This is really bad! YouTube should find ways to respond to misclaimed tracks as a creator. Also companies / individuals that claim public domain music should be banned from the platform.
the legal answer here is that if you don't like youtube's copyright system then distribute your content on another platform. Otherwise, push for there to be a penalty for an excessive removal of copyright, because that's the only thing that's going to tilt youtube's scales back to the center.
I’m really confused by that part: YouTube lawyers must know that there’s a significant risk they’ll piss of a someone like a law professor and that they’ll use all their faculty to go after what is essentially fraud: there are provisions in the CDMA precisely for that, and the platform is liable for indulging those in systematic cases. Even if it’s not, they are risking a change in law.
Compared that PR nightmare to having an engineer spend a few days to hack a “public domain” user that automatically accepts re-use, or re-train to distinguish interpretations from copies… I feel like I’m missing something — and I’m not missing a cynical take on how Google is too big to care.
God knows that I’ve been arguing that some problems are harder than one expects, but public domain sheet music isn’t a hard one for YouTube.
The thing though is that youtube decided not to care. Actually, that is not about caring - the youtube we knew when it first launched was killed because it was an impossible business model if they themselves had the liability for uploaded possibly copyrighted content. So now they say "sort it out between yourselves, go to courts if you want but I will take it down while you do that to not be liable in the worst case".
So yes, Warner Bros can be an enormous headache to youtube. Legally and financially. "Piano teacher" probably can't. Youtube acts accordingly which is pretty rational. If you owned a youtube-like service, you'd have to do the same.
(assuming you mean DMCA) Yes, that has provisions, but YT copyright claims are explicitly not DMCA claims. This is intentional to both protect the content creator (lawsuits are expensive!) and YouTube.
> YouTube lawyers must know that there’s a significant risk they’ll piss of a someone like a law professor and that they’ll use all their faculty to go after what is essentially fraud:
YouTube can ban you from the platform at any time for any reason. While it's not good publicity, you don't have a legal right to be on YouTube or receive money from them.
> Even if it’s not, they are risking a change in law.
I doubt Google is happy with the status quo, actually, since it is not good for their creators. But with the system being as it is, they're doing what's best for them.
> Compared that PR nightmare to having an engineer spend a few days to hack a “public domain” user that automatically accepts re-use, or re-train to distinguish interpretations from copies… I feel like I’m missing something
For one, recognizing this music is not an easy problem. You'll need to be accurate in a wide variety of cases, lengths and qualities, which in itself is already very hard. But, just because it's that piece, it's not necessarily free: Recordings of these songs can be copy-righted. For example, Beethoven's music itself is free, but the recording performed by the Sydney opera is not. So you need to decide whether the uploader has rights to this specific recording, which is nearly impossible.
And this is just the easy case. Fair use, for example, is a very gray area and something which can take courts years to decide. Same on whether a piece is derivative or different enough to be its own work. There is no chance for Google to automate away any of this.
I'm not quite so pessimistic. There is a chance, machine learning is pretty good these days.
But: the chance is pretty low and I assume other priorities are taking up most of their time, and this would be a risky project from a legal point of view.
(Humans can't really solve this problem either.)
Might not be a function of the data in the video, but they can throw more data from elsewhere at it.
no, but being compliant in fraud goes farther than arbitrarily banning a user. Not a lawyer, and odds are there's not enough care to address this point legally anyway. But I don't think the potential case here is as open and shut as "we have the rights to refuse service".
Being a non-profit organisation doesn't make you immune from frivolous lawsuits...
Google won't get the ad money from these views. That's the point.