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Comment by mistercool | Hacker News Reader

> So, until the 30-day appeal period (appeals are to the claimant!) expires, some copyright troll is making money off of ads running on our new production of a public domain opera.

Can someone explain how the copyright trolls are able to steal the ad revenue? Do they upload a different video with the "copyrighted" material, or make money off of the one uploaded by the defendant?

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The troll files a copyright claim against the PD post, then gets the ad revenue from the PD post rather than the post's author.

Since there's no penalty for the troll, and possible upside, why not do if you have no ethics anyway?

Does the ad revenue go to some sort of an escrow until the claim is settled? Otherwise this doesn't seem to make any sense (??)

If Youtube cared they would do something like this excellent idea.

Yes it does, this is one of the recent changes to the system.

Filing the copyright claim requires identifying information from the claimant. If the ad revenue is valuable enough, the posting creator should have a decent case for fraud.

But a few thousand bucks isn't enough to sue, while a robot can mass collect a few thousand bucks from a bunch of victims at one time.

The latter. If a creator uses copyrighted (or allegedly copyrighted) material, ad revenue goes to the copyright owner.

> to the copyright owner

The copyright claimant, which may or may not actually own any such right.

Example: copyright trolls claiming videos that use public domain NASA footage.

Yeah that was implicit in the "allegedly" part.

They make money off the one uploaded and inappropriately claimed until they release the claim (and the money) or decline the counter-claim. They also have an option to claim a strike against the flagged work.

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