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Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

Summary for those that don’t want to watch the video :

- Pianist creates YouTube video demonstrating how to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata

- part of this video includes her playing Moonlight Sonata (of course)

- YouTube has a new ‘feature’ that scans submitted videos prior to publication to identify potentially copyrighted material

- her video is found to include copyrighted material. She is certain this is a mistake that will be rectified by disputing the copyright claim

- she agrees the only person who’s content she is reproducing is Beethoven himself

- her copyright dispute is rejected. She is found to be violating the copyright of a piece called “Wicca Moonlight”

- she can appeal the dispute but the appeal process is limited, and she risks getting a feared “copyright strike” on her account, wherein three such strikes would mean permanent closure of the account

- she says nearly anyone can file copyright claims against published YouTube videos, including bots, and is worried about all the time she’s putting in to create content being usurped by a few bad actors

View on HN

1) Feed a computer with MIDI files of public domain music and render it as audio

2) Upload to YouTube

3) File copyright dispute to YouTube for any (future?) uploaded video which contains the music which used to be in the public domain

4) Have Google reject the videos

5) Create a site or an app which allows you to license that public domain music for a fee.

6) Notify YouTube who has licensed this public domain music.

Ok. that's the way Google thinks is the way it should work. Or maybe they just recognize that their AI is causing more harm than good.

Two days ago I uploaded a video which was a screen recording to demonstrate a bug in the Android app "Komoot". It was unlisted, the link was attached to the bug report I sent to the company. It was just a short video showing how the caching (or something in that direction) of uploaded images in the app seemed to be broken. The content in the video was 100% adhering to all the guidelines, specially to those of "for all ages". The content was nothing else but scrolling photos of an MTB-trail with a bit of UI. If your video is flagged or you mark it as "for 18+", then it can only be viewed by logged in persons.

After uploading the video I got an email that it was not complying with the "for all ages" requirements, which is kind of bad, because now the support team must log-in with a Google account to YouTube in order to see the harmless but useful video.

But then again, videos related to Instagram celebrities or Chinese ASMR-binge eating are totally ok for them.

> Ok. that's the way Google thinks is the way it should work. Or maybe they just recognize that their AI is causing more harm than good.

Let's be clear. It is not Google that wants it. Actually Google is on the side of calling all of this retarded. It is the state of copyright laws, of the DMCA, of the lobbying by the RIAA. The day the whole copyright ecosystem is updated to accept that computers exist and that people share files on internet easily, Youtube will be VERY happy to unplug all these terrible bots that are there to provide a bad solution to a problem we should not have.

> Actually Google is on the side of calling all of this retarded.

Google has the means to make this stop.

How so?

They just stop and wait for the DMCA take downs and copyright owners have to make their own claims? I guess.

Add friction to the process of submitting copyright claims. Reduce friction in the process of appealing copyright claims. Relax draconian rules like the copyright strike system leading to account closure. Adjust the content ID system to reduce false positives (assuming no magical improvement to the system this will come at the cost of increased false negatives; that seems like an entirely reasonable trade-off)

For starters, they should actually follow the DMCA. The DMCA gives affected people a defined way to counter-notice, and then the entity who filed the initial DMCA notice can either sue within 14 days or the content gets restored.

Instead Google chose to evaluate "disputes" themselves, with algorithms and "AI", and reject disputes. Rejecting counter-notices is absolutely NOT something the DMCA mandates or even suggests. Moreover Youtube essentially used to allow (probably still does) alleged rights owners to reject disputes in essentially one click, while the DMCA would require them to bring a law suit. Some copyright owners therefore created bots doing the clicking for them.

They could also be more lenient to "established" players as a first step, especially when it comes to counter-notices/disputes. Factor in previous history google has with an alleged infringer (alleged by their own algorithm by the way, not even by a third party) when considering a dispute, like account age, channel age, number of previous videos without problems, "we do know the customer" e.g. to pay out ad money, etc. And then maybe not outright reject it, but leave it to the alleged copyright owner to file a law suit (as the DMCA states) or at least refer it to actual human beings for further evaluation.

Of course, Google could hire people to check up on their own algorithms and decide on disputes instead of machines. Youtube had $6 BILLION in ad revenue in the last quarter (not year), so they could certainly afford to hire some people. In the end it might even be a profitable investment, as fewer good content is pruned from Youtube for wrong copyright issues, leading to more ad revenue.

Youtube right now seems pretty content with their quasi-monopoly, to their own detriment in my opinion. As unlikely as it may seem that people will create competitors, it can happen, ask mighty MySpace about it.

> Youtube had $6 BILLION in ad revenue in the last quarter (not year), so they could certainly afford to hire some people. In the end it might even be a profitable investment, as fewer good content is pruned from Youtube for wrong copyright issues, leading to more ad revenue.

Who is paying said ad revenue though? Could a large chunk of it come from the same companies/industries who currently enjoy the broken state of YouTube's DMCA process?

Parent comment was also referring to YouTube's AI marking a benign video as 18+. Google is willing to wrongly punish people via excessive/unfair false positives in the interest of trying to be more advertiser friendly. It's just about money.

Well, false positives result in fewer scandals than false negatives here.

So guilty until proven innocent seems like a perfectly reasonable, if very annoying, stance.

It's not reasonable to screw innocent people over.

It's reasonable for a for-profit company that has a monopoly.

No monopoly necessary to make this commercially reasonable stance to take.

(And, there's no monopoly situation here in any case.)

I don't think the laws are so harsh. It seems like YouTube caved in to the music industry interests so that popular artists continue to premiere their videos on YouTube.

And otherwise they'd get sued for hosting copyrighted content, which will result in hefty fines and jail( didn't the US want to get Kim Dotcom from NZ precisely for that?)

They won’t get sued if they follow the DMCA process which is very different from what they are doing.

They were sued [1]. The lawsuit lasted 7 years and ended in a settlement. The terms were not public, but I think it's likely they promised to institute a process that goes above and beyond what the DMCA requires. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

So long as they respond to actual DMCA reports, no. ContentID goes far, far beyond what is required by the DMCA to have safe harbor.

Dotcom got in trouble because he was intentionally hosting infringing content, going so far as to try to hide that material from the copyright owners by making it look like he had taken it down when notified of its presence when in fact he just made the URL that the owners knew about stop working. Employees that went too far and actually took down infringing material got reprimanded.

Go dig up a copy of the indictment. It includes a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other running his site where they talk about all this stuff. It was basically a site whose intent and business model was hosting pirated movies. That you could also use it to host your own photos or whatever was there to try to provide cover.

Does the extent matter that much? Assuming YouTube did nothing to take down copyrighted content, is that better or worse compared to lying about taking down ?

The reason why Google is not accused of hosting copyrighted content is because they somehow managed to sell the fiction that streaming and download are two totally different things. The slightest touch can make that fiction dissipate.

Ehh, Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that the largest holders of copyright have their content libraries available to check against new uploads and apparently no lengths to ensure that public domain content is available for the same purpose.

The public domain doesn’t threaten to sue them.

It ought to.

Who has standing?

The public. It's ours.

Mskes sense, but how does that work?

Can any of us initiate a case and it becomes a class, or?

I'm open to having a conversation about it. What does the space look like between "no the public does not have standing", and "the public has standing individually or as a class"? What are the tradeoffs at those boundaries, and how can we work towards creative solutions that exist in the space between those extremes?

That convo should happen.

I dont believe this in the slightest. Besides, the false-positives which regularily pop up around YouTube claims are not a result of any law, or lobbying. They are the result of googles sloppy implementation of the cliam system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eBB1ZzvFoI

There are disputes over "white noise" videos so it is already as bad as it gets.

Given that white noise is random, a recorded copy of white noise is its own perfect watermark.

Does it depend on seeding that would eventually have tendencies for replication? Or could that be pushed out until practically forever?

If the white noise is based on a random number generator, the pattern would restart after a full cycle.

If the random number generator's period is 2^32 and you use one integer per sample, then at 44 kHz, you would have about a million seconds, or twelve days, before the RNG has gone through a full period.

Most RNGs have periods much higher than this. xorshift128 has a period of 2^128-1 and the Mersenne Twister's period is 2^19937-1.

So you could push it out until practically forever.

So you could push it out until practically forever.

But, there will still be repeated sections.

Knowing nothing of the YouTube algorithm, I’d still wager it’ll take you longer than the lifetime of the copyright to produce conflicting noise works.

Depends on how lossy the compression is. Your watermark becomes compression artefacts instead.

Most audio codecs by now use perceptual noise substitution, which potentially substitutes in identical noise (I think it just EQs it?).

no, the mp3 codec actually deletes humanly inaudible portions of the frequency spectrum to reduce storage, this data isn't recoverd or replaced or referred when played back again, it's lost information. what is removed is based on human perception limits for audio

He is referring to modern codecs, not MP3. MP3 isn't widely used anymore.

Modern codecs don't encode noise - they remove it during decoding and then add back artificial "comfort noise" when decoding, e.g. for film grain or background noise in voice calls.

Got a source for the current usage of MP3?

What services do you know of that use MP3?

Virtually every podcast ever.

YouTube itself seems to rely more on webm for audio. That seems to be a container for Opus or Vorbis formats.

Vorbis and Opus themselves are lossy encoders (Ogg Vorbis).

> Virtually every podcast ever.

Apple Podcasts are AAC. Spotify are Ogg Vorbis. That probably covers 90% of the market right there.

The original question was whether or not audio could be fingerprinted from white noise, or if compression would obscure that fingerprint. The original context was YouTube videos specifically.

Sufficient to support the latter assertion was that lossy compression is frequently used.

YouTube's webm does in fact use lossy compression as noted. MP3 is, I assert, still significantly used in multiple contexts, including many podcast sites. I haven't specifically surveyed those, and don't use Apple Podcasts myself (never bought into the ecosystem, though as it happens, this specific response is coming from a MacOS system). I do make heavy use of tools such as youtube-dl and mpv, and find that those do in fact frequently find and extract mp3 audio from various sources, including podcasts and IIRC Soundcloud.

Verification is as simple as:

    youtube-dl -F <URL>

The '-F' flag will list available downloadable formats.

E.g.:

   $ youtube-dl -F 'https://soundcloud.com/danyork/tdyr-362-thoughts-on-wordpress'
   [soundcloud] danyork/tdyr-362-thoughts-on-wordpress: Downloading info JSON
   [soundcloud] None: Downloading webpage
   [soundcloud] None: Downloading webpage
   [soundcloud] danyork/tdyr-362-thoughts-on-wordpress: Downloading info JSON
   [soundcloud] 637919466: Downloading JSON metadata
   [soundcloud] 637919466: Downloading JSON metadata
   [soundcloud] 637919466: Downloading JSON metadata
   [info] Available formats for 637919466:
   format code   extension  resolution note
   hls_opus_64   opus       audio only audio@ 64k
   hls_mp3_128   mp3        audio only audio@128k
   http_mp3_128  mp3        audio only audio@128k (best)

Pedants are my fourth favourite people, but only during Lent on leap years, prior to Vespers, during a blue moon.

Re: opus

'Opus (audio format) - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Opus_(audio_format) CELT includes both spectral replication and noise generation, similar to AAC's SBR and PNS'

Which would mean that at least some of the white noise signature of an opus-encoded audio track would be ... a compression or encoding artefact.

Does opus have a notion of bitrates similar to mp3 or ogg vorbis? If so, the white noise would vary among bitrates.

Podcasts are pretty niche. Almost all codec use these days is from streaming services or video/phone calls - YouTube, Spotify, WhatsApp, etc. None of those use MP3.

What codecs do those applications use?

How do they preserve or modify white noise?

You haven't named any lossy stream codecs that do restore white noise, so i will not consider you a reliable source of info.

> Another notable addition in this version of the AAC standard is Perceptual Noise Substitution (PNS). In that regard, the AAC profiles (AAC-LC, AAC Main and AAC-SSR profiles) are combined with perceptual noise substitution and are defined in the MPEG-4 audio standard as Audio Object Types.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

If you take 30 seconds of white noise and look for it in 2h long generated output I expect that you can find similar 30 seconds in whole 2h.

Because if you use 30sec of someones song you have to pay up and youtube is enforcing that.

Now if you will take another 2h video cut it into pieces and start searching for similar patterns in other 2h video I expect you will find some matching ones.

If you're comparing sample-for-sample, maybe. But that's not what is performed by music identification algorithms - it would be both slow (to the point of being unusable) and inaccurate (because of re-encoding, etc). Instead they rely on different kinds of dimensionality reduction that match the way we perceive music, so they only compare smaller amounts of data to get more perceptually relevant matches. The Shazam fingerprinting algorithm is the best known but there are others.

So if you submit white noise to a copyright database, it could match different white noise recordings.

Even if they were the case, this further shows how limited and dumb (i.e. not 'smart') YouTube's copyright voilation detection system is.

You (probably) can't copyright white noise because US copyright requires authorship. So in the same way that you can't copyright a phonebook's alphabetical list of numbers, you can't copyright random numbers rendered as sound, unless you did something else unique to it to exert authorship. It's just not something protected by copyright law. So even copying someone else's exact white noise sample is probably just fine.

The problem is that YouTube's system can only apply simple content matching rules and it counts any sufficiently long content match as a violation with no consideration of the work or context of use. Thats not how copyright law works. Copyright is a complicated system with all sorts of issues like fair use, derivative works, public domain, and works that don't qualify for protection. It's not a database query.

I don't think it's hit YouTube, but there are people and/or bots enforcing a copyright on silence:

https://www.youredm.com/2015/11/28/soundcloud-finally-goes-t...

What would be worse: whoever holding the rights to John Cage’s “4’33” filing complaints against movies without background music, claiming that they have copyrighted background music.

> which is kind of bad, because now the support team must log-in with a Google account to YouTube in order to see the harmless but useful video.

Not only this, but in the EU* it requires verifying your age with a credit card or ID photo: https://i.imgur.com/gP20dXi.png

Since you van have a credit card when you are 13 yo, the check is more or less useless.

It's it effectively doxxing people under 13? That's a concerning implication if I'm understanding this correctly.

Honestly, the only way things will change is through grass roots abuse of the system like this. You have to force them to change.

Sounds like good material for a Defcon talk: "How I Own A Quarter of Content on YouTube"

You have YouTube's content rating system backwards.

It's not "racey content gets marked special" with "suitable for children" being a catch-all category.

YouTube's "content developed for children", is the special case. It's explicitly content meant for and marketed to children, or content that children would be particularly attracted to, like nature documentaries.

All other content should be marked "not intended for children", even if it's not "adult"--aka restricted to 18+--content.

This is stated pretty clearly in YouTube's documentation. They have a link to it in a contextual pop-up right next to the form field asking you to self-rate the video.

This was the email I got:

> We wanted to let you know that our team has reviewed your content and we don't think it's in line with our Community Guidelines. As a result, we've age-restricted the following content:

> Video: Komoot Bug

> We haven't applied a strike to your channel, and your content is still live for some users on YouTube. Keep reading for more details on what this means and steps you can take if you'd like to appeal this decision.

> What "age-restricted" means

> We age-restrict content when we don't think it's suitable for younger audiences. This means it will not be visible to users who are logged out, are under 18 years of age, or have Restricted Mode enabled. It also won't be eligible for ads. Learn more about age restrictions.

When I click on appeal I get a popup titled "Submit an appeal" with the body text of "Appealing this violation is not available"

----

EDIT: Ah. I see. I actually did set it to "Is made for kids" thinking that this means that through this option I express that it does have no content which would be against the community guidelines.

I've now changed it to "Not made for kids" but also "Not age restricted".

Thanks for pointing this out.

>or content that children would be particularly attracted to, like nature documentaries.

maybe times have changed, but you could not pay me to sit through a nature documentary back when I was 8.

nature content is a very weird gray area of content in terms of age ratings. It's technically just, well, nature. But then there can definitely be "just nature" content you don't want a kid to see.

Unless they've changed this you can get around this by sending the 'embedded' link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/<videoid> instead of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<videoid>.

http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

TL;DR copyright becomes absurd surprisingly fast when you have a large population, widely-available authoring/recording tools, and a way to store/search all of them, indefinitely. Like, indefensible absurd.

That was a good read. Thanks for sharing it.

This is a fantastic story. Thank you for the link.

> Or maybe they just recognize that their AI is causing more harm than good.

Google recognizes that these flaws in their AI aren't worth caring about. Google doesn't have any mission or obligation to help the world share videos. Google cares about Google's profits. And they've found that the expedient way to do that is just let the AI be overzealous with rejecting, because the cost of a false positive is infinitesimally tiny and the cost of a false negative (real copyright violation) is so much higher.

How do we fix this? Competition. We need a Google/Youtube competitor so that users will choose the platform that does copyright recognition better.

What if someone exploited this to such an extent that Google could no longer ignore the issue? All someone needs to do is write an open source library that automates this. Almost like exposing a security flaw to the public to force the company to fix it. Sure it would enable bad actors but it would subvert them in the long run. I feel this may be the only way to force the company's hand as an individual.

I sympathise with her. I had a copyright claim on one of my YouTube videos (I’m totally small potatoes, handful of vids with dozens of views).

I made a video of myself playing my own unique interpretation of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats on piano. https://youtu.be/ZNfMZ6g9YWo

I got a copyright violation notice shortly after posting it, by some random Latin American music company. It wasn’t clear if it was legit or not, it could have been some holding company of song rights or some failure of the AI.

I disputed the claim, saying I used no recorded material, it was entirely my own styling on the song including ragtime and stride piano influences.

Frankly I’m not even sure how copyright works on covers, particularly if style is quite different.

The company never responded in the 30 day period so the copyright claim was removed.

My channel is so small that I probably would have just removed the video. I’m not even close to the levels that are required for monetisation (1000 subscribers and 4000 cumulative view hours).

But it was a bit surprising how quickly it was claimed that I violated someone’s copyright.

Covers of songs, even if the covers use completely new styles are protected by copyright law and therefore can risk being claimed by YouTube's system:

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...

I guess you need to make it a parody to be in the clear?

I'm guessing the next Weird Al has already been disillusioned with the copyright ban hammer.

Weird Al himself was well aware of this issue, and famously would only parody songs after receiving permission from the authors.

Permission from the authors is unfortunately different from permission by the copyright holders. IIRC Weird Al did it more for goodwill than legality.

> Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it’s important to maintain the relationships that he’s built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties.

https://www.weirdal.com/archives/faq/

Didn’t even need the next Weird Al. Al’s own YouTube videos were copyright claimed by his own label for violating copyright.

Not necessarily.... The Posterchild for parody is 2 Live Crew Pretty Woman. Which includes samples of the original Oh, Pretty Woman. Youtube videos get flagged for 10 seconds of a song snippet all the time.

After the Campbell v Acuff-Rose Supreme Court decision, 2 Live Crew licensed the song from Acuff-Rose music. (which is what they tried to do in the first place).

Parody is a fair use defense, so you have to go through a lawsuit to be able to assert it.

Not an expert, but I've been learning a lil about this lately. Royalties for performances of someone else's song are paid to the writers of the words and the music. The melody and words can be copyrighted, not the chords or style. So you can use the chords of an existing song and give it new melody and words, and it is your own song. Style has nothing to do it.

I love this quote from the classic The Manual: How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way by KLF:

...the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

Learning about the difference between a "groove", a "melody" and a song has been a wonderful rabbit hole to go down. Thanks!

I'd love to know if (the downvoters think) that has factual errors. I'm a jazz musician who will soon be releasing music online—some my compositions, some not—and planning to pay license fees etc. Thanks—I'm a totally at a loss what could have made people downvote it!

I think the problem with that post is that race (black and white people) are unnecessarily brought into it. I'm sure that musicians of all races would want this issue addressed. Making it about race is extremely ridiculous.

Ohhhh ok thank you!

The book is from the UK, I'm in Australia, it didn't seem a ridiculous thing to say to either of us. Maybe the problem was...US sensitivities. I, like I believe the KLF also, am white and have dedicated most of my life to the music of "blacks of African descent". The issue is how much more important groove is in black music, and how copyright is in origin a white thing. Changing copyright would no doubt be a massive, heroic, lifelong task. Like the way it took Douglas Nicholls[0] 30 years work to remove a racist sentence and a bit from the Australian constitution! I just don't hear calling for a hero here as a negative thing at all, the way evidently some people do.

Did any black people have a problem with the quote? I am curious.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26980084

p.s. wow, it's you! I checked out your github and website (crucialflow) a few months ago, hehe small world. proof: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153386

Groove is just as important to many non-black people, so saying that only black people would care about this is annoying me. Anyway, I don't have the ability to downvote things, I can only speak for why I didn't like the phrasing.

Small world I guess, I used to be a random nobody, I guess now people have something to recognize me by. I also release music under the name Dream Scatter by the way.

> saying that only black people would care about this is annoying me.

..But I think no-one said "only black people would care about this".

Like also I think no-one said "We need black people to change this copyright system" or "this is an issue between black and white people".

I'm not sure the quote is 100% serious, if they really thought things can or will be changed in their suggested way. But if I think about it, which I didn't until people said stuff like "Making it about race is extremely ridiculous."—it just seemed a commendable but unremarkable sentiment, one I never dreamed anyone could have a problem with—suggesting a black lawyer seems apt, for reasons something to do with what could be called self-determination. It would be more awesome and appropriate if black people righted the historic wrong, than if white people did it for them because poor black people can't do it on their own. Etc.

Ok, thanks, I think I learnt something about what your and other peoples' problem was/is, and I hope you learnt something about "my side", where what is extremely ridiculous is someone having problems with the noble desire expressed in that quote. But I guess it's hard here where we don't know each other at all, and don't know about what it seems are the unshared assumptions and beliefs that made my quoting a few lines on fixing copyright from a classic book from the 1980s into something extremely ridiculous and annoying in 2021. ..Ok thanks again.

Suggesting that the KLF are racist is pretty ridiculous!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_KLF

That doesn't have anything to do with black or white people. We don't need black people to change this copyright system, just people in general who want to make sure that musicians get paid. Saying this is an issue between black and white people is extremely ridiculous.

same here.

i am a big fan of film music. i made a small piano reduction of a favorite piece and uploaded it to youtube. i wasn't even mad when i saw the copyright claim within hours, since i run no ads.

i was however baffled and somewhat proud that my efforts were not in vain, and that the algorithm thought my poor interpretation was close to the real thing.

i do not defend the algorithm though.

You are not allowed to create derivative works from another person's creation, regardless of whether you are making money from it. You can't go and make a Shrek III flick, for example, or write a book set in the Harry Potter universe. Likewise, you can't adapt music from a film (IANAL, there are things like fair use, but in general this holds).

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

> You are not allowed to create (free) derivative works

I think putting such constraints on creative work is a cultural disaster.

Then your beef is with the United States, not with Google.

I think misappropriating someone else's work to make a buck is a cultural disaster, but then I work for a living and expect to get paid, so what do I know? Fair Use does exist to provide an avenue for the reuse of the work of others for criticism, parody, and the like., but straight up lifting someone else's work and using it to your own ends, even if noncommercial, is wrong.

Explain why it's wrong when there's no money involved (e.g. fan-fiction and similar works).

Even if there's no money involved that can still damage the market for the work it derives from. It's one thing if the derivative work consists of original characters in the same setting, or existing characters but in a what-if scenario, but as soon as you start trying to write derivative works in the same vein as the original then you're damaging the original author's ability to market his existing work, and to continue that work himself. You are, in a very real sense, taking something that isn't yours.

That's great if you ignore the fact that almost all our ideas are borrowed. Copyrights work against the movement of ideas - the ground culture springs from. It is artificial scarcity, like DRM, unnatural in the domain of information.

> as soon as you start trying to write derivative works in the same vein as the original then you're damaging the original author's ability to market his existing work

That seems ridiculous. How would expanding literature hurt it? It would be like free PR for the original. Art (tales, legends, stories, music and potry) used to be orally transmitted, we forgot that too, with every retelling it was reinterpreted and adapted. Even Tolkien didn't invent the elves and Rowling didn't invent sorcery.

depends on the derivative. I can't make a story about hogwarts. But I can make a story about a girl with a scar who gets enrolled in a magical academy. And I probably just described 20 works with that description. But I think the legal definition of "derivative work" isn't that loose.

The more gray areas for derivative work is stuff like fan art, translations, and remixes. All are technically in the area to be copyright'd, but at the same time it also helps publishers in essentially being free, natural advertisement.

I don't get why you're confused. You violated copyright and got a legitimate claim against you.

A really great video (if you're willing to spend the better part of an hour watching it) about this is YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is.[1] by Tom Scott.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

DMCA is bad but the undisputable claim and three strike systems is all of Google own doing

The video covers this aspect. Yes, the current system is bad, but it replaces a scary letter demanding cease and desists plus high damage payments and a resolution between extremely expensive lawyers. It surely is not optimal, but I doubt your common YouTuber could afford to fight claims in court.

That's a US-specific issue. Yet people all over the world are affected by ContentID (though at least in the EU AFAIK you can now get a third party to mediate this dispute).

DMCA replaces the scary letters. YouTube only responsibility is to collect claims and counterclaims. Common YouTubers can just accept the claim and mute content. Youtuber wanting a fight or that know the other party would never risk their frivolous challenge to go to court with the threat of perjury hanging on their head have a right to counterclaim and put the ball in the other party field.

YouTube instead decide to act as jury and will allow claimant to counter the counterclaim, and here lies the crux of the issue.

YouTube isn't protecting poor youtubers anymore than what DMCA already allows; YouTube is instead actively removing youtuber right to challenge the claim, putting all the power in the claimant, far above what DMCA mandates or requires.

And that decision to act as jury and judge and final unappealable authority in the claim process lies squarely on YouTube shoulders.

I don't think the DMCA replaces the scary letters. The scary letters existed because they were more effective than the DMCA. Threatening to sue someone is always and always has been totally an option. The reason scary letters don't get sent right now is because it's easier to just have Youtube remove the video.

If that went away the next easiest option (scary letters) would happen again. DMCA or not.

IMO the biggest issue with all this is the lack of a suitable appeals process, handled by humans.

Would such a process be expensive? Yes, but you can't have it both ways, enabling copyright holders to lodge spurious claims at will, and not allow content creators - who the entire platform is built on! - to disclaim them.

Would such a process be expensive? Yes, of course - but YouTube can very well afford it.

Perhaps the copyright holder should have to pay for a human review, where the content creator agrees to pay the cost if it turns out to indeed be a true copyright infringement.

This would get rid of all bots and most false claims

That would be too much in favor of the little guy, I'm afraid, and probably doesn't align well with preexisting deals with the music industry.

If the little guy is indeed little and is earning little or none from their content, then is the copyright holder being harmed? Or is the copyrighted material being promoted, thereby increasing the potential value of that original material?

I think what should happen is this:

Step 1: Someone files a copyright claim (or perhaps this is done automatically). This is free.

Step 2: Someone disputes the claim. This is also free, and automatically restores the video.

Step 3: The filer can re-submit the claim but they have to post a bond for the price of a professional manual review by a trained copyright lawyer; maybe $1000.

Step 4: If the video owner can re-dispute the claim; to do so they also have to post a bond for the price of a professional manual review. The trained copyright lawyer comes to a conclusion; whoever "wins" the ruling gets their money back, and the other person pays for the whole thing.

If the video owner doesn't go on to step 4, obviously the copyright claimant gets their money back.

Would this not allow companies with deep pockets to continue to abuse the smaller channels who might not have $1000 lying around to put in escrow on the off chance of losing the $1000 just because some lawyer somewhere made a bad decision? Or they just get their video removed because they dont have $1000 to begin with.

Let's not let the best be the enemy of the good. Right now 1) companies with deep pockets can easily false claims with very little consequences 2) small channels basically have no recourse.

Obviously the whole system is predicated on the lawyers being fair: but assuming the lawyers usually DTRT, then 1) there will be consequences for false claims, resulting in far fewer of them and 2) small channels can get a real human to look at their claims.

No situation is perfect, but I'm pretty sure it would be better.

It would also create an arbitrage opportunity for investors who could inspect the copyright situation and put up the $1000 and collect at the end. The system would work well.

I'm pretty sure the process can't have payment stipulations like that.

That's sort of OK for an operating business, but many creators don't have $1000 sitting around for every video they upload.

I think the biggest issue is that the burden of proof and all the risk is on the person who's video is being claimed. False DMCA claims are free, practically riskless, and require no evidence.

> False DMCA claims are free, practically riskless, and require no evidence.

This is the crux of the issue. The DMCA needs to be amended so that filing an incorrect claim comes with some risk.

Copyright enforcement should be on the copyright holders. YouTube shouldn’t have to build AI to scan for copyrighted material. Copyright holders need to a person verify all copyright claims and be liable for the opposite exact same amount of damages that would be rewarded for legitimate copyright claim.

Talk to the RIAA etc.

They seem to believe that only their own sanctioned releases should be allowed, and that they should all be paywalled so that every view is paid for.

Or we could fight the whole damn robber baron system and return to something resembling common sense.

Actually, I have a better solution...

Disallow the uploading of all content held by RIAA/MPAA-affiliated companies from the likes of YouTube, even if the owners thereof wish it to be there. Fuck them. Let them go build their own platform if they think their work is so god damn awesome. Save YouTube/et al. for works created by, well... You.

There is actually one more step available, even after the copyright strike: you submit your contact details and YT clears the strike and it’s up to the claimant to then issue proceeding against you outside of YT.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684

I have used it in the past and it works.

If it is so simple why are there content creators losing their channels over merit less claims?

I don’t know - are they submitting counter-claims? All I know is it worked for me and my channel although I was never at the point of having more than one strike.

> and YT clears the strike

there's the rub .. in the OP's example, the strike wasn't cleared

As I understand it from her video, she did not get a copyright strike yet, and she also did not complete the appeals process because she did not want to submit her contact details to strangers.

This exact thing has happened to most YT creators at this point. It's just part of doing business on YT. Some small section (<10%?) get three "copyright" strikes (nothing to do with actual copyright, of course, as Google isn't the judge of that), and get taken down, and need to start a new channel from scratch. It's what we all get for using a free video streaming service to distribute our content.

I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue, not a lack of cost meaning we aren't deserving of a good experience.

Look at Peertube or other free as in freedom options.

> I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue,

I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale. Currently, about 5000 videos are uploaded to YT every minute. If just 0.1% of them have any potential copyright issues, that's 5 potentially complex cases per minute or 7200 per day.

No amount of human review will be able to decide this in a timely manner. The piano teacher's case is just the simplest of scenarios and you'd have to expect the vast majority being "fair use" cases, which are incredibly hard to decide.

Free an in freedom ultimately results in users being sued directly (see torrent networks) and I'm not at all convinced that that's any better.

7200 cases a day is most definitely not too much for a human review.

It is because people are routinely violating copyright in much larger amounts, yet nobody is bothering to go after them. Compare with the way the laws about audio and video cassettes ended up.

If they followed the DMCA instead of their own system it would scale just fine.

It would scale because under the DMCA system the site is not responsible for finding violations. That is up to the copyright owners.

All the site has to do is:

1. Take down alleged infringing content when someone claiming to be the copyright owner files a take-down notice.

2. Put the content back when whoever uploaded it files a counter-notice.

3. Tell the former that if they want the content taken down again, sue the latter. The site is now in the DMCA safe harbor.

All the site has to scale up to handle is dealing with notices and counter-notices. For that, all they need to do is check that all the required fields in the forms are filled out. This does not require anyone with any legal training--it is just checking things like they have identified themselves, described what content they want taken down/put back up, stated a reason for their belief that this action should be taken, and similar things.

You could train in an afternoon anyone who can read at a pre-high school level to handle this. 20 people in a normal shift could handle those 7200 cases per day.

Heck, you could even speed that up if you wanted by doing even less review on the notices. There aren't really any legal consequences to the site if they accept a notice that wasn't quite right. It is only the counter-notice that needs a little scrutiny. You want to make sure everything is correctly filled out in that, because it is the counter-notice that gives you the safe harbor.

I mean that's basically how it works right now:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684?hl=en&ref_...

> > I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue,

> I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale.

Do you think that the scale of YT is achieved without centralization?

Given the reality that a lack of a centralizing force like YT would just shift copyright adjudication to actual courts and be more expensive and higher stakes for all involved and probably have a similar error rate and bad actors like Prenda, I’d agree that a relatively benignly uncaring Corp without access to police and prisons is better than the court route.

> 7200 per day

Let's say it takes 5 minutes to properly adjudicate a dispute. 5 minutes allows 20 per person-hour. An 8 hour shift could resolve 160 reviews. 7200 / 160 = 45 shifts per day to review all of the hypothetical copyright issues. I don't think that's required, and the number of requested reviews is going to be some fraction of that. Requiring google to spread out under 50 shifts over a 24 period in order to provide a fair review so that they may bring in billions of dollars a year from youtube doesn't seem like a large ask. This is call-center-esque work and even done in the US or Western Europe would be very cheap, particularly as it can avoid otherwise more cumbersome regulatory hurdles.

> Let's say it takes 5 minutes to properly adjudicate a dispute.

That's highly unrealistic, but review alone would take at least twice as long, since the average video length is about 12 minutes.

How would you find out in just 5 minutes whether a monetization claim is justified? Not every case is as clear as the piano teacher's case. Keep in mind that this isn't a DMCA takedown request either - it's about a party that claims the content in order to redirect the revenue.

So you seriously claim that on average you can find out in just 5 minutes whether one of the 6 license types [0] applies and the claimant actually has a case? If it was that easy, I doubt that court cases like [1] would take years. And that's assuming all the information is already at hand so no further communication with either party is required...

[0] https://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights

[1] https://completemusicupdate.com/article/song-theft-dispute-o...

You don't need to review the whole video, the accusing side should provide the exact time at which the alleged violation happens.

> "fair use" cases, which are incredibly hard to decide.

Only a judge acting in a court of law can decide if something is fair use. All else is speculation.

is worried about all the time she’s putting in to create content being usurped by a few bad actors

Is this where we must point out that the entire ContentID system was designed to protect bad actors, because it was written by them?

One could argue that the DMCA was largely written by bad actors. Everything else flows downhill from there.

The “western” world lost a once-in-a-thousand-years chance to change how copyright works at a fundamental level, when the internet started getting traction. We’re now forever beholden to the whims of parasitical “industries”.

Here are the “copyright owners” as displayed to the pianist in YouTube’s interface:

- APRA_CS

- ECAD_CS

- SOCAN

- VCPMC_CS

APRA is Australia & NZ, ECAD is Brazil, SOCAN is Canada, VCPMC is Vietnam.

APRA: Australasian Performing Right Association

ECAD: Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição

SOCAN: Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada

VCPMC: Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright

I went digging. APRA = Australasian Performing Right Association Limited ECAD = Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição SOCAN = Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada VCPMC = Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright

CS stands for collections society. In another age CS would stand for the Mafia.

All but ECAD were found from here: https://www.cisac.org/

These collection societies are actually the opposite of the mafia.

They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).

They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).

AIUI there collection societies are collectives of publishers and look out for the people who own the publishing companies, they're not making sure the publishing companies act fairly and justly, they're making sure they sue people who are too small to defend themselves in order to boost the collections in order to support the publishing company owners.

Maybe I'm wrong ... counter evidence welcomed.

Something odd is happening here. Perhaps I can offer a piece of insight.

APRA is the Australian music copyright organisation (https://www.apraamcos.com.au/)

ECAD is the Brazillian version.

VCPMC is the Vietnamese equivalent.

Not sure about the others, but basically these are the people with whom a composer registers their work. These organisations work together by forwarding royalties collected within each territory to their rightful owners.

I am a member of APRA and very much doubt that someone got away with registering a Beethoven work as their own.

Very curious indeed. I have no explanation.

[Edit] You are only meant to register your work in one territory, so it is odd that this 'work' would be registered in four of them.

> I am a member of APRA and very much doubt that someone got away with registering a Beethoven work as their own.

I've yet to hear of one of these nationwide registries vetting any of the work that gets submitted to them for novelty or whatever. That would be too much like doing due diligence.

Wow. So if a public domain piece of music (which does not have a copyright) is played by someone and recorded (which does have a copyright) the Google AI has no way to know if you're reproducing the the public domain music (which you are allowed to do) or reproducing the reproduction of someone playing a piece of public domain music (which you're not allowed to do).

Strange, that nobody at Google seems to have heard of Beethoven.

>“copyright strike” on her account, wherein three such strikes would mean permanent closure of the account

I think the three copyright strikes have to take place within 90 days. Unless I am confusing community guidelines strikes with copyright strikes.

Even if that piece was copyright, is it a copyright violation to play it yourself and publish it?

Potentially, yes. There are different types of licences [0] and depending on your use of copyrighted material, it may require a license to publish it legally.

[0] https://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights

Yes. Because music is both composed and performed, it has three primary copyright scenarios.

1. Print rights protect sheet music etc. from being copied.

2. Performance rights control whether your composed music can be performed.

3. Mechanical rights control whether your performance can be copied (onto mp3 say). Also related to these are "synchronization" issues and licenses.

It seems that this entire fiasco can be fixed by simply having a media streaming platform which is hosted in a jurisdiction which doesn't recognize 'intellectual' property.

Why has no such thing emerged?

Such a jurisdiction does not exist. See Berne Convention, Rome Convention/PPPPBO, TRIPS, WCT, WPPT.

Well, presumably one will emerge at some point.

I'm just trying to look at the root problem here and how to overcome it.

ISIL? I guess when you have a culture that totally shuns the existing international framework they're unlikely to be able to or interested in competing with youtube.

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