YouTube: filmmakers presumed guilty until maybe proven innocent
larryjordan.com
larryjordan.com
Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership.
The cause & effect before the buildup of awareness is the incentives that prevent content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place:
- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)
- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos especially for unknown creators.
The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay.
I don’t think they ever wanted to be YouTube. Sometimes carving out a niche IS the business goal.
If you're an actual filmmaker making films (and not just a content creator) you're more likely to favor Vimeo over YouTube, but you probably care more about iTunes/Google Play/Amazon/Netflix/etc.
No.
The right-wingers on Rumble are fairly mainstream (and monetizable), like Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, or Donald Trump himself.
The parent then replied, seemingly to disagree, but then listed several examples of right-wing disinformationists and propagandists, not something the average content creator wants to be associated with, who inhabit Rumble
YouTube itself use to be the fringe.
https://odysee.com/ is a site I have seen a lot of mainstream people promote.
The problem is actually discovery, it doesn't really matter who sends you bytes it's about users discovering your content, which YouTube has the monopoly.
Under that direction, of course they'd have fewer content creators and viewers, and they obviously wanted it that way.
To a viewer, Vimeo is just a crude way to host a video.
Like, are you saying that you'd rather use Google to search for content (including videos) and then find the videos on whichever web site hosts that individual video?
I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now.
You idea (I think) is really interesting - it's been a while since the web has worked that way and it's interesting to think about how combined hosting+discovery has changed it from the 'early days'
The main problem with this would be spam; Google has a lock on web search entirely because building a search index that is not immediately besieged by adversarial content is very difficult.
Alternatively we could bring back RSS readers and aggregation. We'd need some way to scrape/feed YouTube metadata into it. Feeds could advertise related creators that way (with the caveat that this would almost certainly become a sponsorship/advertising mechanism, something something RAID Shadow Legends).
If I bang-search "!video <search expression>" on DDG, I'll be returned hits for the search across a range of video hosting sites. Principally YouTube and Vimeo, though also others. I don't believe Peertube sites presently appear, which is a shame.
I'm like the post your responsed to, I really hate that (and all sorts of automated recommandation systems, I just can't stand Spotify for instance). Computers are here for me to tell them what to do, not to take non-repeatable decisions (and this makes it more and more painful to use the web over the years frankly, everything is becoming an inconsistent mess)
A trick I’ve found is being careful about not ‘poisoning’ your recommended videos. There are some topics that are really bad about taking over your recommendations (though liberal use of the “show me less like this” and “don’t recommend channel” options have pruned some of that out) so sometimes watching a video in incognito helps.
Can't binge videos at night with what feels like a friggin flashlight shining in my face
The better one is called Stylus. The main difference being "Any and all analytics, telemetry, and data-collection have been removed completely. We'd rather not know what you're up to."
1) Eliminate legal liability and risk of lawsuits. Technically all they need to do is comply with DMCA requests, but YouTube would rather not be sued by a major record company or film studio, even if they could win the case.
2) Become friendly with major content creators (record and film labels, television studios). YouTube wants a good working relationship with these companies, to ensure that these companies post their content on YouTube. YouTube really wants the views they get by hosting SNL clips and Beyonce music videos.
3) Actually help the independent content creators deal with copyright claims. This is a very, very distant third.
Because of these priorities, YouTube has decided their best course of action is to offload all of the work on copyright claims onto the independent content creators, in order to keep the big media giants happy. After all, NBC doesn't need YouTube, but a solo channel with 50k subscribers absolutely does.
Ofc, the intention of copy-striking was not to decrease competition. But that ended up happening because of the way that the system is implemented (it isn't just copy-striking, I think reporting violations/automated violation systems have the same consequence).
I don't think I'm subscribed to a single corporate channel out of about 100 subscriptions.
* 3b1b * Matthias Wandel * Applied Science * Colin Furze * Scott Manley * Practical Engineering * Tom Scott * Tantacrul * CGP Grey * Forgotten Weapons * StuffMadeHere * John Heisz * Clickspring * Internet Historian ...
YouTube is bursting at the seams with quality content made by individuals or tiny teams.
That can happen simultaneous with good, independent videos being produced. But I think those non-corporate videos would do better if YouTube wasn't so hostile (again, content strikes, getting reported for violations...have you genuinely never heard any complaints about YouTube from people who create videos on the platform?).
I gave up caring long ago about gaining money from views, my most profitable upload was in 2015 when I filmed my parrot falling off my kitchen counter... That video likely succeeded because it wasn't something that would provide me residual success that overshadowed YouTube's normal (controlled) revenue pipelines.
I do however mysteriously get my own music blocked frequently on uploads to TikTok, and there is only complete and demoralizing frustration in trying to report the issue, because they don't care about small creators like me because we don't make them enough money probably.... TikTok and many social platforms keep support only as an afterthought, and finding the right place to get problems solved on most platforms is damn near impossible.
The social media creator economy is dismal and highly competitive for musicians and film makers right now. One of the biggest copyright issues is people who completely hijack and fake "original content" as their own in order to get views in order to profit or sell popular accounts to influencers later.
I'd recommend primarily pursuing contracts with Amazon Prime or Netflix for independent films, rather than trying to battle YouTube because there is simply too much content ID activity on YouTube that is out of control, whereas on the alternate streaming services, they're geared more towards movies than to managing creator communities.
If you are a film maker who needs music for a film project, contact music makers directly (producers that don't use samples in the work you need) in order to generate new, original, and exclusive music that they won't license or release anywhere else perhaps, make them sign a contract too... That might help in the future...?
I understand you're trying to give advice but for this particular thread's article, his videos are not the type of content for Amazon Prime nor Netflix.
Wow, really great shots in there and on the web site. I recommend updating the youtube channel description with more info about the company.
Possibilities are limitless with OC these days, the main question is whether or not how it's leveraged will be interesting enough to others and/or successful within each possible format.
Think about how Anthony Bourdain turned the normally "boring" world of being a chef into a captivating documentary series that created "foodie" culture and ultimately CNN picked up... for starters... ;)
I regularly share my edit work on film communities and on social media sites like Stage32 and among my network of industry friends in the film industry. When they come across things that strike a pulse in their current projects they usually get in touch and ask me to send them a free copy...
If they ask for custom/specialized music for their projects then that usually cost a little bit. Most of my work is towards building a future of work in the industry, and towards building a diverse catalogue of music, while still staying true to what I like most. :)
I recommend avoiding the online licensing sites, they really don't do anything but de-value the potential for proper payment on your work, and most of the time they file you in a back room.
Ultimately directors and producers pick music they like, and whatever fits the mood in their opinion, releasing music effectively and properly and building a following outside of looking for work helps to increase new licensing potential in film work.
Basically, YouTube as a content host, would actively, promptly and sometimes aggressively, respond to the "potential" copyright owner's requests, in exchange of keeping themselves away from lawsuit.
This way, they don't need to pre-screen the content upon the uploading, because it's up to the copyright owner to find the illegal content and report (YouTube still do that in some degree with content-ID, though).
There will be false-positives, there will be false claims, but they choose to play it safe.
Just to make it clear: this whole system is fucked up, and how "aggressive" the host needs to be is a nuance that all parties involved will have dramatically different views. I just feel like lots of people don't understand the principle of DMCA safe harbor concept. It is the consequence of current copyright law; without it, user-generated content hosts can't survive the legal trouble (or they can, but would need significant more legal resources).
From https://www.copyright.gov/512/:
> [...] To be effective, a counter-notice must contain substantially the following information:
> (iv) the user’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
1. multiple creators assign their works to one LLC. This would probably avoid the piercing the corporate veil problem, but it would be a pretty juicy target for litigators. If they successfully win the lawsuit, they can potentially seize all works that were assigned to it, and take them down or resell them. If this happens to a video you spent weeks working on, I think I'll be pretty pissed.
2. each video/creator assign their works to one LLC. This would avoid the "juicy target" issue described above, but you'll have to be super careful to avoid piercing the corporate veil .
Pooling like (1) might be an interesting approach to strengthen things further. You don't need to own a copyright to defend against a copyright claim, so the work merely needs to be licensed to the LLC series. A nontransferrable license to upload a work to a web host has little commercial value. In the worst case, a successful claimant would get the ability to contact webhosts to seize control of other accounts it then owns, and the ability to disrupt defense of other claims by seizing incoming funding. But given how useless such results would be, would it even be worth it for a troll to press that far?
You could add additional interested parties into the mix by playing the public good angle. Donate to this foundation to protect user generated content against SLAPPs, etc.
Even if your use is obviously and unambiguously fair use, the legal fees to defend yourself will range at least in the $10,000-100,000 range. (And many fair use cases aren't actually all that obvious, sadly).
We need something like anti-SLAPP for fair use, where someone with an obvious fair use defense gets to have the malicious accuser pay their legal fees for them.
You can appeal a Content ID claim. If your appeal is rejected, you can even appeal that — which forces the claimant to either issue a DMCA takedown or concede. During the pendency of the dispute process all ad revenue is held in escrow for whomever 'wins' in the end.
It's a great system, and I say that a full-time producer of content for YouTube.
No, it's not. Google has gone so far above and beyond the DMCA's requirements here that it's hard to even see the DMCA at play at all.
If they were only following the DMCA rules, the video uploader would have the opportunity to send a counter-claim to Google, saying that they don't believe the content is infringing. Google then would put the video back up, without taking on any liability. If the original DMCA claimant still believes there's infringement going on, then their only recourse is to file a lawsuit against the uploader (not against Google, as Google has done their duty under the safe harbor provisions).
But instead, Google has decided to bend over backwards and create this Draconian mess that prioritizes the will of the big copyright holding cartels.
If YouTube was divorced from Google, YouTube would be friendlier to creators.
Counter argument: some of the top performing content on YouTube is made by the establishment. But then again, Google created this status quo by using their algorithm to promote content that satisfies their partners.
Your theory that it went beyond the requirements of the settlement with Viacom is interesting, but unless you have insider information as to the terms of it, it is at best, speculative.
Would you stake billions of dollars on the legal theory that if YouTube followed the DMCA to the letter of the law, publishers would not be able to successfully sue them?
If YouTube was divorced from Google it would have ceased existing a decade ago.
It's immensely complicated, because videos are cached all around the world. Someone in Bangladesh watching YT videos is not always fetching them from the US, you can be sure of that.
So "profit" is definitely an opinion, not a fact. If YT was divorced from Google, it would become a fact.
Counter-anecdote: None of my recommended content on YouTube is from established media companies. YouTube's profiling of my account definitely puts me squarely in the "Tom Scott and Technology Connections" demographic - but even so on the times when I've let YouTube's auto-play do its thing I've never been steered towards mainstream media from Viacom and the like (unless you count the occasional clip from a decades-old Discovery Channel docu or unauthorized BBC Top Gear upload)
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What weirds me out about "normal-persons' YouTube" that I see when borrowing non-tech-sector friends' devices is there's a lot of top 40 that's right there - I wonder if that's what you're seeing?
YouTube's primary means of profit is as a music platform playing RIAA protected copyrighted music mostly owned by Sony, Universal and other media conglomerates.
YouTube's profits are fully dependant on whether these conglomerates allow their popular artists to host music on the platform so your idea is very very misguided.
> Viacom said it was not seeking damages for any actions since Google put in its filtering system, known as content ID, in early 2008.
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.
Your assessment is incorrect for the legal options a DMCA claimant will use and doesn't match how previous legal proceedings actually played out.
E.g. Viacom still filed a lawsuit against Google because they disputed that 'safe harbor' applied Youtube.[1]
Google did settle with Viacom (helped by offering ContentID as a tool) but they didn't win any definitive court ruling on "safe harbor" that makes Google lawsuit-proof in the future.
[1] Example articles from 1st page of results: https://www.google.com/search?q=viacom+lawsuit+google+%22saf...
https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/blogs/incontestable/goo....
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/viacom-and-googl...
But in the realpolitik sense, I agree. Foreign company, angry US business interests, etc. I doubt this was argued out reasonably in a court beforehand.
I've seen a lot of software legally distributed using torrents where even the software creators link to torrents that you can use.
Because we all know that website and what torrents it had. That "torrents aren't necessarily illegal" are neither here, nor there. Their torrents were illegal.
(Not that I'm against it, but well, it's not like they're fooling anyone with the "torrents aren't necessarily illegal" defense for their particular case. That wasn't some FOSS/PD software torrent site, and that wasn't why people visited it, or why it was run...).
Was that true in the countries where they had a local presence?
Illegal in the US.
Media companies insist that Google do more and more and they are willing to drag google into court and will lobby congress to force google and (everyone else) to bow to their whims.
Extorting 14 year old kids and broke college students for settlement money is nice and everything, but Google has very deep pockets and the the media cartels would love to get their hands on Google's money just like they want to take billions from ISPs
I do blame google for going along with it when they have the clout and resources to fight them, but the real issue is our horribly broken copyright system
I think it's important to distinguish what the law says and what is actually going on in the world though - since the actual DMCA system is only very occasionally relevant to creators (and usually tied to soft claims - like reading out copyrighted material or static content - like images).
https://www.dmlp.org/threats/crook-v-10-zen-monkeys
for an example
Google doesn't do DMCA: Under DMCA the alleged copyright owner whose alleged rights were allegedly violated has to file a notice and then the alleged infringer gets to file a counter notice. Then the alleged owner can either sue the alleged infringer or fuck off. The hoster - google here - would avoid liability from either direction as long as they followed the procedure, and processed valid notices and counter-notices in a timely fashion.
DMCA notices and the takedown process are NOT "guilty until proven innocent", they are "guilty until the claim of innocence", which is a big distinction.
Google is actually in violation of the DMCA when they let alleged copyright owners decide on appeals and issue "copyright strikes" as the DMCA mandates they have to stay neutral and follow the notice/counter-notice procedure. What they do here is editorial oversight on behalf of the alleged copyright owner and against the alleged infringer, which goes against the DMCA and probably Section 230.
Google doesn't care that they are in violation, because they are TooBigToGetSued by the content creators they host (well, most of them), but they are in danger of getting sued by the RIAA/MPAA and big media, and know chances are good big media would find a jury that makes the wrong decision in a lawsuit.
They also want big media to put their stuff (from music videos to movie trailers) on their platform, so they play extra nice with them, even gave them their quasi-universal internet-age DRM (widevine) they craved so much, along with ContentId.
The DMCA requires the service provider reinstate the content 14 days after the dmca is contested unless the claimant follows through on the claim by filing a lawsuit in court. Youtube does not do this.
The DMCA also explicitly states that it's protection against liability doesn't apply to service providers that do not properly implement the counter-claim reinstatement process, and as such, youtube is not covered by the dmca's shield.
No, it doesn't.
It says that the liability shield against the user whose material was taken down only applies when material is restored according to the counternotice process, and the liability shield against copyright claimants does not apply if material is restored other than according to the counternotice process.
But since providers tend to be able to structure their relationship with users so that they have no liability for taking material down for any reason, they rarely need that side of the safe harbor. DMCA safe harbor has an illusion of symmetry, but since the underlying liability tends not to be symmetrical, neither is the safe harbor in practice.
Google choose to serve their corporate partners. They don't have to scan anything. They can have zero-friction counter notices that reactivate disputed content immediately. They can choose to only accept real DMCA notices under penalty of perjury.
The people calling the shots don't want to deal with what the law requires so Google bent over backwards to build an extra-legal system that gives all the power to one side.
Another huge issue that plagues ContentID is sample-based music. There is a huge number of pseudo-artists who license widely used sample packs, mash together songs with practically zero creative effort and then submit those songs to companies that register their clients' music to ContentID databases. When someone else uploads a song with the same (legally licensed!) samples in their composition to Youtube, it gets monetized with royalties going to the wrong person.
Some shmuck sampled it in a piano composition and now is apparently getting royalties from the video. It really leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
I didn't realise how recently it went extinct though, that's really sad.
You might be interested in attempts to recreate calls of our extinct birds: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audi...
A long while ago, while back at Cisco, I suggested just such a grammar, called the Digital Rights Framework. It would be an inventory list embedded as data within a file, or an associated metadata file, that would clearly say "This is a unique name for a digital property with associated rights. This is my relationship towards the creator. These are the rights the creator gave me, or where I got a right from some authorized reseller of this digital property."
Basically, we needed an industry standard for this kind of thing in the 1990s. Sadly, me and 10,000 of my closest friends got laid off back then. So all the work we were doing was scrapped (aside from getting a few patents around it). But the need for this sort of rights management and negotiation system has never lessened.
Plus, it can't just be something that is done for one tech giant, and each tech giant does it differently. This needs to be a grammar as open as IETF standards, or W3C standards. Something that is extensible and customizable.
Because then you'd be able to shove a list of your digital rights statements right in the face of someone who said you were violating copyright and tell them to shove it.
Now, how you store and forward these rights is also up for debate. Do these need to be portable? Is this stored in a "wallet?" Or do these need to be accessible, and thus stored in a highly available or strongly consistent database?
This is basically the nightmare I and others saw back in the 1990s that we simply never, as a collective tech industry, ever really addressed.
It is literally a billion-dollar business for a trillion dollars of annual revenue if someone can figure out how to standardize this and make it simple and readily implementable.
I'm not saying that this is should be how it is, and you could make a strong argument that it shouldn't be this way, but I think it predates YouTube.
I'm not claiming I have the answer, but I feel that the vague "omg youtube is a platform so it should allow all my videos!!!!" argument is extremely reductive, and tends to imply that it should just be this total anarchy of a platform. If YouTube doesn't regulate their content, it's going to be hard to find advertisers, and if they can't find advertisers it will be hard to monetize the platform.
[1] Obviously legal stuff, porn that's outright illegal should of course not be allowed.
Online video sites are in no way, shape, or form, a town square. They are privately-managed, there is no practical scarcity on how many video sites can exist, and if you don't like YouTube's policies, you and your viewers can easily go elsewhere. Indeed, platforms like BitChute exist in large part to host channels that YouTube has banned.
By moving away from YouTube, you'd obviously lose YouTube's viewers and advertisers, and that may make your video channel infeasible if you're running it for-profit. But them's the breaks -- you're not entitled to another company's audience.
You don't need a blockchain to do signatures or other cryptographic operations, and in fact the blockchain is the worst way to do it if you do not have adversaries trying to make double-spends.
It's much harder to write correct code if you have to give equal power to all peers, while also trusting no-one.
It's much easier to do what most systems do, which is trust every peer more or less (aka the SMTP style usual federation), or trust a small number of well-known supernodes (aka the CA system, the DNS system, the BGP system, etc).
All of those systems for distributing information of various kinds are vastly easier to reason about, operate, etc, than blockchains.
IIRC Getty Images was sued for allegedly claiming copyrights on images it did not actually have rights to.
There are also some gutless people out there who file the copyright claims for other negative purposes.
Copyright has always been a huge mess though, and YouTube's method of making everyone compete for visibility certainly doesn't help it all.
I only sign licensing agreements directly with the film makers I work with, and refuse to use 3rd party sites to handle my licensing in order to properly protect my work use rights though. The Internet can be a scary place to share personal work at times.
Put differently, if the only practical difference between properly licensing and failing to properly license is that you pay extra for doing it right but get no benefit from doing so, then why bother licensing? If the punishment happens either way, might as well save the money and hassle up front.
Regardless of that, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of predatory claimants out there who've found a low barrier to entry, enough payout to make the effort worthwhile, and little to no repercussions for fraudulent claims. THAT's the problem that really needs to be addressed.
I think that moving off YouTube would be the same story as other filesharing systems. Napster worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then (and my memory is foggy here) Limewire/Kazaa/etc. worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then public Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then private Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until someone accidentally invited the lawyers. That's exactly what would happen if everyone started hosting video files on their personal domains. It would work for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. (Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy.)
Anyway, the problem is copyright law. Society would probably not implode if you said "movies and music are no longer copyrightable", and these probably would all go away overnight. What you'd see instead would be really competitive streaming services, and probably a lot of product placement in music and movies. (Except, you already see these things. This comment was sponsored by SquarespaceVPN! Sign up now with this offer code that I'm going to say is limited to the first 100 users but is actually unlimited because who is going to deny a customer? Also, did you know that Hacker News knows your username when you log in? Install our snakeoil VPN widget thing for only $34.99 per month and ... some security shit will happen to prevent that! Hackers! News! Scary!)
They have it on their radar, but compared to torrents Usenet is so cumbersome to use it's definitely not a large enough market to waste resources on.
You could build Content ID for the real internet but it would only as much as you can intimidate each individual creator/site operator. They are free to at least decide to defend themselves if they wanted to. Under the Youtube ContentID that really isn't an option. Plus non-US creators could care a lot less since enforcing DMCA/copyright internationally is going to be even more costly.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comca...
(And I guess that as the Internet market heats up and competitors become available, a ToS like "we won't turn you off just because you get a DMCA notice" could be quite appealing.)
By taking this hard stance not providing the copyright owners with any way to monetize the material, Twitch discourages trolls from participating. Only a real content holder who is genuinely afraid of losses due to piracy, and is ready to spend resources on it despite no returns, will.
Plus, it's a nice little side biz, to have de facto monopoly marketplace, enforced by the fear of BS infringement claims like these. It's a monopoly that's very hard to attack in court, because hey you're free to license content anyway you like! Litigation will take decades, and the customers can't afford litigation anyway, so let's do it!
They are warming up to become a small competitor to youtube
Youtube's overzealous content ID system should push studios etc to create their own original music. We have several original feature films on youtube with all original soundtracks and have no issues with flagging etc as none of our music has been sold to music licensors etc.
Youtube's content ID system even goes after sound effect libraries- we had an issue in 2012 where our original animated feature film was flagged because of a wind sound effect that was 5 seconds long. It was an original sound that somehow matched a licensed wind sound. We disputed the wind ^_^ and the flagging/flogging was dropped.
It might a drag to hear for studios not wanting to do the extra work but I think creating/hiring people to create all original material is the way to avoid such things on youtube. We think its better for culture as well.
And, at the moment that YouTube takes down your video, the preponderance of the evidence is (sometimes just momentarily) against you, both statistically (most copyright complaints they process are legit) as well as philosophically, since there is only someone's affidavit that they own the copyright in the content, and no reply to it (yet).
So, at that moment, YouTube doesn't start investigating because that would be a gigantic waste of resources, considering the uploader is in a far better position to disprove the claim. Forwarding the claim isn't YouTube siding with the accusation. It's them following the process the law set out (and, maybe, being slightly cheap). False takedown request are annoying, yes. They are also a few orders of magnitude rarer than copyright infringements, which I imagine would also tend to annoy some creators. And, crucially, they are the fault of the complainant. Doing anything creates the risk of idiots suing you without cause, and there's just no argument why YouTube should (or could) absorb that risk.
If copyright were only 20 years with an application to extend in special circumstances (equivalent to patent law), we wouldn't waste so much of our economic power devising and enforcing systems to uphold our archaic copyright laws.
Why do business at all with robots? If you can't get someone on the phone, don't do business with that company.
I was doing business with a company and signed a 20-year contract.
At first, it was all humans. Then eventually there were fewer humans... then no longer anyone near me and I could only get business done over the phone. Then the phone people were replaced with an automated system for "nearly everything". I always wanted to speak to a representative though. Eventually even the way to speak to a representative was taken over and now they "schedule a call back".
I don't receive phone calls.
Too bad, I thought Aflac was an alright company.
Unfortunately there are a lot of businesses that are leaning towards "schedule a callback". What comes after that is "chat online with a real person on our app". What comes after that? Maybe just "schedule a later chat with a real person" because their chat people are too busy and wait times are measured in hours. Then what?
"Don't do business with robots" is well but it doesn't go far enough.
My parents are operating an airbnb in their downstairs suite. A few months ago one of their visitors started complaining that they found hair under a heater behind a door, and dust behind the nightstand, and that this was making them uncomfortable and they would leave. To give some context, tens of rentals rentals in, they had an average cleanliness rating of 5/5. The guests stayed two nights, but then left and asked to be fully refunded (turns out there was a storm alert on Sunday that probably was the real cause for the premature departure). My parents refunded the cleaning as a gesture but declined to refund the rest given that it was obviously more of a personal choice than really an issue with cleanliness. The day after, airbnb locked their account and cancelled their reservations for the coming 2 months. An "anonymous guest" had made a safety complaint, that my parents had entered the suite or something like that. Airbnb never disclosed the details, but all the questions were around entering while the guests were in, which my parents were outraged they could be accused of. They had to plead their case that this wasn't right. Fortunately for them airbnb reinstated their account in a few days, but with those 2 months of bookings gone ; plus apparently a strike on their file and some employee telling them "never to do that again", despite not even knowing what the charge was. I scouted the net to advise them, and you can find countless stories of people getting their accounts closed by random guests making false accusations in an attempt to to get reimbursed for random stuff. My only advice was to diversify the platforms, but when the market is so dominated by a single actor, they can apply the ancient type of justice where you aren't allowed to face your accusers, or even know what you are accused of. The only thing you can do is pray that whomever "judges" your case didn't get blueballed the night before.
I hope there will be a correction one day, but given the trend I am not hopeful. The future looks like for all sorts of things in our lives will be ruled and arbitrated by mini dictators ruling over their unregulated fiefdoms.
I'm even posting this from a disposable account and altered the story in fear that somehow they might get identified and be targets of retribution.
We already have statutory public performance prices. And we started to adhere to them, the creators could get their money, and the creators could further create content. (You know, like a content Ponzi scheme.)
This is *simple*, and stays completely above ground with respect to copyright and mechanical reproductions. And it also allows the creators remixing content to ALSO make money.
The hardest part is the ContentID that google already has. So it'd be keeping track of copyright owners, and paying.
Sure, non-monetized videos would have to pay to keep them up. That could be a bummer... But it could be a definite choice to do. Monetized videos could just be paid directly out of the monetization bucket.
I absolutely hate the argument used that scale prevents them to do anything about it, as if crimes en masse are suddenly okay. It’s their problem, not ours, that they’ve built systems that are, for all intents and purposes, uncontrollable. These corporations act like they are the victim in these cases of abuse of their platform.
This is because small diverse enterprises proliferate at first in the growth stage and then winners start to emerge. When a crisis hits, the larger players snap up the bankrupt smaller players at bargain prices and get their best employees too. Over a series of crises, the market consolidates into oligopoly. Once the national market is nearly consumed, the remaining players look abroad to expand markets. There is nothing controversial about this, it is taught in business school.
https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve
This of course assumes a life cycle that starts domestically. Many ventures instead start abroad witnessing an opportunity to exploit cheap labor, lax regulations, or a unique natural resource. The western governments then assist the western companies in securing the opportunity, usually through gangster tactics. The resources are then extracted from the country, processed by the company into higher value goods, and resold to the originating country.
However, I think this sort of corporatism is a natural evolution of capitalism, because capitalism has no other incentives outside of profit and growth.
Absolutely zero corporations have done anything like letting their workers own the means of production or implementing workplace democracy.
> the revised video had 5 new copyright claims even before upload processing was complete!
Maybe there's an opportunity for an integrated offering of licensed music and lawyers to defend the licensee against bogus takedowns?
Countering the Tragedy of the Commons eventually raises the cost of creating and engaging with user-generated content relative to commercial content.
This is essentially an attack on Smartsound, Shockwave-Sound, etc. It sounds like those companies want to after whoever is claiming copyright over their music.
But currently the problem is that in aggregate, it brings more money to rely on an overreaching algorithm (which is already built and paid-for) that favours big established labels as opposed to small-scale creators; the money they would spend on ensuring everyone gets paid fairly by building a better system wouldn't be recouped by the (relatively small) revenue they'd get from small-scale creators being able to participate.
When I mentioned financial incentives, I didn't really mean incentives in terms of making more money - as per the above I don't think there is enough money to justify improving the current system. What I meant is that there should be more enforcement; what the current system does is actually committing copyright infringement by misattributing the revenue to the wrong creators, and if this was punished appropriately it would provide a financial incentive to resolve this problem.
Just think about how much money people have saved from DIY projects on YouTube, for example or how skills have been learned.
This claim process takes place before the legal copyright claim process. The legal process would require YouTube to take the video down immediately, and it would be required to stay down for at least two weeks even if the claim is bogus. (Or YouTube could decide not to follow the process and be held liable in case of actual infringement.)
There is no presumed innocence. The DMCA is constantly being abused, and the only possible punishment for malicious claims is an expensive lawsuit. It wouldn't surprise me at all if half of all DMCA takedown requests would be considered fair use in court, but the vast majority never get there.