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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

>We discovered that if we continued to challenge the accusation of infringement and lost, our video would be subject to copyright strikes. If the account was subject to multiple strikes its ability to live stream could be restricted or the account could be terminated. While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet.

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.

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That's not how I read that. "lost" in this context simply means the so-called copyright holder clicks the button that says "nah, still can't use my stuff" that's considered a strike.

Right. The DMCA takedown process is more reasonable in this regard: if you post a counter-notice, the service provider puts your content back up and the party trying to make a copyright claim has to sue you. YouTube, on the other hand, makes purported copyright holders the absolute judge of their own cases.

This is incorrect. If a rights owner refuses to retract in the face of a dispute, YouTube will require them to convert it into a DMCA notice and will then honor any counternotice.

I've seen multiple reports from channel owners who have not been given any such option; the message saying that the supposed "rights owner" has confirmed the dispute is presented as "final" (along with the copyright strike). Unless this has changed recently, or there's some obscure link to switch to the DMCA process?

Got any links?

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.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3045545

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.

It may hurt you in that sense, but not the account. I think it's pretty clear what I meant by that. Regardless such cases are fairly rare, vast majority of cases I've seen people complaining about YouTube issues have nothing to do with the UMG deal and I haven't heard of any other companies than UMG subject to this.

Which is why I felt the need to clarify, since OP is somewhat misleading.

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 "Resolve a copyright strike" section of [1] includes:

> 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.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000

The strike isn't removed until after ten days, but the effects are paused during that period. The content will stay down during that period but the account is fine.

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.

This also assumes that the entity that made the original claim doesn't just come back and say that your counter-notice is invalid. Google doesn't actually check that they are telling the truth and will just suspend your account permanently instead.

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.

>This also assumes that the entity that made the original claim doesn't just come back and say that your counter-notice is invalid. Google doesn't actually check that they are telling the truth and will just suspend your account permanently instead.

Not how it works. They need to actually file a lawsuit.

> The strike isn't removed until after ten days, but the effects are paused during that period. The content will stay down during that period but the account is fine.

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.

I did some in depth research a year ago and linked to all the Google resources there. See https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeCompendium/comments/aga8yl/h... and also see the EFF link there.

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.

With Google's questionable policies, buggy automatic decision-making and notoriously terrible support? Unless they're sure they can make their complaint go viral, the risk feels quite high.

What policy here is questionable, what automatic decision here is buggy?

You don't need any virality to get a DMCA counternotice accepted.

Google has a long history of "oops, sorry we did $badThing to your account. We see now that it was a mistake. Thank you for going viral on Twitter/HN/Wherever our employees happened to see it" as customer/creator service. It's not an accident that they don't have appeal systems set up for most issues, it's a policy.

> 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.

If it's a liveihood issue, there's a 7 day grace period for anyone that's monetized before the account is shut down due to blocks. And if Google was widely ignoring counternotices there'd be lots of stories about it out there. I think I've seen one or two that were quickly handled.

>To be clear, if you dispute and counternotice everything

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 well aware. If you dispute content ID claim the content owner must submit a DMCA notice to keep the claim active.

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