Sadly, it seems like it’s going to be the norm now. I recall hearing the EU wants to legally mandate the mechanism of Content ID, just another nail in the coffin for the open web really.
The concept of public domain resources is not a difficult one, you don't need special legal training or advanced math to understand the idea that copyright expires and that works whose copyright has expired are free to all. There is no mechanism to even assert public domain status on Youtube.
You have to wait and offer it as a defense if subjected to a copyright infringement claim, and the copyright infringement claim is presumed to be valid and the claimant is the first judge of the public domain assertion.
Youtube didn't invent the system, but they are far from being helpless victims as you imply.
Unfortunately it’s lucrative enough for companies to exploit loop holes by utilising subcontractors, paying the fines and so on.
The real issue is the proof, but it’s nothing new. When the banana industry first took off a “magical” amount of small banana farmers disappeared or sold their lands to militant groups in South America, these groups then sold the land to companies like Chiquita.
Chiquita tried to buy the land the normal way first, when that didn’t work they then made I known that they were buying the land in circles that could “get” the land. Chiquita never actually hired anyone to do the dirty work though.
Every piece of hardware I own is made immorally, yours is probably too, exactly because of companies using these methods of having other parties do the dirty work, but because they have more money than governments it’s impossible to come after them in a legal manner, at least without making some radically different legislation.
Maybe we should do that, but it probably wouldn’t be healthy for democracy.
Some headline catching big fine that gets quietly reduced to insignificance. Some giant parading announcement of a commitment to zero carbon and no meaningful action taken after the cameras leave.
It's pure political theater.
After we landed once on a plane, air marshalls came on before anybody could leave and escorted a passenger off. What happened? He smoked a cigarette. That's actual consequences.
Nobody arrested Exxon or BP executives for their gross negligence in their extremely avoidable ecosystem destroying oil spills. They didn't suffer any personal consequences. There was no tribunal for lying about climate change through propaganda campaigns since the 1980s
The FBI never showed up at Phil Knights house on charges of child labor or call in to question the very peculiar legal acrobatics of subcontractor shell games Nike uses to create liability distance.
It'd be like if the guy smoking on the plane had one friend light it and another hold the cigarette as he puffed it and we were like "Well I guess that's too complicated for the law to handle so it's no longer a crime! Carry on!"
If child labour exploitation was enforced as loosely as copyright infringement most of the world's children would be in workhouses.
That's not fighting the battle and losing. That's fighting the battle and surrendering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y...
They won every time their case was argued. When did they lose?
Ultimately I am not a lawyer and I can’t analyze how and why the case ended the way it did. However, I do think it is obvious to anyone that Content ID is a key component of how YouTube managed to escape further lawsuits and legal scrutiny. And as can be seen in the Oracle case, fighting something all the way into legal precedence can backfire in enormously painful ways, like having APIs all be eligible for copyright.
Really. It was all a direct reaction to the lawsuits: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118161295626932114
When I say it has improved, I mean it genuinely has. Back in 2008 the usual outcome of copyright strikes were deleted videos and deleted channels. Copyright cartels monetizing videos they didn’t make due to dubious Content ID matches may seem like an unreasonable response, but it is still a better compromise than content flying down blackholes.
And yes. It would be great if all of these problems could just be solved. I’m sure they’ve heard every idea imaginable. There is no one obvious way to solve everything. So asking “why don’t they just do this?” is not productive. What we could ask is “how did we get here?”
And the answer to that is that copyright is broken. And if we could fix that, or at least make it less broken, some of these problems would literally disappear.
And if you don’t believe me, there’s tons of backup from people more persuasive who have perspectives of being in the direct line of fire. Like Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU
And yeah YouTube could do better, but all too often you get the perspective that this is all their fault because they could solve it with one easy trick. It’s easy to say that when none of the competition managed to stick around to prove it.
Instead, the opposite happened instead, when Twitch had its own copyright reckoning.
We knew copyright on the internet was fundamentally broken in the Napster days. Did we forget?
And they didn't try the one that is the actual subject of this subthread.
> asking “why don’t they just do this?” is not productive
That doesn't make your answer to it valid.
> the answer to that is that copyright is broken
Why not go further back? Why is there greed? Why aren't all humans brothers? If only we could fix that, some of these problems would literally disappear!
For what it’s worth, Twitch has not implemented this idea either.
Oh? When did that happen?
It’s entirely YouTubes fault. Their business model is automated moderation and it’s constantly proven faulty. Yet they haven’t made a decent support system around it.
Their automated systems is the primary reason why we would never consider using Google Cloud, even though parts of it would enable us of building apps that we can’t with Azure or AWS. Their support is just horrible though. When something goes wrong with our office365 or azure setup we can call Seattle (I’m not sure where exactly Microsoft is located, sorry) and they will give us hourly updates until it’s fixed. With Google the support we get, even as an enterprise organisation with 10.000 employees is the same you get, an automated process that likely won’t solve your issue until it gathers enough publicity to make a real human at Google notice.
The automated bans and takedowns work for YouTube because it’s content creators and it’s viewers are it’s products and not it’s customers, but I’m looking forward to when the EU puts their foot down on it.
> EU wants to legally mandate the mechanism of Content ID, just another nail in the coffin for the open web really.
The EU is slowly moving to making platforms responsible for their content and how they treat their users. I don’t see it as the end of the open web, however, because the web isn’t open now and haven’t been for quite some time as this channel getting wrongly banned shows you.
Google is an evil advertising company and the sooner they get broken down the better.
I suspect (but cannot prove) that the bandwidth and server costs will be small in comparison to the wages for the moderation staff.
If we take "you need about 3x the time of a video to make a considered moderation decision" as a baseline, and trust the numbers from https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/ as valid, we would need....
300 hours per minute * 1440 minutes per day * 3 moderator hours per day. Let's round that up to 1.3 million hours of daily reviewer time. Let us also assume we have super-human reviewers that can squeeze out 8 hours of solid reviewing a day. That means we need 160k - 170k reviewers. And then we need to account for illness and hols, so make that about a quarter of a million people, to keep up with the incoming and maybe make some inroads on what's been uploaded in the past.
That is actually less than what I expected, I thought the numbers would end up in the "low millions" (call it 3.14 million).
I'm imagining a world where the answer was "tough luck, you have to or you don't get to do business". Imagine a Facebook where due to the enforced human moderation you were only able to make a single post a day. That actually sounds like it might solve a lot of problems!
Why? I can want regulation of big tech corporations without building a competitor.
Are these humongous advertising companies even a net benefit to the EU? I doubt it, and if they aren’t, then why on earth should we keep them around as is?
It is possible to make a non-antagonistic system that complies with DMCA: Respond to the takedown upon receipt and give account holders an easy path to restore the disputed content under fair use or for invalid claims. Then the originator of the claim can use the normal legal process and Google is off the hook as a safe harbor. Google doesn't want to do that because they're in bed with the media companies to get favorable treatment on their paid services.
I don't think there is a mainstream anymore. The only place to hear popular music is advertising and it is always from much earlier eras.
Shows like WKRP cannot work anymore. You can't even get it on dvd because of the music licease demands.
Todays popular music are highly profitable but only heard by a small group.
It already passed. Now we're just waiting for the consequences.
Erm, what? Aren't those just two different ways of saying the same thing? The tragedy of the commons happens because there is no owner of the commons who can regulate their use.
What? Clean water, clean air, deforestation, overfishing, noise pollution. There are infinite externalities that have been shifted onto the commons that social compact and peer pressure haven’t (and arguably won’t) solve.
Once you start talking about the modern, post-privatization world, things are different of course. Resources like water may be in theory community managed, but in practice private for-profit entities acquire the right to extract as much as they can. Think Nestle and water for example.
That said, I think privatization was inevitable. I don't think it makes sense to long for the days where community management was possible, because that was probably always limited to rather local resources and not to handling global problems like climate change. (Maybe a "global community" is possible in some utopian future, but thinking about that doesn't seem like a way to solve the problems we have now.)
Yeah, and I understand what we've got right now ain't that.
I think the two requirements for that kind of community governance are 1) relatively stable long-term relationships - ie, stakeholders are well known to each other and expect to bear the long-term costs of their decisions - and 2) relatively evenly distributed power, such that no one actor can ignore the will of the overall group.
Broadly, I think there are two changes in the modern world that put an end to that, both technological - 1) transportation technology increased to the point where it's no longer a given that people will effectively stay in one place for their entire lives, which affects both how people see their surroundings and what they can assume of others, and 2) mechanization increased both the scale of resource extraction we're capable of and the power disparity we can bring to bear if, say, the Crown agrees with us.
> That said, I think privatization was inevitable.
Broadly I agree. I'm not sure privatization as we have it was inevitable, but I think given technology progressing to even trains and rifles is sufficient to disrupt the social and psychological world in which most resources were held in common.
> I don't think it makes sense to long for the days where community management was possible, because that was probably always limited to rather local resources and not to handling global problems like climate change. (Maybe a "global community" is possible in some utopian future, but thinking about that doesn't seem like a way to solve the problems we have now.)
Part of why I push back on the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" is because it fosters a narrative of human beings as inescapably greedy and incapable of acting communally at any scale, and that's simply incorrect. I don't know what a "global community" would look like, but I think if we've any hope of achieving some kind of headway against climate change, we need more narratives encouraging us to be members of a community and fewer telling us we're "rational actors."
For example, many fisheries in the USA have recovered tremendously through smart limits. The Atlantic cod fishery is often cited. I personally have experienced the Pacific North West salmon fishery and can confirm that the fishing gets better up there every year while the Dominican fishery gets worse. The DR fishery has experienced the tragedy of the commons.
The DR also experienced fantastic forest preservation in the 1970s. This was after all the old growth was destroyed. There was a success of the commons following a tremendous tragedy. Still, in the last few years these old laws have been disrespected and so the forests have been decimated to make way for Haas avocado plants. Do not buy Dominican Haas avocado.
The tragedy of the commons is very real. Learn more about the success and failure of different shared resources through Elinor Ostrom’s work.
Could you elaborate on how "'inventing money because barter is inefficient' doesn't seem to exist in the real world"? The idea that barter's inefficiency drives demand for money seems to me to be self-evidently true, so I'd be interested to hear a different perspective.
1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the.... 2. https://newrepublic.com/article/159227/david-graeber-changed... 3. Graeber D. 2011. ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years'. Melville House, NY
F*ck me, if that's the only thing you take away from this thread I'll have done my job. The problem is they keep taking that poor history and using it to spin tales about humans as greed-stricken robots who'd sell their grandmas if it would generate a dollar more value than whatever you want to price a plate of fresh-baked cookies at, and the bigger problem is we've built an entire society and economy off their collective delusions.
Others point out Debt below, and that's the canonical argument here. Effectively, the kinds of small societies that most people lived in for most of human history manage exchange based on personal relationships and reciprocal exchange, not abstract or closed monetary transactions. Money arises in the context of either long-range trade, in which sustained relationships aren't guaranteed, or in the context of large states which actually require some form of bookkeeping to track things like taxes and tribute.
The "self-evident" nature of the "barter becomes money" story is the origin myth of Economics - it absolutely sounds like a way things could have happened and feels deeply plausible, but there's no evidence it did.
You mean through exclusionary rules, investing in monitoring and punishment etc all of which divert resources from the productive activity solely by the existence of the incentive to overuse the "commons" or others' goodwill.
True, while the subgame unique subgame perfect equilibrium of most models is full free-riding, most lab experiments show less than full free-riding. That does not mean the incentives are not there.
Why are dorm bathrooms not as clean as bathrooms in your house?
> inventing money because barter is inefficient
That's a silly statement: No one decided to invent money in a similar process of invention like the lightbulb. Instead, coins, tokens, and other recognized mediums of exchange dominated over barter because barter is inconvenient and inefficient.
Even animals can learn to use a medium of exchange[1].
[1]:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090608095044.h...
No, I mean through collective policing and social pressure. In villages before privatizaton, free-riders faced social pressure, shame, and other consequences for violating the group trust. This is how most societies operated for the bulk of human history.
> True, while the subgame unique subgame perfect equilibrium of most models is full free-riding, most lab experiments show less than full free-riding. That does not mean the incentives are not there.
The lab experiments show "less than full free-riding" because humans are predominantly a social species, not a value-maximizing algorithm.
> That's a silly statement: No one decided to invent money in a similar process of invention like the lightbulb. Instead, coins, tokens, and other recognized mediums of exchange dominated over barter because barter is inconvenient and inefficient.
Except there's no historical record of that happening anywhere. The two things that look like money are trade goods between distant groups and coinage required by rulers for taxes or tribute. There's no record of money being invented de novo to replace barter in societies which didn't already have it.
> Even animals can learn to use a medium of exchange[1].
Obviously, but I haven't seen any record of chimps spontaneously deciding to coin money, so I'm not sure what the point here is.
Edit for the point I missed:
> Why are dorm bathrooms not as clean as bathrooms in your house?
Because my mother doesn't live in the dorm.