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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

I filmed a live concert in the basement of a friends house, and someone from Brazil had the audacity to claim copyright over it. Weeks have gone by while they monetized my video and there was nothing I could do about that. I disputed it, and they were forced to release their copyright claim, but I should be entitled to damages. They knowingly and falsely made a claim against the video I recorded, and it got to the point where I had to tell Youtube That I can produce the actual camera and the original footage before they would believe me. YouTube content and copyright system is garbage.

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Realistically it'll be like this until they get some good competition (if ever) or some laws change

As if any sizable competitor wouldn't also be faced with the compromise proposed by media conglomerates: "allow us to monetize stuff we claim without utilizing the DMCA or lose access to hosting our content (music videos, movies, clips, etc)".

I think there’s a subset of YouTube who would much prefer the website without content from media conglomerates. Not sure if it could be profitable on its own though.

Given that many video streaming websites have come and gone, it is pretty safe to assume it is not profitable.

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.

> Given that many video streaming websites have come and gone, it is pretty safe to assume it is not profitable.

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.

Wouldn't that require enforcing media conglomerates rights and restrictions over content, and leave you exactly in the same place?

I think the difference would be that DMCA could be the only mechanism for content takedown, which would hopefully deter spurious claims, as compared to content ID, which doesn't appear to incur any liability for false claims on the part of the claimant.

This has not been the experience on other platforms, such as Twitch or Twitter.

Opinions are my own.

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.

It's all about incentives, and the football analogy is spot-on. Hockey is another great example: fighting in hockey could be eliminated with a simple "both fighters are ejected" change (but nobody will because the fans love the fights).

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.

Some fans. Watch women's hockey at the Olympics. Actually all hockey at the Olympics. No fighting. Great hockey!

Or as long that there is no penalty for making false copyright claims and until you're considered guilty by default.

Right, giving copyright holders the power to compel others to do what you want without any court involement is already ridiculous. Then also having no consequences for abuse of that is just broken.

Do they get to keep the money made from the video during that period? Or does it go back to you when the claim is denied?

I have no idea, YouTube wouldn’t respond to anything. I don’t know how much money was made off of those weeks with the video, I know nothing other than one day I looked at my video on YouTube and saw that someone had placed a copyright claim, monetizing it for themselves.

Couldn't you make the video private in the meantime?

I didn’t think about that, good idea. What I’ve actually decided to do Finish the discussion here that really brought this to my mind, is that I’m going to turn the video over to the band. I’m going to let them put it on their YouTube page that they can monetize it. I would rather they get the money then some scam artist in Brazil; or whichever nefarious actor tries to do this again.

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