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Comment by zadokshi | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the legislative framework in the US. The definition of fair use is not clear enough. You need to get together and amend the laws to make it much clearer what is fair use. If the law stated (for example) "a song playing in the background in a coffee shop for less than 10 seconds is fair use" then youtubers wouldn't be joking "Better hurry past this coffee shop so I don't get a copyright strike".

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.

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Even with a clear definition, private entities don't have to honor fair use privileges. Their server, their rules.

The (well, a) problem here is that the legal system is misclassifying youtube as a private entity, rather than as the public common carrier that it in practice actually is.

While that is technically true, in practice the private entities are beholden to the creators themselves, and the viewers stand up for those creators.

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.

A simpler definition of fair use would definitely make automation easier! But is the simpler definition one we actually want or intend? Lots of laws are complicated because they’re the product of years and years of iteratively modeling a problem with lots of feedback and edge cases accounted for - why should we prioritize Google’s ease-of-enforcement over _the thing we actually want to be the law_?

I don't see that sort of thing working. Too much relevant gray area.

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.

Fair use is essentially a codification of the common law principle that "some copies no one cares about." The problem isn't that it's not clear enough; the problem is that fair use is contextual and automation of contextual discovery is not really possible.

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