They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
If Google/Youtube were NOT a monopoly, they would have invested significant amount of money in customer support. However, there is zero. The only reason they get away with this is because they have a monopoly. They are saving hundreds of millions in support costs by not delivering any support. Unlike more overt monopolistic actions like raising prices, etc, what they do instead of increase their profits by taking away functionality that their customers should be receiving.
The fact you can get all your work taken away because of fraud, and have no recourse is unacceptable. Yet there really is no viable alternative. I hope content creators band together and form a class action lawsuit against Google and break up their monopoly. It's disgusting.
I'm not sure one has anything to do with the other.
No, the DMCA allows for counter claiming and it not being an issue. Google's policies go beyond what's required for the DMCA, and stem from the early several billion dollar copyright lawsuit they settled out of court with the major labels fairly early on. It's an extralegal system negotiated between Google and the labels.
> However they have in the past sued people who have issued false DMCA claims.
Can you give an example of someone they've sued for making false claims?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20812144/youtube-copyrigh...
You're conflating two different things, perhaps intentionally.
Content ID, which is the additional system you're referring to, does not and cannot cause an account to be closed[1]. If content in your video is flagged by Content ID, all that happens is that the advertising revenue from your video is directed to the purported copyright holder, or the video is removed from YouTube. You do not receive any strikes and your channel is not limited in any way.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/copyright/#...
Copyright strikes[2] are a completely different kettle of fish, and Google is bound by the DMCA to immediately and without question remove the allegedly infringing content. In fact, they are expressly forbidden by law to perform any sort of investigation before making the content unavailable or they risk losing immunity under the safe harbour provisions.
And far from accepting DMCA claims "with no recourse" as you suggest, they openly publish a variety of training materials to teach users exactly how to file a counter-claim[3], and they routinely accept those counter-claims and restore the content.
[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000
[3] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684
>Can you give an example of someone they've sued for making false claims?
Christopher Brady.
https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-20-youtube-lawsuit-false-ta...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/15/20915688/youtube-copyrig...
The whole copyright strike system is in addition to the DMCA, and is part of what was negotiated with the labels (in addition to ContentID).
Also, what are you quoting "with no recourse" from?
That's completely false, and all you need do is click the links I provided to see that it is. Copyright strikes are only issued in conjunction with DMCA takedown requests, Content ID does not and cannot cause you to receive strikes, and does not and cannot shut your channel down.
>Also, what are you quoting "with no recourse" from?
From a parent comment at the start of this thread, which I've only now realised wasn't made by you, so please ignore the phrase "as you suggest" and focus on the substantive portions of my comment that address the inaccuracies in your claim.
I never disputed any of that. I'm saying that the copyright strike system used by youtube on takedown requests:
* goes above and beyond what's required by the DMCA.
* is part of what was negotiated by Google and the labels (in addition to ContentID). The labels were concerned about people spamming their content and just uploading faster than they can takedown. This gives them a mechanism to shut down accounts for 'bad actors' who just keep uploading faster than the labels can issue takedowns.
* doesn't always remove strikes even when a counter-claim is filed because of above.
I never brought up ContentID, and my arguments are orthogonal to it's implementation and history.
It is on content creators to diversify their business. If a contractor has only a single customer because that customer is the most profitable, would you pity them when they are fired by that customer? Or would you call them bad at business for failing to diversify?
Ad-revenue you receive doesn't even make you a contractor. It's basically like working for free and then being tossed something at the end for your efforts. There is no legal agreement or obligation to continue paying you.
It is amazing what the Internet has turned out to be. A place where big tech companies can profit off the work of others, while convincing them that they are the beneficiaries.
I disagree. I think that people have convinced themselves that they are customers of YouTube.
There is a lot of projection on things like YouTube and Facebook, then people get mad because it actually isn't that after all.
Not for nothing - platform usage costs money. It's for the average per-user cost of building and running the platform.
In a sense, they are Google's products.
Yes, this is the monopoly part of the argument. There are no real and practical alternatives for content creators, it seems.
Killing small businesses definitely counts as a market distortion. Good luck arguing it doesn't.
And there is no competitive service, because YT is an audience provider, and not specifically a video hosting provider.
In fact these problems would go away if YT offered a paid tier - with proper support - for content providers.
But YT and Google are averse to treating anyone else as an equal partner, so that's never going to happen.
If there is a single customer, it is not a monopoly, but a monopsony:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monopsony&oldid=9...
Would the "average" Google employees really care about this? I would rather imagine that only executive level employees of Google could be happy about this. And these people play much deeper political games than caring about a wrong word.
This might be right if they were a mom and pop store with 5 others within a couple of blocks. There is no viable alternative to Youtube so they don't get to make these calls.
As a parent stated, the content creators are NOT the clients. Client is the one who pays you money. So advertisers need to be kept happy. If this guy goes down, the guitar makers will advertise on the next guy/lady in line. And the (true) client (advertiser) will be happy.
One of the reason that Google is making crazy money is that they cut plenty of corners in support. And it serves THEM (YT) right to do so.
This video has less than 100k views. "Charlie bit my finger" has 876 Million views.
In work I use the phrase "it is not a Problem until it becomes one".
One content creator (or a thousand) complaining is NOT a problem for YT. A Problem is if YT drops from 100M views per day (or whatever that number is) to 20M views per day.
If you ask me, YouTube is having it good. And if this content creator goes down, his followers will jump on the next guitar player teacher person.
Apologies if my comment seems to cold. I believe it reflects the mentality of YT.
Youtube does not order contractors but offers a service for production and consumption of content- so they have customers creating content and others just consuming- both being customers of their service.
I wonder what the internet would look like if everyone did something like this rather than having all their content hosted on a central platform. What would the internet look like if video hosting platforms were as popular and as easy to set up / maintain as a blog platform like WordPress?
10-15 years ago we all had our own wordpress/static/ghost blogs hosted on our own domains, and then Blogger, Medium and Substack entered the space with the added benefits of discoverability and a very significant chunk of the self-hosted blogs moved to those platforms.
I feel that with YouTube we just skipped that initial self-hosted step and immediately went to the centralized platforms (Google Video, Vimeo and eventually YouTube)
I mean, before the Internet, how many people used to read vs watch TV? Video was meant to win. If video demands centralization for technical reasons, centralization wins too.
In the same way, blogs can't compete with video for ads.
This is a benefit for most users, I'd imagine.
Now thats a keen insight and not a warning of a monopoly I was aware of. You're dead right.
Great point, though. They are saving millions - in order to provide actual customer support they would have to hire a lot of people from all around the world.
Applies equally to heroin. When are we legalising it?
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Google/YT TOS saying that by uploading materials user gives away its rights to these (or at least some rights)?
People could stop using Google today but most don’t, because Google is just so much better than everyone else as searching.
Should Google/YouTube be regulated because people dislike what the company is doing, but just not enough to actually stop using their products.
Your assertion that Google has a monopoly in this market is wrong for several reasons. The first is that there is no market for Googke/YouTube to control. Ad revenue which covers less than their overhead makes them a non-profit and YouTube in particular is closer to meeting the requirements for being classified as a government protected service than an anti-trust concern.
Second,nobody makes money in the free media hosting and distribution product domain. This is well known and is a large part of why they have virtually no competition.
Third, YouTube wouldn't even have a system that automatically takes down channels except that laws were written that required them to do so.
Google doesn't make money from YouTube, and they only acquired it for the good will providing a free service generates for them. Recently the head of YouTube has been making weird even retarded decisions, but it's still a free service that operates in an application domain that basically can't make money by definition.
Do you have a source for this? I feel like Microsoft would have liked to have known that, back when they lost an antitrust case around a freely provided web browser.
>Ad revenue which covers less than their overhead makes them a non-profit
That's not what "non-profit" means.
>nobody makes money in the free media hosting and distribution product domain.
Nobody has been profitable, but that doesn't mean nobody is trying or nobody could if the market weren't anti-competitive. There is also plenty of case-law in the US establishing that just because an anti-competitive scheme wasn't profitable doesn't make it legal. Hell, a lot of anti-competitive activity works specifically because it's not profitable in the short term.
>YouTube wouldn't even have a system that automatically takes down channels except that laws were written that required them to do so.
But not in the manner that they do. The point being made wasn't that their management of takedown notices is itself anti-competitive behavior, it's that the fact they don't have to change it to something more reasonable is evidence that they don't have any competition, which is indicative of a monopoly in the space.
>they only acquired it for the good will providing a free service generates for them
Again, source. I know YT is unlikely to be profitable right now, but I seriously doubt the purchase was a good-will gesture rather than a strategic long-term investment. I don't think there were a lot of people whose opinion of Google went up as a result of the purchase.
>r......d
Really? Was that necessary to make your point?
In any case, I don't think anyone is saying other video platforms wouldn't have copyright claims, they're saying that in a more competitive space, the mechanisms for handling those claims would be better. E.g., they might actually tell the creator in the linked video what the violation actually is.
I'm not very familiar with the channel, but from the little I've seen, I believe the educational nature (and thereby fair use defense) could be debatable. Even if some of his videos are clearly educational, it seems that some videos are just covers of popular songs. And even if he's not using published sheet music to play the songs, he may still be required to have mechanical licenses, and possibly also sync licenses.
Most published music has three licenses that could be relevant here: the mechanical license (covering the combination of notes, rhythms, and/or lyrics that make the song distinct and "recognizable"), the sync license (using the song along with images/video), and a master license (covering a specific recording of the song). From my limited experience (and confirmed here [1]), it appears that many of these videos probably require at least a mechanical license to be performed publicly on the channel.
That being said, I absolutely agree with the sentiment that YouTube's handling of these issues is extremely problematic. They really need to start treating content creators with more respect and assume innocence until proven otherwise. There also needs to be more transparency into the process (and claims) so creators aren't left in the dark, along with improved ways to respond to erroneous claims.
[1] https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...
Only if they don't comply with a DMCA takedown notice, which allows the supposed violator to claim responsibility. That is, whoever posted the video can say to Youtube "This video doesn't infringe on anyone's copyright, let them sue me if they disagree" and Youtube would be in the clear according to the DMCA.
From what we can see in this case, Youtube didn't receive a DMCA takedown notice, since they didn't make it available for the channel owner. Youtube has other internal processes (like Content ID[1]) to detect and remove copyright content, it looks like one of these processes is what triggered the copyright strikes.
Doesn't DMCA and similar law strongly bias them in the opposite direction of having to assume guilt?
In any case, transparency seems like a good idea from the point of view of the outside world.
There is a Byzantine bureaucracy that no one understands. The monopoly blames the regulator. The regulator (if they speak at all) blame the monopoly.
It's the same way with banks. Any strange and irrational bureaucracy they throw at you is claimed to be legally mandated. This is kind of true, but disengenious.
The latter can be gamed by the people who can afford the good lawyers, and makes entry for newcomers even harder.
Your comparison to finance is apt. It's one of the worst examples of regulatory capture. And many people have very dangerous ideas, eg that deposit insurance is a good idea.
Right now we have regulations that heavily lag current realities and weak regulatory bodies that can be corrupted or lack power to effect change.
The alternative you mentioned of no regulation can't exist, because someone is always regulating the market, if not the .gov, then whoever has the biggest clout within the marketplace gets to play regulator and gatekeeper often to the detriment of the competition and consumers.
Yes, exactly. I am suggesting that competition and low barriers to entry to ensure that it's _customers_ that are regulating the markets, whenever possible.
> You need regulation with teeth, that is reviewed and updated dynamically with the marketplace it is regulating to ensure fair competition AND consumer benefit.
I agree that regulation needs to have teeth. My favourite example of a jurisdiction with light regulation but lots of teeth is my adopted home of Singapore.
By and large, our government here leaves the economy alone, but when they implement some regulation, they do so properly and enforce it.
> Right now we have regulations that heavily lag current realities and weak regulatory bodies that can be corrupted or lack power to effect change.
Honest and competent civil servants are the rarest and most precious of resources. Arrange matters to economise on their time and energy.
An interesting example of that principle is in bankruptcy law. There are generally two ways to deal with a business can't pay:
(1) Cut a deal with the creditors
(2) Liquidate the business and pay off the creditors as much as possible according to the fine print signed
If the business in question is a going concern, (2) is a losing proposition, but its very possibility tends to encourage everyone involved to work out a deal under case (1). (And even if you sell off the business to the highest bidder in case (2), the new owner can opt to continue running essentially the same organisation, if that makes sense.)
In a sane legal system, the judiciary might be involved briefly for option (2), if current management is unwilling. But most of the time, all participants can just agree that negotiations failed, and proceed with orderly liquidation.
Now in eg the US that beautiful simplicity is marred by a third option, where a judge gets involved big time. Judges are (hopefully) almost the prototype of a highly trained, honest, competent civil servant.
Alas, the very existence of this third option, blunts the previously sharp incentives on everyone to get a deal done under case (1).
To come back to your point: it's also pretty obvious that there's many more opportunities for corruption and graft for the court appointed manager in the third case, than the simple auction of all assets in the second case.
Obviously we don't want to remove all avenues for self determination, but I don't think adhoc regulation or relying on consumers to reign in global corporations who now have market caps greater than GDPs of large countries is an effective option.
Finding good civil servants is difficult, but so is finding honest and effective businessmen who genuinely have consumer interest in mind.
Trying to fix monopolies with regulators is like trying to fix monarchy with princes.
Regulators harden market structures.
Ultimate vertical integration has been tried as a fad on and off. But it did not endure.
None of the FAANGs are all that vertically integrated. Apple doesn't even make their own hardware in-house, do they? (Foxconn makes most of the phones, don't they?)
If the monopolists are reaping excess profits (or having high costs) there's an incentive for new market entrants to come and take a share of those profits.
If the monopolists keep prices low enough that this doesn't happen, then consumers don't have too much to complain about, do they?
You are right about constrained markets. Hence everything is conditional on my plea for opening markets. It can be hard to encourage new startups, especially in areas of the world or country with less of an established startup mentality; but it's generally much easier to encourage foreign companies to come, and to encourage companies from other industries to branch out.
For the latter, see eg when Walmart tried to do retail banking in the US. (Obviously, the established US banks used the regulation-happy American authorities to thwart that desire.) For more happy endings, see the kinds of industries Amazon is getting involved in.
Constrained markets are not always or even regularly the fault of regulators. There may just be few options or only one option available, and the cost of entry to the market is extremely high. It's not just a matter of some plucky startup entering the market when the incumbent can bleed money for a a year or two to kill off any competition in that area, then jack up rates. You also have collusion issues, which often occurs in the oil industry and DRAM/flash memory markets, and even in places like pre-made ice markets. A startup may not just have to be better than the immediate competition, they may have to be better than an entire cartel set on destroying them, which is very difficult and anti-consumer. Imagine going up against Microsoft and Intel in the 90s, who literally had billions of dollars at their disposal to turn the market against you, and actively did so.
Hence my heavy emphasis on foreign competition entering local markets; and of cross-industry competition. Like Walmart entering retail banking.
Microsoft and Intel are excellent examples! They were eventually toppled in their dominance, but it took quite a few years.
My argument is essentially that toppling Microsoft and Intel in about a decade is all we can hope for; and that it is enough.
Adding extra regulation mostly just gives the guys with the more expensive lawyers and lobbyists more tools.
That's besides the point though. Large banks and regulators are, effectively, a single entity.
In a legal sense, it is illegal unless they've paid the compulsory licensing fees.
That said, Youtube was once a place to find new stars who did covers, and many of them got famous. And now people who got famous like KHS do covers without any kind of issue.
https://www.youtube.com/user/KurtHugoSchneider
I just see it as the music industry locking the door behind the people who've already made it.
Just look at the majority of popular music between 1955-1980 or later. Just about all rock music is either heavily inspired by or directly ripped off of blues. If copyright laws had been what they were today entire genres of music wouldn't exist.
Same goes for Hollywood, tons of movies are just wholesale ripoffs of older ones or 'heavily inspired by them'.
And i'm sure people on HN are likely familiar with such things as the 7 main literary archetypes and whatnot that apply to most human story telling in general.
The best kind of human creativity comes from building on what came before. Sure, we need a system to ensure creators are paid and have control of their creations, but our current system goes so far overboard it limits overall human creativity.
Profit should not come over the benefit of society and humanity, especially when there's room for both. I doubt anyone was really losing any significant amount of money by this channel existing, but somebody was gaining through its existence.
On that note, check out the Popeye version of the Aladdin and the magic lamp story. If you've ever read the original, you may notice the Disney version doesn't resemble it much, what the Disney version does resemble though a fair bit is the 1930's Popeye version of the story...which is actually quite good.
Actually, just check out any of those original Max and Fleischer Popeye cartoons...they're all pretty great.
Our copyright laws should be largely eliminated. Anything that isn’t basically an exact reproduction should be fair game. It would be good for the creative arts.
When writing software involved in managing a live, public, massively multi-user system, the traditional unix-style commands that are immediate, often silent, and capable of damaging effects become a really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. Worse, some commands might let you accidentally shoot everyone's foot on a typo. The traditional example is accidentally typing something like "rm -f * .bak" (note the extra space after the star).
For a good discussion of this type of problem, I highly recommend Bryan Cantrill's talk[1] about the time an operator accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter with a single miss-typed command.
The general solution to this is building sanity checks into the software. The user just asked to reformat 500 hosts, but almost all previous uses olf the 'reformat' command affected less than 10 hosts. Maybe we should ask for verification from an actual human if they really intended to run this unusually destructive command.
Why doesn't YouTube have this kind of sanity check in their automated takedown/strike/channel-deletion tools? Google wrote automation that can decide to delete a channel with a long history and many successful videos. Why doesn't that automation have basic sanity checks that ask for operator input when asked to do an unusually destructive action like deleting a 10 year old channel with a huge history?
bcantrill where art thou
alias rm=‘rm -i’
alias del='rm -i'
Then when you are on another computer or at someone else's shell you get:
del: command not found
touch —- -i
Slack, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Docker, etc all had issues.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/28/aws-is-investigating-s3-i...
It was a good operational lesson and one I'm happy to see shared still. If a command will let you perform a self-inflicted wound like that without checks, then it's time to review that command. Err on the side of caution and bias towards minimizing blast radius even if it means sacrificing some speed. "Move fast and break things" may be true at times, but not when the "*" character is ever involved. =)
I also think about the response to it. Sure it sucked that it happened, and someone was probably feeling really bad about it. But it was a learning opportunity as well. Not just for them, or AWS, but for everyone in tech. Put those safety nets in place.
rm -rf /+(?)
If anyone not understanding the joke, + character matches 1 or more instances, and (?) matches any one character. And / is start of entire filesystem. rm is remove. -rf (recursive, never ask verification). So it removes every file that you have rights to remove.
You can also do same thing accidentally by proxy. When my first computing teacher asked entire class to write anything to terminal to show that you had to write specific commands and computers don't understand normal language. Then she told to press enter. I asked her if she was sure. She asked why. I said that I wrote "format c:" . I have never seen teacher walk so fast in a classroom. I think that was last time she used that line in the classroom.
That is BigG just don't give a f---.
If Google is so big that 0.00001% loss of revenue doesn't register for them, they are surely big enough to spare 0.00001% of total engineering time to fix that loss?
In fact, I hear that as a common complaint that when working as an engineer at Google most of the time you are just making some system fractions of a percent more efficient.
Just to be sure, I am not saying that either your premise or the statement you are inferring is wrong. No opinion on that. I'm just saying that your premises don't lead to the conclusion. (But your conclusion might be right for other reasons.)
No matter what you think is sane, some insane person will prove you wrong. In this case, tiredness + ESL = bad reading comprehension. It's going to happen.
All confirmation dialogs should be replaced with undo. The happy path has lower friction, and in case of a mistake they'll heave a huge sigh of relief. When possible, it's better in all cases for all users, whether novices or power users.
And many things that at first blush seem like undo isn't possible, are actually easy to make undoable with a simple tweak: deleting data? Don't actually delete it until 24 hours later. Sending an email? Wait 10 seconds to actually send it, similar to Gmail's Undo Send.
That's purely a UI element and is completely independent of how the actual destructive operation is implemented in the backend nor how hard it would be to reverse.
From personal experience with gmail's fake undo, in terms of things sinking in, it works almost as well as regular undo for me; and not like a confirmation dialog (which doesn't work at all).
So there's less friction, there's no extra click you need to make after ten seconds. And, also from personal experience, the force-delayed confirmation dialog I've used (I think in Chrome and Firefox for certain actions), don't seem to lead me to thinking at all. At least not any better than a regular confirmation dialog.
But in any case, all these are empirical questions, and it would be interesting to run a little user study with the different options, instead of endless speculation.
Imagine trying to apply this undo to a bulk add/remove labels operation. Once you've committed the transaction, there is no simple 'undo'. It's possible to build a system capable of undo, sure, but you're talking about a lot of upfront work and complexity. Plus a fairly exotic database schema.
I would imagine you would stick all your UI actions in something like a log, and then only apply that log to your actual data with a delay?
But not sure whether you call that 'a lot of upfront work and complexity'?
Perhaps I'm a bit blind, because I come from a part of the programming world that's very keen on persistent datastructures, where undos are trivial to implement. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure)
In my opinion, it's usually worth it though. You only hear from the folks asking you to restore things from backup—you won't hear from the folks who experience unnecessary friction and tell their friends or coworkers "it's okay, it works, it's kind of annoying to use though, I can't put my finger on anything specific".
That one is still possible to undo, just slower and more expensive...
Then there are fun ones like Windows update holding 20 GB of insufficient undo, mechanical or hardware failures induced by extra load, and how to decide where an operation ends.
But when the sample is large enough, it still happens once in a while. In 2004, a CSB investigation showed that an entire chemical plant exploded after the interlock was bypassed by the supervisor password [0][1].
> The explosion occurred when maintenance personnel entered a password to override computer safeguards, allowing premature opening of the sterilizer door. This caused an explosive mixture of ethylene oxide (EO) to be evacuated to the open-flame catalytic oxidizer by the chamber ventilation system. The oxidizer is used to remove EO in compliance with California air quality regulations. When the EO reached the oxidizer it ignited and the flame quickly traveled back through the ducting to the sterilizer where approximately fifty pounds of EO ignited and exploded.
Apparently the supervisor who owned the password didn't receive any training on the nature of the process and the dangers of bypassing the interlock...
Ironic it was air quality regulations - that did for them.
Operator-1: I ewas rebooting an rb
Operator-1: forgot to put -n
[...]
Operator-5: [...] i've almost done what Operatolr-1
just did a *number* of times.
> normally makes you type the number
> I just do not know how to make this more idiotproof
Requiring explicit typing of the number or an explicit phrase like "Yes, I want to delete everything." are can help a lot.
If possible, another good approach is to explicitly show the full list of proposed changes. Phrases like "This will change ALL of ..." might have multiple interpretations (ALL what? All of the the things in my entire account? All of the things in the current/last project/group? All of the things I think (perhaps incorrectly) were referenced in this action?). If someone is expecting to change only a few records, a confirmation popup that asks "Do you want to make these changes:" followed by a huge list has a large size/presence that should conflict with their expectations. "I only wanted to change a few things - wtf is this huge list?"
.... and someone still did it. The struggle is real.
Also, in computer folklore, there are numerous stories of how non-technical users purposefully destroy foolproof mechanisms by brute-force, e.g. cut the slot on a DDR3 socket to insert a DDR2 RAM module and fry everything... And I wonder whether "don't use brute-force, if you have difficulty getting it in, it means you are doing it wrong" should be taught as the first rule when working with hardware. Unfortunately, to add the confusion, we also have connectors that can be surprisingly hard to connect and disconnect even under normal circumstances...
A software analogy for an "easy" connector would be, "fancy software with good user experience often has a lot of complexity hidden behind of scene, and can be fragile". But I'm not sure what would be the analogy for a cheap connector. Perhaps, a shell script?
And everyone has likely experienced in their lives plenty of appliances, self-assembly kits and other objects where some components required application of force to put together, because there's resistance coming from the feature that prevents the object from coming apart together. My rule of thumb is now that if the force seems to be veering into "could break surrounding structure" levels, or if the thing starts making unexpected sounds, then I'm doing it wrong.
... and then I have to put a CPU on a motherboard and the correct way absolutely does involve close-to-breaking forces and squeaky sounds.
I understand idiot users, but what about users who actually want to delete it?
We do not generally allow deletions of stateful resources to be done via automation after being bitten, and use the Azure lock mechanism.
We are now also changing our naming standards from “component-environment” to “environment-component”. In this example I almost deleted “app-prd-sa” instead of “app-dev-sa”. Much harder to do when you lead the name with “production”.
Anybody have “safer” naming conventions in use out there that I should be aware of? Didn’t find much authoritative out there via search; naming things is hard.
When the metrics finally hit the dashboards sounds like it would be career limiting.
“But we prevented pdkl95’s channel from being deleted!” is definitely going to be a solid defense for why you hobbled their infallible AI from ruthlessly executing its system oversight responsibility.
https://twitter.com/leonardjfrench/status/130794817037951385...
It’s only if Google “ignore” valid dmca takedown notifications they are at risk of losing their safe harbour exceptions. How they handle the counter notifications can be pretty hit and miss. (but tbf, most of the time it’s because the person filing the counter notification didn’t fill it out exactly how Google’s bots like) I’ve seen cases where YT just automatically removed the strike from the account and restored the video on receipt of the counter notice. I’ve seen cases where they have locked the account even though the person filing the DMCA notifications has publicly admitted to taking down the video because it was critical of the work and the video only contained small pieces of the original content (exactly what you would expect to be covered under the criticism and comment portions of fair use exception).
When you get a claim on the latter system (Content ID) you don't get a strike on your account but if you appeal the claim its (normally) upto the claimant to decide if your appeal is valid or not (sometimes YT does step in an say "yeah its fair use, have your ad rev back" but that is not the norm).
These takedowns are actual DMCA takedown requests. (even TeamYouTube are telling him to issue (valid) counter notifications to these claims - https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1306733040211824645)
I see people in this comment section posting alternatives to Youtube but I really wonder if, should they become equally as successful, they could end up behaving any different.
When you get thousands of videos uploaded at any given moment and probably a huge amount of DMCA takedown requests what choice do you reasonably have? If there's one thing Google doesn't want is to be sued by the copyright owners, so they always take the defensive stance of taking the content down until proven innocent, which seems cynically reasonable to me.
That guy makes song covers. He claims it's non-profit, he claims it's fair use. The IP owner disagrees, issues a takedown. At this point Google either takes the content down, or starts a lengthy and risky legal battle on behalf of third party content that they do not control. I can't really blame them for not bothering.
BTW, IANAL and all that but I'm not entirely convinced that his "non-profit fair-use" defense would even hold up in court. Surely he monetizes his videos on top of asking for donations and putting ads on his website. Given his number of subscribers he probably makes a significant amount of money from these videos.
To be clear, I think ethically what he does is perfectly fine, but as we all know IP laws have very little to do with ethics. Focusing on big bad google is a bit simplistic here IMO.
As the video points out, in order to make a copyright claim the claimant must specifically state the content that is infringing. Thus, Google knows what material is (allegedly) infringing and has the information to provide to the user. Also as stated in the video Google is not required by law to delete the YouTube channel. They've taken that upon themselves.
To review, Google is being unnecessarily vague about what material is involved and unnecessarily harsh about punishing someone for an unexplained infringement.
The copyright system is, no doubt, messed up - but clearly Google is completely at fault for their lazy and Kafkaesque actions here.
Gareth Evans videos all have the songs and artist name in the title.
Whoever filed the takedown was lazy in that they didn't include the description because the entire video is infringing.
Edit for sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_version#U.S._copyright_l...
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-when-mechan...
You can disagree with the law, but it's pretty clear he's breaking it.
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
> 506. Criminal offenses6
> (a) Criminal Infringement.—
> (1) In general.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
> (A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
The allegation is that five of his videos had infringing content. Five out of six hundred. Being generous and letting him fix, remove, or contest the allegation prior to deleting the channel strikes me as a much better course than to just tell him "Your channel is being deleted for copyright infringement but we won't tell you where it happened."
Other than the timestamps that IS what happened here. The creator knows the exact videos that were flagged, and the creator had the option to dispute it - which they did, and the channel was never actually deleted as a result. It's still up: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf5WyhQHoYKy2ZcY1l51w7A
The situation is now that the claimants can either drop the copyright claims or sue him (this is stated in the video at timestamp 2:40). Neither of which involves YouTube, and YouTube isn't going to delete the channel unless the claims remain. That is, if the claimant opts to sue the creator.
As for timestamps, not all takedown notices must include such information. Notably DMCA takedown requests do not, and Google cannot require more than the law does on those. If Google failed to forward the notice along, or refuses to, that'd be something to be upset about. But we don't have evidence that they didn't, only that the data from that claim was not manually entered into a database to be shown in a pretty UI. But given the channel in question, it seems likely that it's just the entire video in violation.
Can't we blame them for shitty support at least? For not providing any explanation at all? For not having an appeal process? For always taking side of the IP Owner? For deleting the channel instead of some other mechanism? For not actually fighting for reasonable IP laws for this kind of video?
I don't know why people come out to defend the shitty actions of a Fortune 50 company and explain why the underdog had it coming.
Other people are impartial, and do not consider the relative size of parties when figuring out who's in the wrong.
By all means, that's a well known problem with Google, way beyond Youtube. The way they treat content creators and smaller customers is frankly disrespectful. That being said I still think that while they could handle these matters better, in this case I suspect that the end result would effectively be the same.
>For always taking side of the IP Owner? For deleting the channel instead of some other mechanism? For not actually fighting for reasonable IP laws for this kind of video?
No, that part is not something I'd necessarily blame them for. You're asking them to go through a world of trouble for content that's not even theirs. When you create a Youtube account you're not entitled to Google's legal team. You're not a partner in this relationship, you're arguably not even a customer unless you buy ads.
>I don't know why people come out to defend the shitty actions of a Fortune 50 company and explain why the underdog had it coming.
The relative size of these entities is frankly irrelevant in this case. I could spend all day bashing Google for various things (and do on occasions, as my comment history shows) but in this case I'm not sure that the guy uploading unlicensed song covers while claiming fair use and getting copyright struck to death is really the best showcase of Google's abusive practices.
They are the ones providing the tools and also set a number of rules (following the law mostly) to use it. Are you arguing that they can’t improve their tools to add even surface validation, or go deeper and force the filling party to provide enough information for the claims to be reviewable by a human (the receiving party)?
Would the copyright owner sue Youtube for forcing them in the interface to provide evidence of the claims ?
Legally following the DMCA process. The DMCA process allows a response and does not demand channel deletion. Also the DMCA complaints are supposed to be forwarded.
> That guy makes song covers. He claims it's non-profit, he claims it's fair use. The IP owner disagrees, issues a takedown.
Automated takedown software issues the takedown because it's crappy software that can't tell a cover from infringement. Covers are not new, they are very well protected and very common. This isn't some kind of new internet thing, covers date back to like the dawn of radio.
> I'm not entirely convinced that his "non-profit fair-use" defense would even hold up in court
That he makes money from the cover isn't infringement, anymore than other covers are infringement when they were sold on physical CDs.
> Focusing on big bad google is a bit simplistic here IMO.
Yet other services are capable of handling the DMCA process correctly. Instead Google didn't even forward the DMCA notices, list the specific infringements or give him the legally required ability to respond.
Google is choosing to not follow DMCA and instead just delete channels because it's more cost effective. That's it - this is about a few dollars of profit margin that they're destroying someone else's business they've spent a decade building. So yeah, they're the big bad in this situation.
The law is clear that both are valid infringement and subject to DMCA takedown, unless the songs have been licensed.
Not saying a like it, but there is a long list of cases upholding it.
Edit for sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_version#U.S._copyright_l...
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-when-mechan...
Also not a lawyer (and I think that Google sucks for not disclosing what is allegedly being infringed and what is allegedly infringing), but I suspect this is not a slam-dunk case of fair use.
Running through the 4-factor test (https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/fairuse/fourfactor), it really feels like a fair-use claim would hinge on how transformative the work is:
1. The fact that he's monetizing it at all (even if not in a quid-pro-quo exchange of content for money) I suspect undermines the "non-profit" argument, even if the purpose is educational.
2. Music is pretty clearly in the "imaginative or highly creative" bucket.
3. He states that he "uses no more of the original subject matter than is necessary". Which implies that he might be using more than just a little (or even all of it). But that kinda seems to contradict what he says elsewhere in the video, which that he "doesn't use any resources or materials which are distributed or sold at a premium" and "every thing I've ever created has been 100% self-generated".
4. The website (https://www.goliathguitartutorials.com/) he mentions in the video has guitar tabs and (broken) links to Youtube videos which share names of popular artists and their songs. Without seeing the videos, I would infer that his lessons teach how to play popular commercial songs, which do have an established market for licenses he is avoiding.
It's hard to judge because we can't see the videos... but it kinda looks like this falls firmly under "not fair use" unless he's writing music that is only very loosely inspired by the songs it is named after.
A person needs a mechanical license for audio distribution, whether it be physical or digital, and a synchronization license if there is video distribution. Most established streaming sites already have a synchronization license that covers (pun intended) covers, whereas the site will divert ad revenue. However, it is up to the performer to make sure a synchronization license is available from the site for all the songs they will be covering. Some publishers or copyright holders refuse to issue synchronization licenses as there isn't an obligation and there isn't a fixed rate, each license is negotiated separately.
The current mechanical rate is $0.091 for songs five minutes or less and $0.0175 per minute or fraction thereof for songs over five minutes. This rate is set by the Copyright Royalty Board, part of the Library of Congress, and for United States territories only.
Youtube has its own "extra jurisdictional" copyright system.
YouTube can't just "opt out" of the law. YouTube absolutely responds to DMCA notices, and per the video he issued counter-claims already - that's a core part of responding to DMCA.
https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/copyright/#...
And you don't have to go through youtube's webtools to submit one, either (which of course you don't - the law doesn't require that). You can mail, fax, or email the DMCA takedown notice: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6005908?hl=en&ref_...
Sure, but these aren't proper DMCA claims. As kristofferR pointed out there are other extra jurisdictional mechanisms that Google employ to make your life difficult as a creator.
And then, which laws apply? US, UK, EU, Russian, Indian....
Now sure, it's a private platform and they can shut you down any time. I recognise there ain't no free speech on private platforms.
But if they've been making a tidy sum of lots of ad money due to your apparent infringement (and much, much more than you the creator) along the way then I'm sure we might see a well funded case against this practice, maybe not in the US, but other jurisdictions that still recognise the limits and powers of private companies and the right not to be fucked over by them.
> there are other extra jurisdictional mechanisms that Google employ to make your life difficult as a creator.
That's not quite true. The DMCA is a very strict mechanism. You get a notice, you take down the content, and if the uploader isn't happy with that, they have to sue the claimant.
Of course, Youtubes process is streamlined for its own interests and the interests of big corporate copyright hoarders. But it's not designed to bully creators.
The problem isn't really the process in itself, it's how Google applies it and the fact that Youtube doesn't seem to care that much for its creators.
Youtube does allow DMCA counter claims because they legally have to. Youtube has absolutely no wiggle room with DMCA. No amount of complaining to them can ever change that, either. You have to get the laws changed.
Do you understand that the content in the submission is infringing? And not just to the civil level but to the criminal level? And so YouTube losing safe harbor would be huge.
No, it wouldn't, because YouTube is actually removing the content. So they're not going to get sued for infringement, and other parts of the DMCA still protect them even when they operate outside the bounds of the takedown notice procedure.
A creator can have up to three strikes, with them disappearing over the course of time if they don't get more strikes. Contested copyright strikes may be elevated to DMCA requests if YouTube finds in favor of the creator, but it's not required.
If you run out of those strikes, your channel is immediately shut down. It's possible (especially with a large backlog of videos) to exceed this strike count before you can use their tools to argue against the strikes. When this happens, your account is shut down, and a "grace" timer is enabled to allow you to try and challenge the copyright strikes (one at a time). If that grace period passes and you're still out of strikes (don't dare to take a vacation), the only remaining choice is to appeal to the public.
No DMCA claims necessary.
All signs therefore point to this being a DMCA notice. If you have evidence to the contrary please provide it.
And the video itself is identified. He does have that information.
I can't believe this needs to be said literally every time one of these types of articles gets posted on HN: if you build your business on top of someone else's platform, and have no contracts in place to protect your interests, your business's existence is completely at the whim of the platform owners.
I wish we lived in a world where the Googles of the internet had sane, transparent, easily-appealable processes for these sorts of things. But we don't, and absent government regulation, we probably aren't going to. People need to take these sorts of risks into account when deciding how to run their businesses, and have contingency plans.
It's interesting to note that in the landlord/tenant analogy, most jurisdictions have laws in place that prevent tenants from agreeing to such unbalanced, predatory contracts, and give tenants rights even in the absence of any agreement at all. Perhaps we do need something like that on the internet, for some things.
One small caveat - the small business owner had no choice in the matter when they moved in 10 years ago. There was only one mall people would actually visit across the entire world. And that mall has a clickwrap agreement for all their rentals, one which includes a clause that says "and we can change this agreement at will and without notice."
You use a platform, that’s on you. It’s never been cheaper or easier to run a website, make videos, and host them.
Even the web is a platform now. You won't do well running a website if Google Search and Chrome don't favour it. Depending on how you plan to get your initial customers, you may hit a sizeable roadblock if Google Ads or Facebook Ads decide that they don't want to run your ads.
Windows and MacOS are also platforms.
Even pretty big companies depend upon platforms. Take the example of Epic getting booted from Apple's app store. Facebook have not been able to get Apple to approve Facebook Gaming.
If you want to start an ecommerce business, are you meant to build your own rather than using Amazon & Shopify?
It doesn't make sense to not participate on platforms. What does make sense is to consider what it means for your business. In certain extreme cases like YouTube or Apple's app store, it seems like some degree of regulation may be necessary to prevent the platforms from abusing their position.
A regulator tends to lock the status quo into place, it's almost always incumbent friendly... like banking, casinos, tobacco, etc. Remember that Philip Morris benefits greatly from tobacco regulation.
What "good" would be is wrenching video out of YouTube's Kafkaesque hands.
Have we given up on decentralisation?
I don't see where he says that. He says he's never profited from selling other people's material. I think he considers putting up content for free with ads to not be selling content.
Which is a pity as it would be nice to be able to use music cues to set the mood and enhance the experience.
Id have loved to used a clip from Bettye Swann's "then you can tell me goodbye" at the end of our recent Expanse one shot.
It’s one of the aspect that the usage is evaluated on, but not a requirement.
What specifically is illegal about this? If it's not and you think this should be illegal, how would you write the law that would make this illegal?
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
506. Criminal offenses
6
(a) Criminal Infringement.—
(1) In general.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
It's a complete shitshow.
The thing is, for all we know, 99.99% of cases could be handled properly, and we wouldn't have a clue. We only get to see it when it goes wrong, and someone complains. But again, such complains at the very least have been decreasing, while Youtube itself is ever growing, so it looks like at least something is improving in here.
> It’s important that creators always have detailed knowledge about who is claiming content in their videos, where it appears, and what they can do to resolve the claim. That’s why all new manual claims will require copyright owners to provide timestamps to indicate exactly where their copyrighted content appears in videos they claim, and we’ve updated our editing tools to make it easier to automatically release a claim.
Is it a bug with Youtube or do they not follow this policy (consistently)?
Even if that is "just a technical issue", no one cared enough to spend resources to fix their underlying system to reflect that policy.
Something that is notably missing from the strikes shown in the video.
GP is saying that their system shouldn’t let copyright claimants just ignore Google’s policy. Which is clearly what’s happened here. Which just further demonstrates Google’s contempt for its creators.
The point of confusion here is that there's multiple ways to issue a copyright strike on YouTube. If this is via YouTube's internal mechanisms, then yeah this is bullshit. But if it's not and is instead a DMCA notice, and the evidence suggests it is a DMCA notice, then YouTube has no authority over the matter.
> (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. [1]
Now a timestamp isn’t required in a DMCA notice, but a description of the copyrighted work being infringed upon (i.e. a description of what has been stolen, not just a link to the supposed stolen article) is required to make it a valid notice.
In the video, the creator shows an email and YouTube page where Google claims that they haven’t been given a description of the copyrighted work being infringed upon.
If that’s true, then the DMCA notice given to YouTube is invalid, and once again YouTube demonstrates how little it cares about creators.
But given the channel in question, the notice & details are really not a mystery? If you cover a song, and get a copyright strike, is it not fairly obvious what the strike is about?
How can they request that? Also, it's Youtube's stated policy that all copyright strikes must include the details. Also also, the creator did request the details of the strikes and Youtube didn't provide any.
> If you cover a song, and get a copyright strike, is it not fairly obvious what the strike is about?
No, it's not. There are numerous instances where companies would issue blanket copyright strikes even for content those companies don't have a copyright to [1]. There are instances where there are copyright strikes for silence and for bird noises [2]. Copyright strikes are anything but obvious, even for cover songs.
[1] https://www.ccn.com/youtube-has-massive-false-copyright-clai...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 and https://thenextweb.com/google/2012/02/27/a-copyright-claim-o...
It must not be a manual complaint. That's some nice PR-Legalese.
If someone just sends a regular DMCA notice, they're only required (by law) to provide the URL, and Google has no choice but to take down everything at that URL, until/unless they receive a counter-claim from the poster.
The content-ID stuff is a convenience outside the law, if content owners (who have access to it) choose to use it. Anyone can file a DMCA notice, and Google has to respond in a particular way in order to be compliant with the law, and cannot impose extra requirements (like timestamps) before acting on the DMCA claim.
You can’t just go “this video infringes on my copyright, but I’m not going to tell you which copyright”. That isn’t a valid DMCA notice at all.
[1] § (512(c)(3)(A)(i-vi)) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
I barely trust the information in the logging functions that I write, and those don't have legal consequences attached to providing extra detail.
He received a DMCA takedown, which is different from a copyright claim. Copyright claiming is a system made by YouTube for copyright owners to easily monetize/monitor reuse of their content instead of having to take down the content. It also allows splitting revenue in cases where one party owns copyright in specific territories. When you put content in CID, it will automatically claim videos and provide timestamps to the uploader. Sometimes CID fails to claim a video, and the copyright owner can then manually claim a video. There was a time where copyright owners didn't have to provide timestamps when they manually claimed a video. Nowadays, all manual claims need to provide a timestamp. Only highly trusted companies have access to CID, and getting a claim doesn't result in termination of your account.
The DMCA is a law that makes it easier to remove copyright content from the internet. It also makes it so that a service provider isn't responsible for the content they host. It is basically a legal action to take down content you own from the internet without having to start a lawsuit.
It works like this: when a copyright owner sends a DMCA takedown, the service provider needs to take down the content. If the uploader disagrees, they can send a counter notification. Unless the copyright owner that filed the takedown files a lawsuit within 14 days, the service provider needs to reinstate the content. You can be sued for damages in case of an incorrect DMCA takedown.
If YouTube would reject a DMCA, it would make YouTube responsible.
I guess that's how Google's index works, they remove indexed results, but not the whole index.
One difference between the Google index and YouTube is that links in the Google index can be service providers like YouTube, while the owner of a YouTube channel is always the one responsible for the content.
Something notable that happened here is that instead of bundling the 5 videos in 1 DMCA takedown resulting in 1 strike, the party sent 5 separate DMCA takedowns causing 5 strikes.
I believe this is may reinstate the content, I don't think they're obligated too. Also not a lawyer.
The DMCA provides wide protection to the service provider against liability for taking down stuff due to a DMCA notice (e.g. contractual SLA with customers mean nothing). However that protection disappears if the correct counter claim steps are followed, at which point the service provider becomes liable for not providing a service.
Of course with YouTube, they almost certainly have broad T&Cs that let them delete/disable your content for any reason at anytime (it’s not like creators are paying for hosting). So YouTube never had any liability to be protected from.
The net result, YouTube can do whatever they want with your content, and you have little to no recourse.
Do you have a source for this? I can't find evidence that this is a DMCA notice. Those are fairly straightforward to appeal on youtube which means the next step is court. I don't think this guy got actual DMCA notices.
Proud times!
Warden of the Alphabet: Der Herr, wir hätten da etwas gegen Sie vorliegen…
Y (in despair): Um Himmels Willen! Was wird wird gegen mich vorgebracht?
WotA: Es ist eine Eingabe gemacht worden, daß Sie wiederholt, in gröblichster Form gegen das Urheberrecht verstoßen haben.
Y: Das kann nicht sein. Wer bringt so etwas gegen mich vor? Wie? Warum?
WotA: Das kann ich Ihnen leider nicht sagen.
Y: Das müssen Sie! Was habe ich verbrochen?
WotA: Ich kann es Ihnen wirklich nicht sagen. Sehen Sie (shows a slightly crumpled piece of paper with a single line of machine writing): Das ist in der Eingabe nicht angegeben.
Y: Also kann ich gehen?
WotA: Keineswegs, der Herr! Sehen Sie, da, da ist auch der Stempel "Notorisch". Das wird üblicherweise strengstens bestraft.
Y (dejected): Wann ist die Verhandlung?
WotA: Also, Verhandlung haben wir hier noch keine gesehen. Der Tag der Bestrafung wird noch bekannt gegeben. Auf Pardon sollten Sie sich allerdings keine Hoffnung machen. Machen Sie es sich bis dahin bequem, der Herr. Da muß doch ein Einsehen sein…
I've seen more promoted Livestream scams in the last 6 months promising crypto giveaways than ever. They're equally blatant and impersonating tesla, spaceX and even Steve Wozniak.
If Google can't be bothered to properly pay humans to moderate this they shouldn't be entitled to the billions in profit that comes from it.
Edit: there you have it, 345k views and it's still up: https://youtu.be/hEI0McfLF9Y
That's the same thing with copyright scams and counterfeits on Kickstarter and co, Kickstarter doesn't give a flying "fork" about user reports until Disney or Sony send their lawyers.
I also remember that blatant Youtube live bitcoin scam just after the Playstation 5 reveal which Youtube let run despite perhaps thousands of user reports. Youtube could not NOT know this scam was happening.
Is he legally allowed to make a guitar cover of any song he wants to and distribute it?
It's also not clear if there were ads on the videos. Would that play a role?
It's an argument over the doctrine of fair use, which has four parts:
1. What's the purpose of the use? Is it for educational purposes, or commercial purposes? (These aren't mutually exclusive, which is a confounder)
2. What's claimed to be copyrighted/creative in the original work? Is the creativity in question merely the phrasing of facts, or are there aspects of the original author's own creativity (for music, this one is probably irrelevant; it's obviously a largely creative endeavor, though I guess there probably exist certain hypothetical pieces of music for which it's harder to say)
3. How much of the work has been used? This is tricky; he probably teaches how to play entire songs, but the guitar part of any given song is a small piece of the overall work (and he probably uses very little, if any, of the copyrighted recording)
4. What's the impact on the value of the original work? In this case it's clear that there is essentially no negative impact – if anything, if you're learning to play a song, you're more likely to purchase or otherwise consume the original recording. This is also usually the most important factor in deciding fair use (from what I understand; I am not a legal professional, I just remember this from a paper I wrote in college for some course or other).
(edit: formatting)
Thousands (millions?) of people post covers on YouTube with no issue, but sometimes people get unlucky. I don't think monetization makes a difference in the eyes of the law (maybe it would for proving damages? I'm not a lawyer.)
What's unusual is that he said he got 5 copyright strikes without telling him why. I've gotten a copyright notice on a video before and I got an email and I think it even shows on the video where the violation is. (I'm not 100% sure, it was a long time ago.)
Funny enough, they cite a case where a content creator (h3h3 productions) was able to prove fair use in court as an example of the system working. If you look into that case though you'll see that the claimant was only an individual musician and not a big studio, and even then the legal fees were hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Well.. that doesn't sound right? That sounds like Google's decided it will treat the accused as guilty unless/until they defend and prove their innocence? Could it not equally decide all claims against them are bullshit unless/until the claimant sues and proves their damages?
Of course, taking all other videos down and disallowing to open another channel ever, those are not measures which should be used until both parties agree that this has been settled or one of the two supplies a court document. But I don't think it's entirely unreasonable (debatable, sure; unreasonable... not sure) to make the video(s) in question invisible to everyone except the owner, copyright holder, and youtube employees until they agree it's settled or the court settled it for them.
As long as they handle DMCA notices as they're supposed to, they're not at all liable for the content posted on their platform (copyright-wise). But it's easier for them to provide a guilty-until-proven-innocent fast-track for their larger, trusted, monied rights holders.
Alright alright, I get the message, they need to just "handle" DMCA notices. But doesn't "handling" them include taking the content down? Because that was what I was saying.
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
> [online service providers must] promptly block access to alleged infringing material (or remove such material from their systems) when they receive notification of an infringement claim from a copyright holder or the copyright holder's agent
Taking the material down seems to be within the scope of what you're saying is "all they have to do".
So based on that, citing from your comment now (not Wikipedia):
> it's easier for them to provide a guilty-until-proven-innocent fast-track
Is that not exactly what DMCA is, given the above?
Viacom still sued Google 10 years ago and dragged them through three court rulings before Google agreed to settle [1]. It didn't matter that early rulings favored YouTube on the matter of DMCA compliance, the content owners will find a way to hurt you and lock you in court. After Google settled the case, they created Content ID and Viacom stopped attacking them.
It frustrates that everyone seems to miss the cause whenever this kind of stuff comes up. Does anyone actually think Google likes being pushed around by copyright holders? Does it make any sense to you for Google to want to create this insanely complex system if all they have to do is handle DMCA notices like they did before Content ID? The content owners have always pushed for something beyond DMCA. YouTube complies because there is something to fear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
Apparently you can have YouTube videos blocked or demonetized for even mentioning the name of a song from some very famous artists who have very active legal teams.
But you're right that the guy is probably in the wrong. Part of the issue too is how opaque YouTube is about this kind of thing. It would be cool to see them build better appeals systems or at least treat their creators a little better than they treat copyright trolls (which may or may not be who gave him the strikes in the first place.)
Because copyright is controversial.
This may be different though if the work the creator is showing is considered transformative enough to be considered a new work altogether. It could be considered educational in nature instead of violating the copyright.
770,000 subscribers 120 million views 600 videos
all gone in 4 days!!!!! keep rocking youtube!!!
Google is now a monopoly with Search, Youtube and probably gmail be right?!
It was only a matter of time before it happened to other high profile creators.
Not quite.
Search -- I use an assortment of non-google engines, but mostly https://duckduckgo.com
Youtube -- Not quite a monopoly, but contains almost all of the mindshare.
Gmail -- There's plenty of other email services. I use protonmail.
We're just rolling out our mainstream video product explicitly designed to compete with YouTube @ https://odysee.com
To learn more about the protocol itself, check out https://lbry.tech
A blockchain is the only technology that allows a simultaneously decentralized and coherent view of what exists on a network along with local control over identity.
I think blockchain sucks in many ways and is a big hassle. We try to hide it as much as possible. It's still the right solution to this problem.
But in the FAQ there's this: "LBRY.COM / LBRY.TV allows content to be flagged as inappropriate. Should any content be flagged as illegal, unlawful, harassing, harmful, offensive or various other reasons, LBRY.COM / LBRY.TV shall remove it from the site without delay."
So how do you actually remove stuff if it's so well distributed, encrypted packets, no central authority, no censorship? Seems contradictory.
Or maybe I'm just not understanding how it works and LBRY.TV only represents one implementation of a broader standard that is platformless?
[0]: https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/blob/master/ui/index....
For professional videos, until there is a law that specifies that a monopoly (currently Google YouTube does seem like the only place where money making is possible) has to follow certain rules, they can throw you out for virtually any reason and it's not a secure way of making a living. So maybe it should be, but it currently isn't, and we can't currently force them to be.
Other platforms may not significantly help one to pay bills, I'm just wondering if that might not be okay given the sheer number of people who seem to have fun doing this. If not, we should make new laws.
Sure! We can definitely have charity content. Most of the content out there is.
Somebody's paying for most of the content most people want to watch, though.
A reasonable-quality single-camera A/V rig that a video producer would actually want to work with is comfortably in the middle four digits. Three cameras, low five. That money must come from somewhere, as must the rationalization for the time in a world as productized and generally fucked as ours, and "that's OK, art and media can just be done by wildly wealthy dilettantes in their spare time" is a shitty world.
I think it was prompted by seeing the name "Hodler" once and thinking it sounded like the cryptocurrency equivalent of Wainwright or Cooper.
So, bigger than that.
YouTube, like it or not, is the engine that drives many people's content business (the creators), and if the engine is denied to them, there really isn't a realistic alternative.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're Google."
It's like the alternative really is "depend on his largesse and submit to his whims beacuse you can't overthrow the king because he is too powerful".
Like it or not YouTube is in an extremely solid position that is unlikely to be shifted by anyone at this point.
I often hear the “host your own content” but I don’t feel like there is an equally vocal “make it discoverable, too” crowd. That is until I discovered the indieweb.
The indieweb’s usage of microformats and features like “webmentions” that can be crawled ad hoc, enabling decentralized, federated discovery (example: http://indieweb.xyz) is the web that-IMO-we should have gotten. Not one dominated by corporatized, professionalized platforms
Twitch somehow seems to do a pretty good job of competing with YouTube.
If you move and only get a handful of views, do you really have a channel? If you can't take your viewers somewhere else, do you actually have viewers or are you simply one of the interchangeable nobodies that YouTube uses to keep YouTube viewers engaged?
I'm reminded of the "influencer" who couldn't sell 10 t-shirts to her "thousands" of viewers.
Still, we need people to start contributing to alternative platforms. The YouTube monopoly only benefits Google.
There are great ways to host video for free on the internet these days so if you want to preserve some video or link it in somewhere (I've seen vimeo used as a hosting platform for tutorial videos on sites) then you have much better option than YouTube - but if your business is the videos then you either need to survive on YT or else get big enough to splinter. Given how Dlive (pwediepie) and Nebula (technical vlog folks) haven't taken off that well I'm guessing you'll need a lot more behind you to go indy - those subscriptions (hit the bell icon!) and the feed are the feature YT sells.
Clips are a neat feature but they're a sharing feature, not a "help me watch" feature.
For $900 a year you get 7 TB of video and unlimited live streaming. Yes, YouTube is cheaper (free) and brings a large audience. So you have to balance paying for something that's certain or being at the whim of the market maker.
I believe it's because YouTube is as much a content-discovery platform as a content-delivery platform. If you only use Vimeo, very few people will discover your videos.
I don't know why more people don't upload to both, though.
> whim of the market maker
As I understand it, Vimeo are also far from perfect in this regard.
An interesting anecdote: the recent Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans, was made freely available on YouTube, but was taken down after a copyright complaint. They moved the video to Vimeo, where it remains. (I can't comment on the legitimacy of the copyright complaint, and this is not an endorsement of the film.)
We have an large
Should be:
We have a large
lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.
bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT
diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.
bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.
Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.
It would be cool if these sites were able to mirror all of the youtube content as well, so you get all of youtube plus the content that people are posting to the decentralized or anti-censorship platform. Probably illegal but that's kind of the point.
Of the people who get kicked off of those platforms, a significant number will be socially obnoxious. They of course have "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach", and our legal structure has decided that the big platforms get to enjoy being both a platform and a publisher, simultaneously.
So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law". So the socially obnoxious flood to the new plaform, and pretty quickly, you've got a core user base of people who like that, and a few people who are merely willing to tolerate it on principle.
I don't think this was originally strategic, more a matter of not wanting socially obnoxious voices on the platform, because advertisers don't care for that sort of thing. But it so obviously contributes to the continued dominance of the big platforms that there's no chance they haven't noticed.
We are "Social Media X but with no moderation" is a braindead business strategy. I'm failing to find a source, but moot (this founder of the anything goes social website), once said of all the 4chan clones, the ones that never lasted were the ones that were started by people who decided to make their own 4chan clone after being banned from the site. Naturally people discovered those clones were filled with insufferable asshats and died off.
Naturally when you look at these video sites, very few of them actually offer the number one thing I would expect from a YouTube clone - revenue sharing. So not only are they not competitive with YouTube, but for a large group of people kicked off of YouTube, they aren't even substitutes.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertu...
I don't know what you guys expect to happen if you just keep using YouTube... Do you expect some benevolent spirit to fly down on a fairy chariot and "break up YouTube"?
Y'all just want to complain but do nothing else.
> Oh, you? Yeah, your unit was full of stolen goods, so we seized it and changed the lock.
> There was nothing stolen in there! What about a bunch of banged up furniture and old cans of paint made you think it was stolen?
(the manager stares blankly)
> Well?!
(crickets)
> Can I at least take back my stuff that you didn't mistake for being stolen?
> We burned it all and sunk the ashes in the Mariana Trench. There is no recourse. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. Have a nice day!
> Gee, thanks... ᵃˢˢʰᵒˡᵉ
---
If we ever come up with a digital bill of rights, one of the amendments should include being given a grace period to retrieve all of the data that you stored with a service in case they decide to terminate your account. It's absurd that you can store your data with a service one day, and in the next it's all gone because reasons.
Now all I need to do is hire a US legal firm to sue paypal and get my money. Even if it was $100,000 it still wouldn't be worth it. Paypal know this.
One of the clauses of the GDPR gives EU residents the right to appeal certain automated decisions that might affect them.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
While I was researching some substantiation for my comment, I noticed that Wikipedia has a citation saying "Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in the General Data Protection Regulation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... ) -- any idea if the footnote is outdated, or perhaps the actual statute is more nuanced than one might think?
Sounds like traffic lights are illegal in the EU.
More like, imagine if you show up to your storage one day and the lock is changed. You talk to the manager and he says, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service".
"Which rule did I break?", you ask.
He answers, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service."
You appeal multiple times and receive the exact same answer with a blank stare from the manager until he says: "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service, this decision is final and no further communication from you will be reviewed."
Then he just sits and stares at you blankly like you don't exist, no matter what you say.
This is also exactly how Amazon handles shutting down sellers as well.
Only a law that prohibits or at least severely limits automated handling of customer complaints would help against these practices.
I only recently learned that GDPR actually includes such a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... although a footnote later appears to say "no, it does not" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... so I guess we leave that fight to lawyers
There is further commentary elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572144
I’m afraid that whatever is broken will stop the phone number transfer from succeeding.
Imagine you stored all your stuff in a storage unit you didn't pay for, where the owner can show people round your stuff, but the owner surreptitiously takes photographs of people and what they are interested in. They then sell those photos to random people who then turn up at your house, your work, on the street, at your gym, in your supermarket and down the pub to try and sell you shit they know you're interested in. These people also sell those photos to a few hundred other such organisations.
Someone claims you stole their stuff, the owner of the building can't be arsed to investigate and tells you to gtfo.
That's the actual comparison.
Who would defend the guy borrowing the space? No-one. But then, if people found out their photos were being sold, they'd also be up in arms!
That's the reality, but somehow that's become the norm on the internet.
Kafka, at least, got to talk to a person. OTOH, we get to enjoy our Kafkaesque distopia without having to physically go to some office.
Before the focus felt like it was more on exposing people to new up-and-comers, or random viral stuff. The viral stuff is still there, but so algorithmically driven, and catering to the lowest common denominator that it just feels off.
I have no clue how to find new channels with interesting concepts anymore.
They could buy one of the online course sites. I’d pay a small subscription as a Netflix “add-on” to get what ever I wanted to learn without ads.
It's not entirely fair to blame YouTube exclusively for the complicated mess that is copyright laws. In fact most of this video & thread are misdirected blame.
Per the video it sounds like he received 5 DMCA copyright strikes to which he issues counter-claims. That's not youtube's system and youtube is bound to follow the laws outlined by the DMCA. YouTube didn't issue the copyright strike, so why would YouTube know what was or wasn't at issue?
So yes the system is broken, but moving somewhere else doesn't fix it. The new system will still have this exact same set of circumstances happen because that new system will still be governed by DMCA & US copyright law (in this instance being US-based).
The only part of this that has anything to do with YouTube itself or being in YouTube's control is the channel being deleted. But that policy is clear - 3 copyright strikes and the channel is deleted. Too harsh? Maybe. Ambiguous or unclear? No. And if the channel does what it should as a business & lawyers up to respond to the DMCA notices & issue counter-claims, if those counters are successful then the channel remains at 0 strikes and isn't deleted. But there the part that's shit is DMCA. Want to fix that part? Stop blaming YouTube for it and go try to get the law reformed. YouTube isn't going to be your lawyer. Nor will Vimeo. Nor will any video hosting service.
Actually, I believe YouTube uses a mechanism which is explicitly not-DMCA for its copyright claims.
Under the DMCA, a user has the right of counterclaim, where the user says "your claim is wrong, here's why, see you in court", and the service provider has to reinstate the claimed material (unless it actually goes to court). I don't believe YouTube's ToS gives the user that provision.
https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim
There's a summary but it links to a more detailed PDF.
If it is a "real" DMCA claim, then according to this Google must put the content back up within 10 to 14 business days. If it's Google's house rules then they don't, but that would mean it's not a real DMCA claim.
Now I understand Google reserves the right to ban you for anything at any time, like all providers. But that would be a secondary action in addition to this.
If his counter claims are successful there's no reason to believe the channel will be deleted, either.
This story probably got enough reach now that something will happen, as usual.
"If the subscriber serves a counter notification complying with statutory requirements, including a statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed or disabled through mistake or misidentification, then unless the copyright owner files an action seeking a court order against the subscriber, the service provider must put the material back up within 10-14 business days after receiving the counter notification."
But that’s not an excuse for every use case. For example a corporate training video with the URL emailed to every participant.
Why YouTube? Because everyone else does it. And nobody even began to think about looking at the possibility that there might be alternatives.
It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.
If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?
I have a Gmail inbox that sends and receives from dozens of addresses on 4 different domains.
If Google locked me out, I could just update the forwarding rule on my domain to go to a different email.
But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life.
I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!
Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted.
If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.
https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#ipv4-ipv6-...
My rational is to align my interests with the company running the infrastructure for a fundamental component of my digital life.
Free email is fine most of the time. Until it's not. I want to limit my "until it's not" exposure.
The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
How bad is life without that filter?
I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
How does it compare to ISPmail:
* https://workaround.org/ispmail
mailinabox seems to be a 'magic script' of sorts, which ones can read through, but it seems to wave a wand and things should Just Work. ISPmail appears to be more of a set of instructions of what to run manually to reach the end goal.
How hard is it to understand what mailinabox does after running the script?
I don't really know how it works but I have been running it for 2 years and it has been fine. The hardest thing was updating to the new ubuntu LTS which involved making sure my backups were safe, wiping the vps and then restoring the backup on a fresh ubuntu install.
Because the software is strict on using only a fresh ubuntu install with nothing else on it, it all just works because you have the same config as everyone else.
I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time.
And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days.
But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.
Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.
I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again.
This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human.
In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services.
So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.
It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to.
It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.
This doesn't help when Google decide to sunset one or more of the services that you're relying on, forcing you to migrate elsewhere or re-design
Its reached the point now this is just expected behaviour, and I feel sorry for anyone that has invested considerable effort into any of googles platforms.
A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it.
B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money.
C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable.
D.) They don't want to leak any details that help scammers learn how to get around automated anti-fraud/abuse systems.
edit to add:
E.) The reason might be something utterly embarrassing about some really dumb internal snafu.
Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive.
The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks.
But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.
Do you have any examples?
Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.
I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.
The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.
My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it.
Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case.
The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.
This is exactly right! Google has taken all the benefits of scale and made many billions of dollars in the process. At the same time, they’ve externalized all of the social costs onto their users. Hard problems like moderation, customer support, anti-fraud have been automated in an opaque fashion that leaves users with little or no recourse when things go wrong.
If they were struggling to stay afloat under the weight of that metric crapton of abuse, then maybe I would take that excuse seriously. But they aren't. Every dollar they line their pockets with while allowing their users to be abused is a dollar exploited.
The mistakes Google's automated systems and reviewers make can cause lasting damage, even if your app or channel is reinstated after public outcry.
One of my browser extensions was removed for absurd reasons from the Chrome Web Store, and they've reversed their decision after things were made public [1][2]. While the extension was reinstated, since then it appears to be artificially pushed down in search results, and it no longer appears in the top three results when searching for the extension name [1], despite being in the second and third place for almost a year before the takedown and repeated update rejections were issued.
[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57
[2] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63
[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20imag...
The Castle, and The Trial particularly.
I wonder if there's anyone writing Kafkaesque fiction about the modern world. I'm sure it could be Googlified. Any ideas anyone?
Next day I received a notification Google was terminating my account with the message "It looks like it was being used in a way that violated Google's policies." Had to appeal the decision and they restored it, no explanation given.
Google customer support is awful. I decided to move my professional email from Google Apps. I don't feel comfortable using a company that can decide to lock your out from your personal stuff without warning and a proper explanation.
It’s kind of ridiculous that YouTube accept claims against an entire video without _any_ evidence, or even a description of what copyrighted material is being infringed on.
Instead it seems that YouTube will simply let someone claim that a video has copyrighted content without explanation (and in violation of the DMCA), and delete creators based on that.
You can’t just go and claim that a video or other content infringes on a copyright somewhere. You must state which copyright is being infringed upon.
> (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. [1]
I tried to use their web site. No option to change currency. Then I tried contacting support. What a shitshow that was:
- They claimed it was trivial, but the web site just wouldn't cooperate. "You can't change your country because one or more Google services you're using does not allow you to change your country." Google Support were never able to tell me which service that was.
- They suggested and I tried the usual restart, reboot, reinstall, clean cookies, try different browsers, login from an incognito window, etc. etc.
- Then they asked me to delete all registered payment options and finally to cancel my Drive subscription, after which point of course I lost access to my files and I was no longer able to pay to reinstate access.
After several months of support assuring me that they had "our specialist team working on this" not a single thing happened.
Thankfully I had a big enough hard drive to store all the photos, so I just found another service (which has been rock solid ever since) and made a mental note to move off of Google ASAP.
Generally you're not allowed to just publish cover songs without getting the copyright owner's permission first.
Here's what a copyright lawyer says: http://suebasko.blogspot.com/2011/06/cover-songs-on-youtube....
Note that the YT Music Policies have been removed, so what he calls "outdated information" is actually relevant again.
Sync license requirements haven't changed and YT has nothing to with that. You're mixing up several things here and that might be where a lot of the confusion comes from.
The songs you've uploaded might have been covered (pardon the pun) by YT's Music Policies, which consists of a list of songs that YT has license agreements for. In such cases, ad revenue handling, etc. is done automatically and you don't require a license.
In other cases, however, it's solely under the discretion of the copyright owner to just grant you the license for free (i.e. they don't care), or demanding the content to be taken down, because a sync license would be thousands of dollars if not more.
This is independent from any content ID practices, which usually only apply to master recordings (e.g. original songs or bootlegs). Copyright law is a complex (and IMHO messed up) topic, but we just don't have enough information here.
GCP might have great support. They may not have automated bots suspending accounts. They might actually follow the DMCA counterclaim process instead of some weird process on top of it.
I'll never know: I restrict Google products to casual, throw-away contexts. I've imagined myself trying to explain to my boss or a client "They won't respond" or "They say they can't provide any information." Just typing that freaks me out.
Anyway, if you want to be a huge corporation living under one brand umbrella, you've got to take the good with the bad. Google is for entertainment stuff and toys to me.
It seems like for all of the Google ex-products I can think of, they gave advance notice of at least a year.
Turns out the fear is not unfounded see a confession by an ex GCP Googler:
We can't reliably tell whether a product will be supported for the next N years. It feels non-deterministic.
Ironic how Google has squandered their goodwill.
Similar factors in deciding between Office 365 or GSuite. Different products, same Google story.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/enterprise-support...
The price charts are all publicly available. Anyone can check for themselves what the costs are.
For example, one will hardly think of the cost of the disk speed (IOPS, in AWS), before moving to AWS. Then, they will suddenly have to deal with it (note that IOPS will be mostly opportunity costs, in case one doesn't choose provisioned IOPS of larger capacity).
AWS prices are well-known, and not for being low.
Now, the benefit of AWS may well be worth the high cost - that's a separate question.
AWS is run like a gigantic social experiment in "how half-assed and crusty can we make it and still have people pay?"
The reason we put up with them is because A. they're the new IBM, nobody gets fired for choosing AWS, B. you can reliably reach a human who will at least give you a straight answer when you start to suspect that the AI-powered auto-scaling is actually marketing fluff sprayed over a double/halve cron job that runs at the top of the hour.
You say this as if it's an afterthought as opposed to an incredibly important and massive advantage AWS has over GCP.
Do people find "?" as being aggressive? I think questions generally, tend to be aggressive (which is why deflecting back at your opponent is common in online arguments), and I'm having a hard time seeing how a question mark does more than just attempt to annoy the other person.
I'm curious what others think, I may be too sensitive.
I'm on the younger side for HN. In my social circles replying to something with either just '?' or just a leading '?' is pretty aggressive and rude.
I read it as, "huh?" or "what?" or even maybe, "who are you kidding?" and for all of those determining offense level comes with context.
In this context, the person replying clearly sees it as a bullet and puts some detail on why out there.
Frankly, that kind of thing is as offensive as we all might think it is. Almost any offensive thing is.
Context matters.
If it were me, I would continue your preferred mode of expression.
Offence works in strange ways.
Truth is, we are all as offended as we think we are.
And the reasons for it vary widely, with some well established ones seeing broad, but rarely complete consensus too.
Implication?
There is no way to know what may be offensive beyond a few well trodden examples.
Second order implication?
Offence is gamed easily, and I submit regularly as a tactic more than a meaningful, or sincere sentiment.
Having worked through that in my life, I quit apologizing and put more effort into understanding others and helping others understand me.
Starts with, "I did not intend to offend"
And carries on with whatever the primary context is, not the meta context.
Where others insist on the meta, I simply cannot help them and either the convo settles back to its original intent and value or it does not.
All I can do is leave the door wide open to continue and express my stated intent and that I am the authority on it.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I cannot tell you how many conversations I have recovered to good ends doing that.
My 0.02
There is the disdain of not explaining exactly what you are questioning with the implicit assumption you are questioning everything said. It's pretty much a stand-in for "WTF are you on about? I don't even know how to ask a sensible question about what you said." when I've used it.
In this case though? It's a single statement so maybe a bit abrupt but I read it as a request for clarification. A fairly strong statement was made (essentially "don't use this company") with no backup or explanation. So an equal lack of effort was made proportionally in response.
For actual issues needing real support, like when anything breaks, they're useless.
We've ultimately decided that we're moving out of Google strictly to AZURE / AWS, and ironically enough Oracle.
> Minimum 12 month contract
> One TAM unit provides on average one business day’s worth of effort per week
Just to have an ear on deck about Google's issues?
It sounds like the platform is bad enough that we're in the ballpark of Bald Tony the TAM coming in with a bat and saying "nice place ya got here in this rough neighborhood... pity if something bad happened to it!"
Alphabet doesn't to my knowledge use poverty wages combined with prison like surveillance and massive union busting to prevent employees to be treated as thrash.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-is-hiring-intelligence-...
The optimists would say that's a testament to how much Msft's behavior has improved over the past 30 years; the pessimists would say its an indictment of just how bad Amzn and Goog really are.
AWS or Azure will always trump GCP in my mind because Amazon and Microsoft have shown over the years they care about their customers on most fronts.
I just wanted info before I started about whether we should expect to be able to even build those hosts that day and they wouldn't give us _anything_. We're not exactly a small company and the amount we're spending with them is large.
Their answer was basically either reserve capacity or screw you. I had to relay that to my CTO.
The world wants VMs and virtual networks and firewalls and clickable web interfaces and to run big legacy enterprise apps that MUST NEVER DIE and to fuck around with Terraform and to SSH onto boxes. This sucks, though, and Google SREs know better than to use such terrible abstractions unless forced to. The internal software development ecosystem is eons ahead of anything you can get with any cloud provider, but that sort of alien technology doesn't sell.
Kubernetes/GKE is a good compromise between something that Google sells but Google also wants to use. That, and some of the GCP versions of internal tools (Spanner, BigTable, BigQuery, ...).
We're all just living in the real world. What to Google looks like non-terrible abstractions looks like Kool Aid elsewhere.
(Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.)
YouTube creators, however, do not have this luxury. People watch YouTube videos because they happened to be on YouTube and YouTube suggested the video, not because the end user was looking for your videos specifically. Social networks and video sharing sites are appealing to creators because there is the chance that The Algorithm (I hate that term) will award them with eyeballs that they can then sell to advertisers for very little effort. That is something you can't just migrate off of, because there are no competitors. You might convince your Patreon supporters to follow you, but even that is uncertain. I have watched many streamers move off of Twitch because they got a better deal from a competitor, only to watch their viewership drop to nothing until they were able to move back to Twitch. If one of these video sharing sites shuts you down, your career is over. Google kills your GCP account, you can still be a software engineer.
So my TL;DR is that cloud computing is very different from being an independent creator. Computers are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't matter which ones you use. But video sharing platforms give you a free audience, and that is something that is very hard to build yourself.
"Like this video, subscribe, and don't forget to add this channel to your video-RSS feed. Link in the description below." ?
Edit: Looks like this functionality already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en
Looks like Vimeo does too: https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-c...
Personally, I'd try a simple app that OAuths from YouTube/Google accounts and collects an email, so you control content announcements, even in case YouTube fails. It also has the advantage of being independent from other social media platforms.
I do the same, and also back up my email regularly with getmail so that it will be easy to transfer, either if Google arbitrarily locks my account, or if they just shut down Gmail for good.
I wish there was a good solution to similarly back up Google Photos -- only partial metadata is exposed via the API.
The feature has not worked for more than 8 months now, customers complaining and all. We have done everything on our hands (all documentation sent, demo app showing the feature, video explaining all usages, etc..) and it's as good as shouting to the abyss.
We were recently evaluating alternative cloud providers (our main one is AWS) and we discarded GCP because of this.
This could be fixed tomorrow if the law had significant penalties for copy fraud in cases of fair use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud
Give the reporters 5 strikes too... If you cry wolf 5 times on things that are proven fair use or spurious or without proof you are banned for X days from submitting claims (at a minimum).
NewPipe is one of my recently discovered favourites. It pretty much scrapes Youtube and strips the horrid ads. You don't get any of the recommendation rubbish either and is far better from a privacy and data tracking point of view. FOSS for Android devices.
Slurping all 214 of his videos right now in case I want to improve my journeyman guitar skills in the future.
Interesting, no ads when you watch them that way. Imagining a browser extension that you kick off when in YouTube: it pulls down the video and opens it in a new browser window sans ads....
(Safari broke that extension though.)
For everything else, there's PiHole
Maybe scrape your watch history nightly and take a delta of what you haven't downloaded yet.
The solution here isn't to appeal to Google to change their ways, it's for more creators to pick competing platforms or go the self-hosted/decentralized route. I think it's still an option for higher effort content, using YouTube as more of a teaser platform to drive viewers to their actual website. It will definitely result in significantly slower growth and less eyeballs, but with the ability to still make money off platforms like Patreon (which most YouTubers say is their primary source of income these days anyway), the trade off of being in complete control of your own content seems like it should be worth it.
Thinking about it, I suppose it's possible that more creators actually are doing this and I just haven't seen them because they're harder to find.
They're hosting petabytes upon petabytes of videos, transcoded to work anywhere, forever, for free. And you can even get a share of the ad revenue. I can't imagine how I would even begin to develop a competing website, I'd be drowned in hosting fees before I even make a dent in Youtube's user share.
> Thousands of times a month, someone posts a cover song on YouTube. And whether the video is a live band performance or a toddler singing from her high chair, most of those cover songs are posted without permission from the song’s copyright holder—meaning they’re infringing someone’s copyright.
> To avoid problems, you can obtain licenses that allow you to post the music and an accompanying video. [1]
[1] https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...
The possibility of getting shut down for arbitrary reasons is part of the entrepreneurial risk.
Professional content creators for TV, movies, advertising, etc. don't have these problems because they make sure they don't use anybody else's content without a license! Youtubers don't bother because they're little fish and can get away with it and justify everything to themselves as fair use even if it's not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/iyddro/youtube_term...
Most of YouTube's content moderation work is performed by an AI that was given the power to delete videos and channels, without informing anyone, including the human part of YT support, of its artificial nature, instead passing it off as some kind of "content oversight council" or something along those lines, and having someone occasionally write communications on its behalf.
It would explain the absolutely massive discrepancy between the public and the content moderators: there are often highly morally questionable videos and channels that are still up to this day, while relatively minor offenders are often struck down with no option of recourse for seemingly no reason.
https://flypaper.soundfly.com/hustle/how-to-legally-cover-a-...).
So they can do these covers perfectly legally, as long as they pay the fees, that's all.
I'm aware of the problems of scaling support to a huge scale, and contexts where the communication of the termination causes is an issue in itself (e.g. to protect internal business logic).
However, in cases like this, being hostile seems an intentional decision - specifically, by hiding the reasons. Is this truly intentional on Google's side?
Every once in a while, some insider pops in discussions like this, and says "you don't know support at large scale etc.etc.".
Therefore, with both sides of the story at hand, a productive assessment could be done.
To clarify, I do think Google has a just "f*ck them all" approach to support; for example, there could be paid support plans for people who made a large investment. But I need to hear the devil :-)
Why should three private companies have a government protected, international, monopoly on our collective human music culture?
Obviously, they shouldn’t...
1. He's trying to figure out which video infringed on what work.
2. YouTube is refusing by saying they don't know which part of which video infringed on other work.
Not sure who's miscommunicating or what the reason is, but based on what he says, it seems this is what's happening. Anyone know if this sounds accurate?
He knows which videos strikes were issued on. He doesn't know what he did wrong. Like he says in the video, he isn't provided with any timestamps or details about what has entails those strikes and the channel deletion
I think it is obvious, he was playing a copyrighted song, as he does in nearly all of his videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4AeoAWGJBw (2018, now resolved)
But, and here is where it gets weird, what defines cover is extremely limiting. For covers, the song must follow the exact general tone and pattern of the original. Anything else is considered derivative work and an infringement, even if the license was bought. So if a guitarist adds a simple vocal explaining how he played it -- it is not a cover. It's infringement.
Also, under DMCA, covers are not fair use. I also expect lesser music companies letting YouTube videos slide as we now have YT Music and these covers directly compete with the original. So they might just not be comfortable with getting your money, they also don't want a cover beating the original in playlists and charts.
What’s the alternative content site? Vimeo? Twitch? Instagram/Tiktok? Something else?
How would you monetize it?
You'd need to operate at a loss for years and streaming video is not cheap.
....
That’s the joke.
Google's products and services should be avoided by any and all corporate entities. If your business relies upon products or services in order to run, then stay the hell away from Google's Cloud Platform.
Toys are for babies. Big-boys need tools.
Why hasn't youtube built any tooling for creators?
Not a single editing tool, let alone a whole suite. You're expected to show up with your already polished in Adobe mp4.
They could own a huge chunk of that market, yet seemingly willingly choose not to.
Probably still worth reading? I got some good ideas and perspectives out of it, back in the day.
Just uh, sip the Kool-Aid, don't chug it.
* Same extraordinary number to lead you in
* Massive cost crossed out with FREE on top of it
* No preview till you put in your email
* Some rando endorsements at the bottom from people claiming to also have gotten rich quick both of whom are also selling Get Rich Quick™ stories.
.. of course it is. Ugh.
Yes, that was a thing twelve years ago, and apparently it's still a thing today. There was, back then, a nexus of the 'top tier' creators in San Diego. If you were attractive, they'd even mislead you into believing that you're "in the club" with them, in order to get you to buy more of their "inner circle" product.
Silver lining, I'm now hypersensitive to marketing formatting and layout, and can detect samples of it without having to read the words.
Ultimately I'm trying to gleam information from other successful course creators as I work on my own technical offerings. At the end of the day, it seems a better approach than hoping Youtube doesn't shut you down and continues to throw you scraps from their advertising revenue.
Piano In 21 Days, on the other hand, has been incredibly successful :)
-Jacques
I also downloaded the related free tabs from his website https://www.goliathguitartutorials.com/index.html
$ pip install youtube-dl $ cat downloadlist.txt https://youtu.be/w9uYlCO23Sg https://youtu.be/7sgzu9dgUOI https://youtu.be/6wTvMH-ZO_c https://youtu.be/XJ_005RKzTI https://youtu.be/kZAxhlZtafA https://youtu.be/Q1zCsu0swh8 https://youtu.be/0unXcEeL_U0 https://youtu.be/I8UKTLS-Aj8 https://youtu.be/r3bTX5hlplQ https://youtu.be/q49yJNOldfk https://youtu.be/tLNDdRC6q30 https://youtu.be/060ClJ8BQqA https://youtu.be/xBrHmVd7AXU https://youtu.be/Kt4N5MCIWN8 https://youtu.be/x8fymovqutI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ph4p1xb60Y&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCnDvkGy92Y&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfXhXqV-ono&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nfoXrZWax4&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCDjNhC5Zn0&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMN5_0pQAQU&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9O8_zytw8g&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8fymovqutI&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPT2lRHDxk0&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BqFej5U53s&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfKq1SONL-k&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyhgp7vzBDM&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4IUrOGI0UQ&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePY4XsjvrFE&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUjUs3g_jMM&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0rjC4vtwo&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An7CfmW4-kM&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0tEAXUU9Kw&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xORtcxm7OWc&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhcAxi6Yxmw&list=PLwCOjNCln2... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfSlrT_us8Y&list=PLwCOjNCln2...
$ for f in $(cat downloadlist.txt); do echo $f; done
These days the real money comes from the corporate nipple, the 5-10 million+ subscriber base - CocaCola, Kanye, Madonna etc with millions, or hundreds of millions of views punting shit. They want us to watch that bland corporate bollocks, rather than sub 1M creators with actual useful content who's only crime is to try to control the attractiveness of their channels by reducing the number of ads or their timing. Especially ads that interrupt things like the flow of an educational video when the presenter says "and at this point we.....[AD ROLL]"...attention is then lost.
Often I see glib comments such as "never rely on another platform for your income", but YT encouraged content providers hoping to grow them, and thus grow revenue for YT themselves. No other platform implicitly "promised" this sort of income.
Now a good number of sub 1M YT'ers have ducked out of the new oppressive ad-roll thing, though not completely shutting down ads, but controlling ads on their own terms to make their videos at least less user hostile due to the injection of ads every 5 mins (this "feature"[0] seems to be the new thing, and back dating this rule to your older content, whether you asked, or not). Many of these folks are pretty YT savvy also know that if they don't run some amount of ads then they're leeching off of YT, and that's a fair enough thing, there's a bit of give and take, I don't expect something for nothing.
A good number of sub 1M YT'ers have now diversified and set up Patreon accounts (YMMV) so at least there's some protection should YT decide you don't fit their profile any more and have to move elsewhere.
Now about moving to Vimeo etc + running a patreon, in the video below, Louis Rossmann says he's even tapped out the "affordable" paid service with Vimeo, and the next step up on Vimeo for him is some kind of "Enterprise (ask for pricing)", so we all know what that means.
Apropos the YT'er who's clearly having a distressing time, if YT can't and won't provide evidence of what they've apparently violated copyright-wise, then that sounds like an organisation that no longer cares about the creators that helped build their platform. And I also wonder why the complainants aren't taking out law suits against Google/YT to recover some or all of that revenue that Google pocketed due to "infringing" material....by we all know why, Google could sustain the defence of more lawsuits than there are atoms in the universe due to their size. The world has become very lopsided.
And I really don't know what the answer is when these large corporate behemoths dominate our lives. Well I do but that's another discussion.
I know this is difficult when people are saying things you believe to be untrue, but thus far nobody has come up with an alternative that doesn't result in censorship or end up having an unrealistically high moderation cost.
One core value that a platform could have is common decency, which is not the same as censorship, but it is given up even easier than what your argument calls free speech.
How do you suggest making a platform which allows good content while disallowing bad? Also, how do you expect to be able to define these things? Remember: every person you pay to moderate has to be able to discern good from bad in as little time as possible. Even less time than that.
I have no idea how to apply this to a content hosting paradigm though. Not without spending a couple million dollars on bots who inevitably make mistakes.
Since somebody downvoted without providing references to their refutes here's an actual case about freedom of speech online which is the main one by the looks of it in regards to suppressing speech online:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti...
The burden of defamation is on the person not the website if anything, however, if someone posts anonymously who do you sue? The best a platform can do is delete their account. I've successfully had defamatory / false content about myself deleted from a platform in the past.
If someone wants to argue that YouTube should be declared a public utility that is required to host everyone’s content no matter what, that’s totally understandable and they should make that argument instead. Otherwise they’re just asking for the government to mandate that YouTube, etc. are safe spaces where everything is permitted and no one is allowed to judge other people for what they say, including the company paying for the servers. Which is so totally counter to what those very same people seem to think about everything else that I’m surprised the hypocrisy and inconsistency doesn’t create a singularity or something. But here we are, in 2020, and AM-talk-radio types are demanding the government mandate safe spaces for them on privately owned platforms where they are shielded from consequences.
I suspect you'll find out that whatever free speech rights your local jurisdiction grants you don't allow you to stay in the bar.
What you are doing when you allow racism or xenophobia on your site is helping them promote it. There's a difference, and the fact that you have chosen to stand with those people doesn't put you in the free speech group, it puts you in the "I am a racist" group.
Let me put it this way. Nothing is stopping hateful people from creating their own video hosting platform and hosting their drivel. Hence, free speech. But nothing in the entirety of free speech, whether the legal notions or the philosophical notions, requires platforms to give that speech a place to live. The whole "marketplace of ideas" concept fundamentally works by having the community at large reject hateful speech.
Free speech does not mean each instance of speech needs to be weighed and evaluated equally by the community.
From a far more practical perspective, allowing this sort of thing onto your platform spells death for any content-platform startup. Seeing this sort of thing is going to immediately (a) drive sensible content consumers -- your actual users -- away from the platform, and (b) draw other hate speech creators to you like flies to shit. If that's what the platform wants to do, then nothing in the world is stopping them, but they will never gain mainstream success.
Cloudflare and domain registrar bans, payment processor bans and deplatforming, etc. would beg to differ.
You don't even need to use the Internet, paint it on a sign and walk around the street with it on a pole.
You're not having your free speech impeded by any of this, because refusing to carry someone elses speech isn't censorship, it's just that when you say things that are repulsive to people they won't want to help promote it.
If you want free speech go to your door, walk outside, start taking. You got your free speech. Everything else is a bonus.
This argument is reductio ad absurdum, except executed against an argument you support. De-platforming online is in opposition to free speech, and the fact you can walk out your front door with a sign does not mitigate the loss of equal power behind your speech that others enjoy by using Internet services. You standing on the street with a sign is in no way equivalent in character or reach to writing what your sign says on Twitter. So here we are, the Internet is a thing, it exists, and so do digital platforms. Free and open access to web platforms is a core philosophical requirement to ensure freedom of speech, and de-platforming people damages that.
It's okay to be opposed to freedom of speech, it's okay to be opposed to the open web, but don't act as if you are not while advocating de-platforming as being an acceptable behavior.
Maybe the answer is obvious to you, but it is not to me: why should these things be equivalent? Why should you be entitled to twitter's channel for your views that twitter does not want to host?
If Twitter is making the decision on its own -- that is, it's not coerced by the state, and if you are still capable of getting your information online by some other means, then Twitter is making its own free speech decision to curate its own website like you would your own site or your own store. Free and accessible doesn't and shouldn't mean that you get to hold the platform for ransom with your content. That is, Twitter shouldn't be chained to indefinitely dedicating hosting specifically for any one kind of unpopular content.
Your definition for the "open web" sounds to me like, honestly, very severe state control of private enterprise. You, a member of the open web, not being permitted to choose what content belongs on your own website just defeats the purpose of any kind of experiment of free expression online. A government telling you that you must always carry this or that particular view is totally antithetical to the First Amendment that establishes the Freedom of Speech.
Getting kicked out of the bowling club for sharing highly offensive statements has not prevented you from sharing those statements. Losing your job over them has not prevented you from sharing those statements. Being banned from twitter has not prevented you from sharing those statements. I really do mean to be absolute about this -- your freedom of speech would not have been impeded _at all_, no matter how many hosts or bans or jobs you go through.
If you're reduced to screaming your opinions from a street corner in order to have anyone hear them, and you're still being ignored by people, well you've still got 100% of your freedom of speech -- it's just that the speech isn't resonating and the government isn't some despotic, Orwellian regime that would force audiences to listen to those views.
If you're saying that you're not physically prevented from saying whatever you'd like, but with that being the limit, it seems like just about any infringement becomes acceptable.
> Being put to death by the government has not prevented you from sharing those statements.
All speech has consequences. You, the free speech enthusiast, not being prepared to pay those consequences is not cause for a government bailout or arrests of website hosts.
Ah, you are making the same claim (and thus mistake) as another commenter in another thread I responded to. Freedom of speech is not just a law, it is also a social more. It's basis is first in philosophy, and then in law stemming from that. Just because the government has not violated your First Amendment civil rights, does not mean your freedom of speech has not been violated in some other way.
Losing my friends over calling them assholes definitely dissuades me from doing so in the future. This impedes my freedom of speech.
See how nonsensical that is? Just because something makes you less likely to speak your mind doesn't mean it's impeding your freedoms. You have the freedoms to call your friends assholes. They have the freedom not to associate with you anymore (this is called freedom of association, and is part of freedom of speech). That freedom of association is the same freedom your employer is exercising when you make a racist joke and then fire you. You had the freedom to make the joke, they had the freedom not to associate with you after you did. No ones freedoms were limited.
Are you implying that black people choose to be black like someone saying racist, firable things at work chooses to say those things?
If the freedom of association is inviolable, why can't I put up a sign outside my store saying "NO BLACKS"?
If it's about someone making statements at work, would you accept if a business owner said that they'll fire you if you're Jewish, but let you work there as long as they don't know about it?
I don't think there is an obvious answer here. We're in the realm of philosophy. My response to the grandparent was less about my own advocacy for freedom of speech (although that is clearly my position/bias) and more about their statements being disingenuous.
What my own personal opinion is as to the answer to your questions is pretty simple though. Twitter, like other social media "publishers", enjoys special legal status under the law via [0]Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. As such, they themselves do not have freedom of speech, they must not interfere with the content of the creators who use their platform. Interfering with that content (in theory) loses them that special legal status and opens them up to liability for the content they do choose to retain/host. So our legislation is pretty clear on the matter, Twitter does not have the right to censor you simply because they're a private business while also maintaining liability immunity as a common carrier.
> If Twitter is making the decision on its own -- that is, it's not coerced by the state, and if you are still capable of getting your information online by some other means, then Twitter is making its own free speech decision to curate its own website like you would your own site or your own store.
See above. "Publishing platforms" don't have free speech rights as long as they choose to operate as common carriers to maintain liability immunity, which Twitter does. That's setting aside the separate argumentation point which is that corporations are not people and corporate personhood is a sham, and therefore corporations themselves do not fundamentally have freedom of speech.
> Your definition for the "open web" sounds to me like, honestly, very severe state control of private enterprise.
Please elaborate. I can't imagine how you would come to that conclusion from what I wrote.
> A government telling you
"You." Civil Rights are individual rights, not collective rights. Compelled speech is obviously not philosophically aligned with freedom of speech. But it seems you are using a collective "you", strongly implying the impositions that come from corporate personhood as a legal concept to be more tangible than they are even in current law.
> Getting kicked out of the bowling club for sharing highly offensive statements has not prevented you from sharing those statements. Losing your job over them has not prevented you from sharing those statements. Being banned from twitter has not prevented you from sharing those statements. I really do mean to be absolute about this -- your freedom of speech not impeded _at all_. If you're reduced to screaming your opinions from a street corner in order to have anyone hear them, and you're still being ignored by people, well you've still got 100% of your freedom of speech -- it's just that the speech isn't resonating and the government isn't some despotic regime out of 1984 that would force audiences to listen to those views.
I'm less absolutist here. Your argument has merit, and yet it misses the point. The bowling club kicking you out is not the same thing as being banned from Twitter. The bowling club is not a publishing platform which exclusively exists for broadcasting speech to people who choose to follow you. Twitter is. People who are highly offended by your statements on Twitter have many modes of recourse in order to not be accosted by your statements such as not following you, blocking you, or otherwise using available technical means to ignore you. The bowling club, however has no such filtering mechanism, nor is it's sole purpose for existence to provide a platform for individuals to broadly publish their speech, it exists for people to bowl and your highly offensive speech reasonably detracts from its purpose for existence.
Platforms are different from other forms of private entities, and they are treated differently under the law as such. Trying to conflate the two is not reasonable, nor is it reasonable to take an absolutist position based in a conflation. Also, it's just plain wrong to say that "your freedom of speech not impededed _at all_." if you've been banned from a broadcasting platform. That's an obvious impediment, which shouldn't need further explanation.
There's a line between removing content and creating/editing content, especially when it's attributed to someone else. When you, publisher, start modifying others' content, it's reasonable that you become liable for the result. If you choose not to publish certain authors, for any reason goes against your acceptable use policies, I don't see an issue. It's off-topic comments on a forum. Political comments on a cooking blog. Etc. You have pretty wide latitude to define what is acceptable on your publishing platform, and that definition shouldn't have to be fixed throughout time.
> "Publishing platforms" don't have free speech rights as long as they choose to operate as common carriers
Twitter is not a common carrier. Social media is not a public utility. They are publishers.
Anyhow, you still need a bank account to get paid. If you can only work jobs that pay you in cash and don't need any access to bank accounts or the Internet themselves, that rules out 99% of businesses that could employ you.
Should you start your own DDoS protection service too?
That's about as 'mainstream' as you can get in the fediverse.
so i have to make my own bookstore just to sell that book? I'd say that's pretty close to censorship. Even tho the constitution doesn't stop private censorship (only gov't censorship), it isn't a good outcome imo.
I, a terrible author, am not entitled to your bookstore's audience.
In the market of video providers, none of them are interested in hosting a particular viewpoint, then the creators of the video either have to put up with that or go make their own.
Either way: still not censorship.
To spell it out, your reasoning assumes that the prevailing consensus in any society is good.
Removing it from the bookstore prevents those who wants the book from getting it. Having it in the bookstore doesn't force those who don't want it from reading it!
Instead, you can choose to not support that bookstore owner by shopping somewhere else and rewarding the bookstore owner that -does- carry it. Bookstore owners are not the government, they're free to do all sorts of things and you're free to be a patron or not.
it is ridiculous when there's physical constraints, but for digital goods, such as youtube, there's almost no physical constraints.
Noone is saying the bookstore must promote or give prominence to all books equally. But preventing the books from existing by virtue of their platform size is wrong.
There's a difference between your home, which is a privately owned private space, and a mall, which is a privately owned public space. Youtube is more like a mall or a newspaper conglomerate than your house. For it to have a bias when censoring content can be objectionable in the same way that a big media conglomerate with a bias can be objectionable.
So if I ask you to leave my house because I don't want to listen to you any more, am I violating the global ethical principle of free speech?
The second paragraph of my response is more relevant here. Your house is not open to the general public except for me, it does not contain political discourse from billions of people, it's not owned by a company with a market cap close to a trillion dollars, and it has a plethora of viable alternatives.
If I was a political candidate and you asked me to leave your debate venue, I don't know whether you'd be right, but it would certainly be more controversial than if you asked me to leave your house.
Flip it around: Imagine you have a tattoo. You're publishing the one tattoo therefore "free speech" means you have to publish all the tattoos? Should you be obliged to allow a big "Kick whites out of America" tattoo next to whatever tattoo you have chosen to wear?
Leaving a piece of speech alone and simply doing nothing to it doesn't count as promoting it. That's exactly what section 230 in the USC means.
It’s fucking textbook definition of censorship.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
Are you conflating “government censorship” with censorship?
Those who agree with the norms of 2020 also think many of the norms of past times were awful. Homosexuality was considered beyond decency not long ago. Race mixing, premarital sex as well. The list can be made very long.
So what are the chances that mainstream decency right now has found the perfect set of correct values, that never needs to be challenged?
That's not what is happening here. That's not what the issue is. Hate speech doesn't boil down to "things I don't believe to be true."
Typing "Jews" into these platforms and getting hate speech back isn't an issue of "oh dear, here are some untruths." It's hate and designed to create more hate. Which is why many platforms and many countries have a special category for it.
You can disagree with that philosophically, fine. But you might try not being so flippant about it. Especially when the example here, anti-Semitism, is associated with the death of millions of people's loved ones.
Since we're on the subject, anti-Semitism is one of those accusations that is used liberally to attack anyone that organizations like the ADL don't like. For example, if you compare the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis to apartheid, if you criticize Judaism in a way that resembles what Catholics are subjected to on a regular basis, or some tendency in Jewish culture, then suddenly you're an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jewish ethnicity, a hatred of a person who is Jewish because of his ethnicity. It is not a critical stance toward questions of culture, religion, or politics. But the legitimate definition of the term has been expanded by political hucksters into what Norman Finkelstein (whose parents are survivors) calls the Holocaust industry, where a grave crime is exploited to silence criticism and bully people into silence on matters that have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. So we have a textbook example of how "hate speech" is deployed to silence political opposition and stifle debate. There are, of course, other examples.
Mind you, I do not include things like libel and calls for violence in hate speech. Those kinds of things are already legislated and penalized as they should be. Too many things, like pornography, have been falsely defended by appealing to "free speech". What I'm talking about is the use of this insidious term by powerful groups to silence those they don't like, and then pretending like that's not what's happening. It is that simple.
Personally I would prefer a choice C, a platform that deletes stuff I don't like and nothing else, but I don't think that's on offer. The closest thing available is platforms that delete stuff that offends their target demographic, as determined by a conference room full of SV middle-management types, i.e. youtube, which we already have and which isn't all that great.
I'm not trying to snark you, I don't like the content on lbry either. But sometimes it seems like HN's consensus opinion is that censorship is terrible, and also that censorship-resistant platforms are terrible.
If I have to choose between a platform that let's anti-Semitism run rampart and Youtube I'll pick Youtube.
However the actual solution is a platform that that develops enough tools and hires enough human moderators to thwart blatant racism or hateful content while not accidentally kicking creators off the platform. This is mostly a question of effort and resources, and requires not outsourcing the entire process to a shoddy half-working automated system.
If you're a guy who advocates the supremacy of the white race on lbry, I challenge you to make it into a library
If the internet gets censored in the name of anti-semitism it would certainly not decrease animosity. Furthermore the blind crackdown on "disinformation" only increased reach of right leaning parties. The result should be observable since there is now enough empirical evidence. Trying the same strategy over and over might not be too prudent.
For some people a trimmed garden might be preferable and that is completely fine. But I don't think that is true for everyone. And there are enough alternatives, you can just watch TV or select another channel.
Stop your paternalism by pretending everyone gets influence because some YouTube videos don't fit your taste.
no it won't, this is just the typical American freakout. I'm German, here anti-semitism and hate speech are not only not propagated by private platforms (which is not censorship by the way), but banned (which is censorship). Our right wing party is diminished and unlike the US, we're not governed by complete lunatics.
There is no automatic mechanism by which stopping hate-speech somehow stops 'any form of dissent' in a democratic state of law and I'm tired of hearing the same argument again and again without any evidence for it. The US is alone among all democratic nations on this planet in their tolerance of bigotry. The UK, the oldest democracy on this planet, does not tolerate any of it either.
I don't know if you remember, but we managed to actually create a second dictatorship after WW2 and also gave far left agitators a partial fault for collapsing Weimar. Not that the assassinations that came for their leadership wasn't cowardly and their opposition completely reactionary.
The US also stands out as being actually pretty solid on democracy and a main factor we can enjoy it today too.
And yes, the right got much stronger as criticism on immigration for example was declared to be nationalistic, while left leaning groups were actively mixing up refugees and immigrants to serve business interests. Of course the result is predictable.
You aren't allowed to call anyone a Nazi in Germany, that can have legal repercussions. It often has not because there is a cultural understanding. I think that fact would be a big surprise to many people advocating speech policies like they are implemented in Germany. And don't tell me there aren't staunch crackdowns on demonstrations if they stand in the way of interests. There is enough stuff to do and with more freedom of speech, we would prosper even more.
> Our right wing party is diminished
That should actually have been the argument 10 years ago.
For my question I wonder how it compares to the other services that deadalus mentioned?
Here is a good link comparing other sites https://lbry.com/faq/different-bitchute
They are just so arrogant and know that they will never get in trouble with the law that they just won't even spend a dime or a second thought on these issues no matter how life ruining they can be. Pretty sad.