“I just got a copyright claim for *TYPING ON MY KEYBOARD*”
twitter.com
twitter.com
The claimant is one of many copyright trolls who try to get as many copyright claims as possible.
Once the claim hits, they are able to run their ads on the video get the revenue from it. Once the dispute is settled, they keep the ad money and receive no negative consequence.
The only solution I've found is "don't engage". It doesn't change anything, but at least I'm not the one getting burnt.
It basically says "Dear Youtube, if someone claims copyright you can't be liable if you immediately comply with the claim. However, if you don't, there is no bounds on how much you can be slapped for content posted on your platform."
It creates powerful incentive to err on the side of claimant, however ridiculous the claim is.
So if you are looking for somebody responsible for this, find politicians responsible for getting this passed and forever breaking Internet for everybody.
The DMCA, at least as it's written, is somewhat equitable: if I think you post something of mine, I can go to a lawyer in good faith to file a notice to get it removed, you can go to your lawyer and have it restored, and then we hash it out in court without the video provider needing to be involved for the duration of the case. With YouTube, it's YT throwing up more roadblocks in my way (as the uploader) should you start sniffing around. Plus, you can claim copyright on my work in a scalable, automated way, without needing to verify individual works, and that last part is where all the abuse of the system happens.
Google has absolutely no intention of fixing this claims process; doing so would break the armistice they agreed to with Viacom more than a decade ago, since Google wasn't complying with the DMCA.
It's kind of bizarre to suggest otherwise.
DMCA merely requires a timely takedown in response to an active report of infringement. And if the creator counter-claims and says "nope, I'm not infringing", the DMCA instructs the hosting service to put the content back up and guarantees the hosting service will not be liable if a court later finds the content infringing.
Google does not need to make any kind of judgment here; they can just say "hey DMCA claimer, the content creator says they're not infringing, so we're putting their content back up; if you don't agree with that, you can sue the content creator, and we'll comply with whatever court order comes from that."
But Google has decided to become judge, jury, and copyright-striker without any legal obligation to do so. Their current "solution" cost them way more money to implement than simply complying with the DMCA takedown process would cost. But I'm sure the buddy-buddy relationship they got with the music labels and movie studios in return for ContentID (and Google's hostile attitude toward small creators) has more than made up for it.
The DMCA has a lot of bad parts to it (the anti-circumvention provisions come to mind), but the takedown process is actually not bad. For the record this is all it is:
1. Copyright holder notices content they think is infringing and files takedown notice with the hosting provider.
2. Hosting provider takes content down, and notifies content creator.
3. Content creator can file a counter-claim attesting that they do not believe their creation is infringing.
4. Hosting provider puts content back up, and notifies the original claimaint.
5. Claimant can decide to sue the content creator if they still believe they have a case. The hosting provider is left alone.
And that's how it should be! People should be responsible for the things they post. Neutral hosting services should not be. The alternative to this takedown process would be that the copyright holder would have to go to court for every single case of infringement, which would not only be prohibitively expensive, but would clog up the court system. I'll bet that most DMCA takedowns never even make it to step #5. Either the content "creator" admits that they are indeed infringing, and leaves the content down, or the original claimant decides to drop the issue after receiving a counter-claim. It's surely not a perfect system, but I think it's better than making everyone reach for a formal lawsuit as their first and only option.
It's more than that. This bending over backwards is the only reason YouTube still exists. Until recently, the main value of YouTube to anyone was free music. YouTube was built on copyright infringement. Eventually, it faced a choice: clean house and lose the only thing that kept users regularly coming back, or go bankrupt trying to pay for royalties. They found a third way - settling and bending over backwards to funnel money to big media companies.
Perhaps today, YouTube could survive on "original content" alone - there are more options for music, and vlogosphere became a thing general population is very much into. But that would be still an extremely risky move for Google: streamers and vloggers can easily move to another service, but there's only one place on the Internet that can legitimately stream all the mainstream music, for free (with ads). It's still their only true competitive advantage.
This is not DMCA. I’m almost certain from the screenshots that the video was flagged by YouTube’s incredibly broken content ID system. Once flagged the content creator can appeal, but on appeal it is the supposed copyright holder who gets to decide whether their claim is valid, the content creator has no say, and no further recourse.
It’s an incredibly unjust system, plagued by trolls, but I don’t think it’s caused by DMCA.
IANAL, etc
> Viacom said it was not seeking damages for any actions since Google put in its filtering system, known as content ID, in early 2008.
It's not DMCA, but Viacom basically said "we won't sue you for damages since you've start scanning all videos and taking down our copyrighted content". Obviously other media giants weren't going to let Viacom be the only one with access to this profit machine, so now pretty much all global media giants have access to Content ID.
DMCA has a proper process where you can appeal properly, and you can't keep sending bogus claims without repercussion. DMCA also allows fair use. And finally, DMCA puts the burden of proof on the claimant. In ContentID, however there is no burden of proof, and claimants can deny disputes without mediation.
see
> If the claim is disputed by the uploader then the claimant can accept/reject that dispute. The uploader then has the chance to appeal; if they do so then the claimant has to either release the claim or escalate to a DMCA takedown. Of course if it gets to that point then the video is coming down and no one will be making money.
has any major company ever faced meaningful consequences for this? A handful of copyright trolls have been busted, but the MPA/RIAA send false DMCA notices all the time. Sometimes they're just incompetent (https://torrentfreak.com/all-dmca-notices-filed-against-torr...) but companies often very willfully abuse the DMCA to silence criticism yet not one of them seems to have been held accountable for it.
I did not say this claim is DMCA.
I said this situation is a result of DMCA, the law.
Basically, why deal with DMCA when you can just summarily take stuff down or demonetize even without any DMCA claim.
I am pretty sure without DMCA and other similar, made to order laws Google would not bother taking stuff down or building any kind of AI to do this. Because, you know, it costs. And makes people post less content.
So yes, this is result of DMCA.
No, its a result of bog-standsrd copyright infringement claims (the DMCA safe harbor weakened those against hosts generally, but then claims made in the massive Viacom suit—which, before it was settled, resulted on Google being forced to turn over the entire viewing history of YouTube to Viacom—and others involved YouTube being outside the scope of the DMCA safe harbor.)
(Other than "it's the easiest thing to do and they can get away with it")
So you can confirm that you did lose ad revenue because of the claim and really are just stuck until somebody steps in and reverses it? Or is it as described in the YT terms linked in another comment?
If yes to the former, that's horrifying.
I've heard countless horror stories of creators ending up in Content ID hell and losing huge amounts of revenue. Whatever systems YouTube has to try to make this work, they obviously don't, not in practice, and real people are being hurt by copyright trolls like this one.
One thing I have no recourse for is that there are now incredibly intrusive pre-roll ads running on the video and annoying my viewers, where there shouldn't be any. No amount of escrow is going to make up for that problem.
What you can do is release your content as music (e.g. your channel intro music or similar) through a music distributor that offers Content ID services, and claim it on yourself. Then it becomes a revenue share, so instead of stealing 100% of your revenue, a fraudulent claim only takes 50%. This is, no joke, legitimately a thing people have done.
I see in a sibling comment/reply that you say you weren't monetizing your videos, and that now there are pre-roll ads on them that you don't want, and there's no way to undo that fact right now. I agree those are bad things, but those issues are separate from the one to which you are replying, which is about who gets the monetization revenue that accrues during a dispute.
https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/respond-to-co...
>Monetization during Content ID disputes is enabled when both the video creator and the Content ID claimant want to monetize the video. Throughout the dispute process, we'll hold the revenue separately and, once the dispute is resolved, we'll pay it out to the appropriate party
Or does that only apply if it's content-id and there's some other kind of copyright claim with a different resolution pipeline?
Do all disputes get resolved?
What is the median resolution time?
What is the maximum amount of time a claimant can drag out the resolution process?
Source: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/respond-to-co...
Source: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/respond-to-co...
I seem to recall those being notoriously lax.
The part of the DMCA that requires paying out compensation for knowingly issuing false claims is rarely used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
POSIWOD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- there's no penalty for filing a knowingly-false DMCA takedown notice, aside from getting a judge angry at you for wasting their time (which, generally, is a bad idea)
- there's no penalty for filing multiple takedown notices on the same work, since the uploader would have to spend the time and money to take the claimant to court
But the issue in this case is that there's another four or five steps before you, as the uploader, can make your claim before a magistrate because YouTube has their own process in front of the DMCA. On top of that, YT allows automated scans and takedowns; there's no lawyer-signed letters to show a judge until much later. YouTube only requires you to click a "I own this" checkbox, and does no due diligence (at least not publicly) of the verification video that's uploaded into Content ID. And given the church with which YouTube promotes videos, there's not really much incentive to spend the time and money on a legal fight for a video that's fallen off the recommendation engine's radar.
The only one that might work is if they charged a reasonable fee and only allowed people that had uploaded government issued IDs and accepted liability for their accounts. That might help sufficiently deter bad actors and reduce labor costs to sift through all the garbage.
That is completely ignoring the network effects of everyone being on YouTube. The profitability of an alternate website while YouTube still exists has nothing to do with the profitability of a YouTube without music.
Competition won't change it. All competitor's will behave the same under the law's incentive. It may be hard to believe, but most of the tech companies are pretty rational. If the copyright laws favor normal users more, and have stronger punishment for spurious copyright claims, then the tech companies will implement it.
It's like blaming American Football for being too violent. My opinion is that the rule of the game make rational players behave that way, if they want to win. Basketball and Soccer are less violent because the rules are different. I can imagine a world where systems like content ID and spurious copyright claims are much rarer, if we have better copyright laws that encourages a different set of behaviors.
The laws and policies driving YouTube's ContentID were built when the content owners had YouTube over an existential barrel: had YouTube not come to a solution, they could have sued it into oblivion. The resulting implementation massively over-corrects in that direction. Barring a legal change to de-fang the content owners (or to impose penalties for false copyright claims), nothing changes.
You might even be able to get state or federal justice dept.'s civil division interested. There could be some compensation due, but what you really want is to cover your costs and demand specific performance of YT actively making changes to uphold fair use and stop being an willing instrumentality for copyright trolls.
Of course, wealthy defendants often try to spin the process out as long as possible and then offer a fat settlement right before trial if all else fails.
They also don't have any legal, ethical or moral responsibility to ensure that any one copyright holder gets "their fair share" of the revenue for a particular video. The law already has a provision for the recourse copyright holders have if people use copyrighted material improperly. That's called a DMCA takedown request and it requires certain conditions to be met.
What YouTube has done with the contentid and three-strikes system is to create an extra-judicial system for settling claims of a similar kind to DMCA takedown requests, but without going through the courts. That's their prerogative! But it may or may not be legal for them to do so, especially using the language that they use.
For example something they might get sued for is fraud. These copyright claims that copyright holders are able to make. Are these legal claims via the courts? Or are they YouTube claims made through YouTube? What if YouTube has appropriated too many legal terms for this system?
Imagine that I created a Security as a Service (SaaS) called The Police (tm) and for a small monthly fee you can subscribe to The Police (tm) and if/when you find yourself in some kind of tight spot they'll show up and fix things for you.
It's not hard to imagine that this might not go well, and for similar reasons one could suspect that YouTube using legal-like terms for an entirely private "copyright policing" system they might eventually find themselves on the losing side of a legal challenge. It's really up to what kind of legal theories the plaintiffs could come up with that would put YouTube on the wrong end of the law.
Another counter analogy is imagine that a publisher finds out part of your book is plagiarized and they decide to give all your royalties to the person who you plagiarized without a court order to do so. A person might call that theft.
That's 17 U.S.C. 106a under US Code, and is a key element of European copyright generally ("droit d'auteur")
And rightfully so of course, Google claims they can’t review everything for copyright infringement yet for instance they succeed pretty well in filtering adult content.
While it is true that the YouTube takedown and strikes system favors large companies, it’s just about the same as the basic provisions of the DMCA, with the unwarranted takedowns, claimants who never get held to the ‘penalty of perjury’ for false claims etcetera. And compare exactly the same complaints about for instance Twitch.
Viacom’s suit wasn't about DMCA requirements (in fact, it was originally dismissed based on the DMCA safe harbor, but that was reversed on appeal) but basic commercial copyright infringement.
What that means is that if that particular claimnant decides they own your video, they own your video, and your only recourse is very expensive legal action against them to prove it's yours.
YouTube has so thoroughly contravened the intent and spirit of the DMCA it's hilarious.
I would not be surprised if Content ID participants have indemnification agreements with Google related to Content ID, which is itself a private agreement.
Yes, they can.
> because handling them properly is a matter of federal law.
They can ignore them unless they have some legsl obligation outside of the DMCA not to take the content down, because the only matter of federal law applicable to handling counterclaims properly is the DMCA safe harbor, which:
(1) continues to protect against copyright liability to the purported rights holder so long as they do not restore the content without a proper counternotice, an
(2) protects against any liability they would have under any other law to the user for taking down the content unless they fail to restore it with a valid counternotice.
But, there is no separate liability for not honoring a counternotice, and Google (like most free content hosts) structurrs their relations with users so that there is almost possibility of liability for taking content down with or without cause, so #2 isn’t much of a concern.
I bet if you asked Google’s General Counsel whether they ignore DMCA counter claims, they would say “no, we handle them properly,” not “yes, Sony Music pays us to ignore them.”
That might be what you’d like the law to say, but the safe harbor law is very explicit on what it requires, and being a “neutral middleman” is not it.
Not sure why people like to pretend DMCA and Section 230 include neutrality requirements that aren't actually there.
The intent of the DMCA as a whole was to protect copyright holders above all else. The intent of the DMCA was to avoid innocent online hosts from being collateral damage. The counterclaim process was a by-design empty, toothless gesture to users, who, unlike copyright holders, generally never had any claims against hosts against which the safe harbor would protect.
Ignoring counterclaims may be against the PR of the DMCA safe harbor, but it is very much exactly consistent with the intent and spirit of the DMCA as a whole and the safe harbor in particular (the intent and spirit of which was ebtirely “protect the interests of the big businesses”.)
They could definitely improve it to avoid this sort of nonsense.
That's not even a slap on the wrist, it's more like a kiss on the cheek.
My naive stab at the problem would be to withhold ad revenue for content in dispute. Obviously this would hurt original authors when their content is disputed but it might squelch the current bad-behavior.
One step further (but still maybe not overall better) would be for the winner of the claim to take all/part of ad-revenue from monetized+infringing uses.
Chances may be better going after the claimant. But this case, like many other, seems to be a false positive of a maybe slightly too sensitive system rather than some wild claim with absolutely no rational basis.
Does anyone believe it's possible to identify copyright violations with complete accuracy? If not, why is it such a terrible scandal if some erroneous claims are made, which can be disputed with a few clicks?
If you happened to be a musician, how many videos using your music unauthorised would you be willing to tolerate for avoiding a single erroneous claim against some video of yours?
edit: removed bit that I am probably wrong on.
But larger channels have been hit, notably Adam Neely, at 1.38m subscribers, by Warner Chappel, over his defence of Katy Perry's copyright in a Warner recording, for a segment of the video illustrating the source of the claim against Perry, and not the Perry piece Warner claimed infringement of by Neely.
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/adam-neely-youtube-copyrig...
To summarize, Warner was being sued over Katy Perry's Dark Horse, claiming that the melody violated the copyright of Flame's Joyful Noise. After Neely published a video at no expense or request from Warner defending Katy Perry, Warner rewarded him by copyright claiming him.
It gets even more absurd. That lawsuit against Warner? It was found that Katy Perry's melody infringed on Joyful Noise, but when Warner issued the DMCA claim to Neely, they said Neely infringed on the melody of Katy Perry. In other words, they issued a claim on something that a judge literally just ruled that they do not have copyright on.
If it couldn't get any absurd, there's one last thing I remember. In the DMCA claim Warner has to select a time period of Neely's video where the Katy Perry's melody was being infringed, and the time period they chose was actually when Neely was demonstrating the melody of Joyful Noise. So perhaps even Warner's lawyers can't tell the difference.
Two additional elements:
- Warner manually reviewed the work, so this wasn't just a case of algorithms gone wild.
- Warner's claim was that the infringement was against the primary melody of "Dark Horse", when it was in fact a background melody. Neely makes a big point of this, I'm not sure it's hugely salient, but ... well, it just adds that much more flavour to the manure sandwich.
I know this isn't exactly the same since those were DMCA complaints filed by The Verge legal team while TFA is about automatic ContentID claims made by Google itself. You mentioned Linus Tech Tips; interestingly, I know of one recent ContentID claim affecting them, but it was in reverse: someone else made a video about LTT and Google flagged it automatically. Linus said at the time that there is honestly not much they can do when that happens. Imagine feeling so powerless about your own content that Google insists is being infringed.
We need to move towards an innocent until proven guilty system where content is only taken down after human review and that dramatically punishes false reports (probably in a way that threatens losing ownership of the copyrighted work after repeated false claims). That is the only way to solve this problem, and it isn't going to be solved by Twitch or Youtube taking a stand (because they never will) -- it has to be legislation that changes the playing field.
Fair use is supposed to allow you to, say, use a 20 second or so clip of a popular song, no problem. That's impossible these days. The laws as they were originally written and the way they are enforced by big tech have drifted apart dramatically. It's quite sad.
Keep in mind that people growing up right now, the only thing they have ever heard about the DMCA is "oh, that's that thing that got my favorite twitch streamer almost banned". Believe me when I say zoomers will obliterate this in 20 years.
Edit* To be clear it seems to be browser independent. I use firefox on my mac and safari on my iphone and it seems every time I click a link to twitter I get an error and have to refresh the page.
Refreshing the page works to load the content.
Note that numerous of the Nitter instances are themselves rate-limted or blocked by Twitter, though I've found several that work reliably.
Disabling JS on Twitter helps ensure I remember to use Nitter ;-)
So lots of people experience it, it's a long thread of examples. I can never load a twitter link on the first try no matter the device. This one took 5-6 refreshes to show up. Wonder why it hasn't been fixed for over a year. Surely they know about the problem?
I don't know if it's a Twitter bug with requests that have the Referer set, or a deliberate thing with HN as the Referer.
Essentially if I control a certain number of Twitter accounts and I have the handles of some of my own website users, I can selectively block those each of those users from different twitter accounts. In the background of my web site I can attempt to load tweets from all of my accounts and time how long these requests take.
Because blocked accounts load much faster than actual tweet threads I can statistically identify the users of my website by the combination of fast-loading tweets. The errors you get loading tweets not directly referred from Twitter is a consequence of Twitter attempting to circumvent this.
Here is the relevant parts of the Standard Youtube License:
> By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business, including for the purpose of promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service.
> You also grant each other user of the Service a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to access your Content through the Service, and to use that Content, including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display, and perform it, only as enabled by a feature of the Service (such as video playback or embeds). For clarity, this license does not grant any rights or permissions for a user to make use of your Content independent of the Service.
This license pretty clearly gives Youtube the ability to show ads on your video and give the revenue to whomever they want. Further, if the interface to claim copyright of your video is part of Youtube (and not a DMCA claim), you give the copyright trolls a license to do that (they are after all using your video through the Youtube interface). You have no standing to sue the moment that you grant Youtube a license to do whatever they want with your work.
Thats a pretty specific law. Also like what if one of the options always just returns false?
I think writing narrow specific one off use case laws like this is like writing code with a series of if statements.
If one wants to go to the effort of changing laws one should write laws that are general and dont contain a bunch of potential loopholes.
Aka the law should be written like good code.
Note how, in this case, it probably did correctly identify segments of a certain length and entropy. At that point, it needs to loop in a human to decide if the audio can be copyrighted. It does so, with the uploader being the first human it asks.
Yes, that last part may be annoying, and slightly cheap. But the uploader is also in a better position to judge the matter than some content moderator, so I don't know why it's supposedly scandalous.
If some countries want strong copyrights they can enforce them for any imports and exports, but he effect of their laws should stop at their border. We have many other laws governing what you can and cannot do that vary significantly between countries and they do no get harmogonized globablly like copyright has been. And no, a global internet really does not change that.
Server hosts receive a lot of DMCA notices on a day-to-day basis.
Unlike a patent, which can be pretty broad, a copyright is only THAT expression of an idea, not every possible expression. So I would think your copyright only covers typing on your keyboard, not any keyboard. Or maybe, the exact rhythmic sequence of key presses you did, not any sequence.
But how that is enforced -- I have no idea. I can easily believe that YouTube's automated copyright checker doesn't do a good job with that.
If you went to court and sued someone for violating your copyright, you would lose (unless they used your keyboard and/or did the same rhythmic pattern). But probably YT doesn't know that.
There are no perfect laws or implementations to support them. The solutions err on one side or the other. In our current case, the solutions privilege the corps.
Let's say that anything someone uploads fly's and there is no means to deal with copyright violation. In that case, the person who created the work gets screwed. For example, a song writer or singer. The very people we appreciate for their artistic work.
Self driving and cars is a different case when you're talking about laws and the solutions being built around them. They are also a bit different when it comes to the financial side (and incentives) of it all.
How are they getting screwed? Art and culture grows through sharing, it doesn't diminish.
Artists and consumers have different needs and goals.
I believe trolls have also laid claim to other sorts of test tones, though I have encountered the white-noise one personally. So far I've been able to assert that it's my own audio and not his. (It's audio generated from a plugin, when I demonstrate this noise)
The blockchain is a distributed notary.
What kind of alternative do you have in mind?
Every work has authors, and it should be illegal to claim that it has any other authors.
Otherwise, copy all you want.
The composer of the new piece was intending to challenge / satirise copyright law, and actually credited Cage as a coauthor.
https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2012/04/price-of-silence-and-m...
> Looking forward to the company who "owns" it hitting the "nah, screw that guy and give him a copyright strike" button so we can turn this into yet another media cycle about just how utterly broken this system is.
If its broken then stop using it. I cant help but not care that peoples videos are flagged or taken down. "Content" "Creators" aren't customers and should not expect anything. Google owns youtube and will do whatever it takes to avoid liability and maximize profit.
Video playback in a browser is a solved problem. Simple self hosting isn't. Hopefully, projects like IPFS can solve the hosting issues. I just want to hand out a URL that points directly to a video file. I don't need or desire recommendations, follow anyone, or like/dislike content. Just something that plays a URL be it a browser or a video player like vlc.