-responsive take down resulted in the youtube.com domain being seized?
Instead, Google would rather have made their own job easier by standardizing 'requests.' There's nothing in the DMCA specifying that some standard, machine-readable format be used. To get the media companies on board with keeping the takedown request process as automated as possible, they compromised.
Even if Youtube was in the right, it would take years and multiple appeals to get to that conclusion and then Viacom still appealed so at some point Youtube just decided to settle, it was cheaper.
I believe that means that in the current legal environment it is not cost efficient to provide free hosting of third party videos, ad supported, without draconian/significant number of false positives content identification system that is made available to the biggest potential "suers". Thus, even if a competitive service would appear, if it needs to be profitable using the same format it would likely end up implementing a similar (or worse) system. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Whoever is in charge of this situation dropped the ball out of fear. It cost Google plenty because all videos should have ads unless you are on a paid account.
I'm not a content creator, but I run into it myself, when I wanted to upload a dashcam recording of an accident to share with my insurance company.
It was tagged, because radio was playing a song and of course after my appeal they insisted the copyright was theirs. I gave up after getting the page which threatened me with the possibility of terminating my account.
The thing is that if I could I would actually prefer to remove the music from the video, I was interested in the other sounds.
[0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...
>> a Seattle appeals court said on Wednesday. It’s neither a public forum nor a “state actor”, and it can’t be held to First Amendment court oversight as if it were a government body.
>> »violation of First Amendment protection of free speech. That argument doesn’t fly, the appeals court said on Wednesday, given that YouTube isn’t a public forum
The big mistake people make is that youtube is a public platform/forum. It is not, it's a privilege that their server accepts your browser's request, not a right. They have every right to refuse for any reason they want. Same for videos you upload there, them holding it is a privelege, not a right.
It's in company's best interest to make people believe that it's a public forum, because people will start using it every day. In case of google, people use their browser to visit their website, sometimes using their ISP (google fiber), and log in using their account. As soon as you do something google doesn't like, you risk losing access to one of those, because it's not actually yours, it's a service provided as a privelege, unfortunately.
Maybe we just need better advertising standards enforcement to fine these guys into the ground whenever they talk about how their platform "enables open communication on a global scale" and other marketing BS.
The copyright system on YouTube is broken and stuff like this allows rightsholders to abuse the DMCA and bully small creators. It's a shame.
> Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.
It is so with all Google products. Your content will be taken down or account will be randomly locked or your apps will be removed and unless you have lots of "clout" and/or can build up an outrage about the incident on Twitter/HN, you're screwed.
BTW, the page is non-commercial and doesn't profit from anything.
Facebook will start caring if there’s the potential for a legal precedent to be set against their copyright filtering software
Vote with your feet. Build a website FB doesn't control.
Au contraire, the EU is demanding automatic copyright filters (also known as censorship machines). Don't mistake EU doing one good thing – GDPR – for EU always taking the side of the little guy.
Of course, automatic copyright filters are a complete disaster for multiple reasons, but establishing them universally via regulation in a way that doesn't favor big corporate players is a lot better than the ones we have right now. The ideal is to abolish them entirely.
One of the biggest problems with Content ID is that Google seems to make no effort to verify actual ownership before allowing claims to be made, so you can trivially steal other people's content without being penalized. If filtering happens at a regulatory level, it could be tied in with the system for registering copyrights, at which point anyone can utilize the system by registering their work and you have an easier way to resolve disputes over claims (is this copyright registration valid or not? is the match correct?) vs the current YouTube mess.
In legislations like ours in Germany copyright registration isn't really a thing for most arms of copyright related topics, rights on creative works are rather complicated in general and even with the EU subject to local laws. So there's hardly anything to tie into really.
And from the viewpoint of "helping the little guy/gal" it seems that all recent legislation worked against that, e.g. here most of these issues were delegated to commercial interest groups that just flat out deny smaller content creators like YouTubers or bloggers.
Even if they could upload content, then you have the same content in there twice and need to bake on another layer that's likely broken.
To me it honestly seems that no amount of good will legislation in this space that mandates anything close to upload filters will ever turn out benefitial to smaller players in the space.
I agree that it's very hard for legislation to fix this problem, but I think people are too eager to claim that legislation is unable to help small players when the situation is far more nuanced. Well-crafted legislation in this area could help a lot, but content filters aren't it.
Only have a German link at hand but it's definitely not helping the little folks, e.g. this breakdown was cited with the remark "bloggers don't even make the cut to appear in the statistics". https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-so-viel-geld-...
I'm by no means arguing that legislation wouldn't help, I'm honestly of the opposite opinion. I just see content/upload filters as a bad idea and broken by design, apologies if I didn't get that across in the previous comment.
In most of these cases of unreasonable takedowns or account closures, there is no way to reach a human to have the case reviewed reasonably. It seems to (almost?) always depend on somehow finding an employee, such as often happens when someone posts their story here on HN.
I haven't read the annual report of Alphabet lately, but I can safely assume they are making enough profit that they could afford to make improvements in these systems (by employing more humans in key positions and by slowing or limiting the chances of automated processes reaching terminal decisions).
The only real damage done to Google/YT as a result of fraudulent disputes like these are to it's reputation of not being friendly to creators - a view I think is already firmly rooted. We desperately need alternatives but it's an uphill battle the whole way with huge barriers to entry...
If a company, or an agent acting in their name, makes a fraudulent copyright claim, then have the wronged party name one item in the offending company's catalog that becomes public domain. Any contractual losses for entities who were benefiting from royalties in the said work are the offender's problem. Not only do the copyfraudsters lose a (possibly much more valuable) item from their catalog, they'd also have to compensate those whose incomes they have affected with their fraudulent acts.
Align the incentives and make the stick painful enough. People being people will take care of the rest.
BigMedia: "Your Honour, we select This Cheap Crappy Z-List Movie We Made Just To Serve As Ablative Armour In Disputes Like This."
But on the other hand, nothing's going to stop you from filing fraudulent DMCA claims. The few measures in the law designed to discourage it don't work.
This seems like a good solution since it makes it harder to just sling copyright claims left and right, and make it so entire videos don't get taken down.
Unfortunately it looks like either it was never introduced, or did not end up working as hoped.
--
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/10/youtube-copyright-claim-...
Or media companies found it onerous.
Lack of incentive to care. They're too big, and what can the small user or uploader do except whine?
It's always the same problem with massive power asymmetry.
Create the same incentive in the direction that you care about (maybe also with lawsuits) and maybe something will change.
That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. And I think that assumption is dead wrong: we're bumping up on all kinds of emergent phenomenon (conspiracies, runaway recommendations) and issues (copyright, borderline child porn) that cannot be solved, and we shouldn't let Google give us their best-effort compromise. If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.
This is what Google and Facebook would like us to believe, but I'm not convinced. What it really comes down to is that they'd very much like to stay in the realm of automation, especially Google who are notorious for keeping humans out of the loop at any cost. See the long history of problems with their automated "developer relations" on Android. And the problem is that the disincentives for continuing to fail at these halfway-automated tasks are simply not strong enough to force their hand.
So they can just keep "doing their best" with automation, even though automation itself is far from the best they could do.
> it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else swim in slightly shallower pools full of money hiring people
I think something like 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. How do you propose people review that in real time? Just to keep up in real time you need (300*60) 18000 people watching the videos and not falling behind, which means you likely need at least 5x that number.
Cases like this, and the OP, are common-sense to any human being. Google doesn't especially want them to be resolved in this nonsensical way, they just don't care enough to direct the necessary resources to make sure a human touch is applied to them.
Also, YouTube doesn't want to settle disputes because that makes them liable to be sued if they happen to be wrong.
There are tons of levers to pull to reduce volume without reducing profit (e.g. replace "nyancat for 24h" with a loop option), and they don't have to review everything.
If we limit review to copyright claims only, the hourly cost may be higher per person, but the review volume would be much lower.
So basically, how PornHub works. They cannot risk not reviewing videos because the risk is so great, so they do. And they somehow manage to thrive in their space.
And people really really do.
And for every hackernews poster (including myself) who says things like "I'll gladly pay X$/month for Gmail/Google/Facebook/Youtube just so that my data/privacy remained my own", there is a THOUSAND or more voices that would not.
How many people would they really have to hire? YouTube alone made $5 billion in 3 months' ad revenue: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
That's 720,000 hours per day. If you figure people work 8-hour days, that's 90,000 people. Assuming they never take vacations, don't get weekends off, and really do work 8-hour shifts with no breaks. None of which seems remotely plausible. If we assume 5-day workweeks, 6 hours of actual "productive" time per day, and 2 weeks annual vacation, closer to 175,000 people.
YouTube revenue in the corresponding timeframe is somewhere between $9.5 billion and $14 billion. How much of that is profit and how much is already being spent on infrastructure costs and whatnot is unclear. But 175k people at $50k/year, say, is $8.75 billion/year. Which is getting pretty darn close to those total revenue numbers.
Note that that's $50k expense to the employer (i.e. including benefits, employer-side taxes, office space, etc, etc, not just salaries), which is likely to be an underestimate if these people are in the US.
There's the question of whether every minute of video needs to be watched by humans, of course. But at that point we're back into automation-land to some extent.
The number of cases that actually need manual moderation would be many orders of magnitude smaller.
Imagine a system that works something like the following:
- Users get access to manual dispute resolution by proving their real identity
- Persons with enough obvious violations (i.e. outright piracy with no possible argument of fair use) are barred from the dispute process
- All disputes get sent to human moderators and handled within 24 hours
- There are multiple levels of appeals, starting at appeals to unskilled laborers and ending at appeals to experienced copyright attorneys
- Going to higher levels of appeals requires paying in a nominal fee that is returned if the claim is overturned
- The final level of appeals can decide the case is too unclear and should be handled by the courts as per the DMCA
- Claimants are penalized some nominal fee for overturned claims
How many moderators would that need? It'd be 1,000 at most. Majority of them would be outsourced laborers costing around $20-30k, with a few experienced attorneys costing $200-300k for the final stage of appeals. Total cost $20-30M. That's a lot of money, but still only 0.5% of their actual revenue. Such a system would surely create far more value both to the company and to the world.
Not even close. We're talking a small % of videos that receive copyright takedown requests, which is already a small % of all videos uploaded.
Imagine if DMCA appeals required a human review on channels above a certain size, for example.
It’s crazy how we as a society just accept this as the new status quo as if the world would fall apart if these services were scaled back or redesigned in such a way to reduce sharing and content proliferation on a mass scale. Sure, billion-dollar businesses have been built around these apps, but that alone shouldn’t justify their existence.
Sadly, we’ve seen this before. Back in the 70’s, Ford sold the Pinto knowing that it would result in deaths due to the location of the gas tank. Basically, if they got rear-ended, the gas tank had a decent chance of exploding and killing the driver. Instead of issuing a recall, Ford surmised internally that it would be cheaper to settle with victims.[0]
Unfortunately, social media companies have been so good at avoiding regulation, to the point that the people don’t have a real way to contest these kinds of practices.
0: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/
Billions of people use YouTube, and like it a lot. They like it much more than what was available before it, given how much time they spend on it now. They would be very unhappy if government decided that "this alone doesn't justify its existence". Why do you think the government back in 70s, government didn't just say "usefulness of cars doesn't justify their existence" and banned them?
Imagine GM sold cars at a loss, gaining 99% monopoly of your country, then put GPS trackers in all cars and sold everyone's whereabouts to the highest bidder and allowed a foreign government (the US) warrentless access. You're saying our only option is to stop driving cars. I disagree.
Because in either situation (with and without Youtube) there are drawbacks, the question then becomes one of weighing those, rather than blindly deciding to rollback.
The new model seems to be: give away all digital content for free (marketing), build a trustworthy brand (to prevent any ol' copy cat from beating you), and sell a service / experience / physical item(s) associated with it.
e.g. When someone uses your song in their YouTube video it should be seen as free advertising for your guitar lessons / live show / t-shirt company.
It's not about what I or anyone else "wants" IMO. It's about what is actually possible and then what's desirable for humanity considering the tradeoffs. Like the war on drugs, it can be stated all day how bad drugs are for society, but it's a moot point if you can't enforce a drug free policy. Psuedo-enforcement gives rise to much worse conditions and impacts on society through black markets, misallocation of funds to ineffective counter-measures, and inconsistent punishments.
What are some examples of things you're thinking of that people identify as that are not just brands and how do you see them as distinct?
I believe that freedom of information is more beneficial to society than any single individual's or company's claim to copyright. Will creativity suffer? Perhaps, but I don't think creative people can help but be creative (nor will people stop sharing it online). Creativity is not what's at stake; it's the established model of monetizing that creativity that is in jeopardy.
I don't think it's crazy that the internet has changed things. I think it's crazy to not change along with it.
How is that in any way better than the current situation? Currently, there is a chance your video will be pulled from YouTube, and you might get your entire account banned... meaning a fraction of people don't get to use YouTube to host their videos.
If instead, we just shut down YouTube, then.. everyone doesn't get to host on YouTube...
I don't get how that is better
No, their take is to refuse to allow socially harmful monopolies to exist just because they already do. The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from.
There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things. There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up.
How is youtube being the most popular video site (a monopoly I assume you're arguing there) socially harmful? And is that harm more than the benefits it brings?
> The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from.
If it was very profitable and technically possible to build a similar system but better, we'd have that. The fact that instead the opposite is happening (consolidation) seems to suggest that whatever Youtube is doing is working, as a solution to this problem (large free third party video hosting site).
> There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things.
And you get to decide that for all the people that enjoy those clips and want to host them?
> There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up.
Other than hurting the bottom line probably not. But the bottom line is what determines if something like this gets built. If it was sufficiently profitable and feasible to build alternatives that do a lot more human reviewing of all these videos then it would already be done so.
> How is youtube being the most popular video site
The reference is to the music industry monopolies. Read the post.
> The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from.
> If it was very profitable and technically possible to build a similar system but better, we'd have that.
Not true. "better" is a matter of perspective. Better for copyright holders? Nope. Better for society? Yes. The winners are still winning (pun intended).
> And you get to decide that for all the people that enjoy those clips and want to host them?
That wasn't the implication. The issue is that there is no alternative that is widely accessible (and conversely as profitable). "There's no reason" meaning that there's no technical reason, only a socio-economic reason.
> There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up.
> Other than hurting the bottom line probably not.
Right. But you just have to go off script there, because you didn't get the opening you wanted. This is why we can't have nice things. Even the intellectuals want to troll, rather than contribute (guilty as charged). I just hate to see mischaracterization of rational discussion.
The real impossibility: "doing it while still optimizing for the greatest amount of ad revenue".
YouTube Kids was the service where this really stunned me: How could it possibly make sense that a service designed specifically for children can’t be properly moderated?
Even of they had one single employee manually reviewing the full content of all submitted videos, they would have 6-8 hours of safe content each day. With an automated quality check first, they could have had 6-8 hours of excellent safe content per day.
Instead they created a service that damaged countless children.
For the sake of ad revenue.
You can easily get everyone to agree on the answer to "is there a pyramid right here?"
Try getting them to agree on "is this video valuable?"
If you want to be a "carrier" you can't moderate anything. If you are going to moderate some things, you have to be responsible for all things.
If your business can't work within those rules, then go out of business.
Extending your argument about Youtube to the Internet & humanity, I think you're arguing that if we cannot address these kinds of problems in our Internet, then we shouldn't fucking build it. I disagree. I think we're better off with the Internet even though these moderation problems are unresolved.
No, YouTube must exist at its current scale because a lot of people find it massively useful. Your argument is no different that saying we shouldn't have cars because some people get behind the wheel drunk. The argument you should be making is the impact of YouTube a net-negative on society or a net-positive and for YouTube specifically you'd have to convince me its a net-negative.
In any case, copyright and borderline childporn are problems with the internet in general, but I don't see why you stop at dismantling YouTube instead of just turning the entire internet off.
Thing is, if Youtube wouldn't function for most people then it wouldn't get that many viewers then the ads wouldn't be paying as much then it wouldn't exist. But practice proves that it can exist, with lots of compromises being made err-ing on the side of the large copyright holders. Maybe it's possible to build alternative systems that work better, there's no law that says there can't be alternatives to Youtube so let's see if it happens. If not, that itself should be a strong enough signal that maybe the way Youtube is done may be one of the _few_ ways this can be done.
If they’re so intent on moving fast and breaking things in search of growth, the only way to introduce skin in the game is that old adage “you broke it -> you bought it”
I agree that upload anything, search anything, view anything can never be moderated or sustained.
We, as a society, clearly want YouTube to exist. The fact that Youtube/Google's efforts and our current legal frameworks cause problems in edge cases doesn't mean we should just give up.
Also, Youtube didn't have a lot of these problems before getting acquired by Google, so they're not inherent to the nature of the platform. Youtube could still exist with different, less hostile policies.
I don't know what you are referring to but how can something be "borderline child porn"? It would think either it is or it isn't. Legal or illegal?
Less whining about the problem and more work on a legally helpful definition of Fair use would help everyone.
(Consider other countries which have clearer fair use policies where they clearly indicate "how many pages of a book can be copied" etc. This needs to be updated to include video, i.e. "How many seconds of a video can be shown/sampled" with no subjective test of "if deemed in the public interest, or newsworthy etc". Just a simple blanket rule. "People can clip up to 10 seconds of video" or something like that.
If creators and viewers knew definitively what was legal and what was not, they would choose to fight back loudly and publicly. My proof? Despite that solid footing, they already do.
For one thing, something that is playing in the background, where it doesn't sound good as music and where there is talking over it, isn't the same as having music edited in with good quality. Using 10 seconds of a song, in high quality, for your opening title sequence is probably a lot more of an infringement than having 30 seconds of dialog, where there happened to be music from someone's car radio faintly audible in the background.
I'm not arguing for the status quo (I think it is very broken), but I don't think such simplistic solutions would actually work.
This enable them to at least get some of the revenue of their video (by sharing with other (often bogus) claimants), and to monetize re-uploads (something normally available only to big channels).
Why Google doesn't do anything about this mess is beyond me.
“This would have been a dead end for most users. Unable to understand how the already opaque dispute resolution process might impact the status of their account, they would have to decide if it was worth gambling their entire YouTube account on the chances that their some combination of YouTube and the rightsholder would recognize their fair use claim.
Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.“
To be clear, if you dispute and counternotice everything, then the only way this would happen is if the other side actually sues you, which is incredibly unlikely here.
> There are three ways to resolve a copyright strike:
> [...]
> 3. Submit a counter notification: If your video was mistakenly removed because it was misidentified as infringing, or qualifies as a potential fair use, you may wish to submit a counter notification.
That's not entirely clear whether the copyright strike is removed when you submit a counter notification, or whether the status of the copyright strike is resolved after further proceedings.
I think the strike is removed immediately upon submission of the counter notification, because I think this is the action that moves the dispute fully into the formally defined DMCA takedown legal procedure and out of YouTube's own content ID procedures. But Google's documentation is obviously avoiding any clear statement of user's rights and what's required by law vs by Google policy. Google and the big copyright cartels want the system to continue to function largely on intimidation, and don't want it to be too easy for users to find and exercise the "sue me or fuck off" option they are legally entitled to.
I don't want to ascribe particular motivations to Google here, but I agree that more people should be aware that they can dispute and counternotice and won't be harmed except in the very unlikely case that they actually get sued.
If you involve some lawyers and media pressure they might reverse the decision, but if you are just a random person without a legal team on call 24/7 you're SOL.
Not how it works. They need to actually file a lawsuit.
The stuff you're saying in this thread all sounds plausible, but I have no idea where you're getting this information and there are plenty of other plausible interpretations of the vague Google documentation I've read so far. Can you please provide some more authoritative sources for your claims? Because as-is you're not really reassuring anybody.
Specifically, https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000 mentions the courtesy period for anyone that's actually monetized and says the account won't go down at all if counternotices are sent. There's no courtesy period for accounts that aren't monetized (I.e. Not part of the Partner program). But of course if you're not monetized you have very little reason to dispute a content ID claim, since that also doesn't harm your account.
A strike is a DMCA notice that's submitted. That can be counternoticed and the only way to prevent that is filing a lawsuit within 10 business days.
The only exception I'm aware of is a special agreement Google has with UMG where they ignore counternotices and appeals, but they also don't count as strikes and won't hurt the account in that case.
Describing it as "won't hurt the account" is a bit misleading. They won't nuke your account ("at this time"), but they also won't let you post the legal non-infringing content that the cartel has paid Google to suppress. That would generally qualify under the broader meaning of "harm" that applies during legal disputes.
You don't need any virality to get a DMCA counternotice accepted.
> You don't need any virality to get a DMCA counternotice accepted.
Would you risk your livelihood that some engineer wasn't tired when they wrote the interface? Remember: if something goes wrong, your account might be toast, and you can't talk to anyone that can help you. Unless you go viral.
This isn't happening under the DMCA, it's Google's own brand of copyright process more tailored to appeasing the giant media companies.
I'm surprised there's not a serious case against Youtube/Google for denying people the right to Fair Use. Is this because people don't have to use Youtube? Is this in the Youtube contract somewhere? Is it because Fair Use doesn't work like that? If you provide a platform like Youtube for people to use, are you not held legally responsible for protecting Fair Use laws the same way you'd be held liable for copyright infringement if you didn't give corporations/people the ability to dispute?
If Youtube allowed all videos to exist regardless of copyright infringement, and didn't lay out any paths for claims, would they be in legal trouble? Is this not the same as automatically removing obvious Fair Use content?
But the general business youtube has pursued, which in fairness, is partly to make it possible for people to publish videos with such works in the first place, is that most copyright holders will allow the work to be use but instead the entire video (regardless of how significant that small copyright portion was) is monetized to the 100% benefit of the copyright holder.
There are some plusses to this, in that it's easy (and free) to actually publish a video containing copyrighted works. And that in general by working with all the publishers to do this, it has in theory prevented them from chasing YouTube harder to disallow any such content.
The downside is the entire system is one sided and the review and oversight process is clearly lacking. I could understand a little how this happens with small channels... but I frequently see channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who are typically full time youtubers) and sometimes even millions.. get the same lack of oversight to their claims.
To me it's crazy that the "3 strikes" rule applies just as equally to accidental and incorrect violations on an otherwise very active and largely original channel (that posts 1 video a day making it very easy to accidentally or incorrectly get recognised as having a violation) as it does to a 1 video channel with no subscribers that is actually violating copyright. It boggles the mind that there is no scale applied.
And time and time again I witness channels I watch have this same process of having to somehow reach out to someone at youtube by yelling on twitter or hacker news and then problems just "go away". Even those with millions of subscribers that have internal youtube partner managers.. often those channels still can't solve these problems. It's madness.
What happens in Youtube is probably covered by the terms of service (like most people, I haven't actually read it in detail, so I don't know the specifics of how it will play out, but the idea should be generally correct). Terms of service is basically a contract, and contract law totally lets you prohibit one party from doing things that are otherwise legal. So fair use doesn't matter, unless it's written into the contract, which it almost certainly isn't.
The other dimension to bring up is DMCA. This absolves Google of any copyright infringement so long as they expeditiously respond to takedown notices and forwards them to the respective user. The user can object, at which point the original copyright owner must file a lawsuit. Only in the lawsuit will fair use be considered (this is one of the criticisms of DMCA). However, the ContentID system at play in Youtube is not a DMCA takedown system; it is completely independent, and thus DMCA does not apply here in the slightest.
This is a misnomer.
Fair use is an authorized use, and consequently is “distinct from affirmative defenses where a use infringes a copyright, but there is no liability due to a valid excuse, e.g., misuse of a copyright.” Id. Lenz, 815 F.3d at 1152
[0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...
It is not under proposal, it already passed :(
(member states have 2 years to implement it in local regulations)
(A possible salvation by the party inflicting the harm onto the falsely accused by allowing a disfunctional system to raise these claims, may be providing funds required for taking the case to court. Else, the entire situation is essentially disproportionate, since, to all probability, the accused party may lack the means to rectify the situation.)
* ) Read: I know, detecting this kind of context is prohibitively complex and probably not in the practical scope of the state of the art. Meaning, the technology is not ready for production.
> The claimant can request that your video be removed ... if they believe their claim is still valid (response to an appeal)
Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims?
This seems like a court in which the plaintiff is also the judge. How can this possibly work?
If I were a troll and just wanted to make life for people needlessly hard, could I submit claims for random videos and simply reject all disputes and appeals - and if someone tried to sue me, say I was just playing by the Content ID rules and didn't invoke actual copyright law at all? What would happen?
From a very cynical perspective: Not really, it makes perfect sense as it is the cheapest option that also empowers the people who can make youtube's life a misery. (The big corporations that file these claims).
Hiring third party people to decide these or whatever mechanism you can think of would be more expensive for youtube than what they have now.
Here's the channel, get to flagging. https://www.youtube.com/user/Google
This Kafkaesque situation is similar to the way the legal process works inside a totalitarian state like China, where the citizen caught in a sticky legal situation, could not use the appeal and defence mechanisms, because nobody knows what is the actual mechanism.
And similarly the Youtube user has no natural rights or protection, even if the entire misconduct lies with the Youtube copyright strike process.
It is times like this that I start to agree with the way governments have begun to scrutinize Facebook and Google.
Clearly they do have a responsibility beyond a commercial term of service, to provide not just a utility but also to ensure that some degree of fair play, truthfulness, and consistency is applied.
They should be under severe antitrust scrutiny.
[1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/alphabet-youtube-ad-re...
I've tried to file a takedown request, and the process is so onerous, and they require all kinds of proof they're my photos I've never been able to actually complete it.
<sigh>
It seems like such jurisdictions can quickly become havens for innovation.
Basically this was a critique of aggressive copyright lawsuits that was manually copyright claimed... for the wrong song.