"Computer says no", "But on average over last 5 years I make 5x what you need me to earn", "Sorry, but computer says no"
I don't see what about ContentID is related to the "Utopia of Rules" issue. ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Alongside the inability to effectively reign in corporations who make such decisions.
Capitalism is the thing where there is supposed to be vigorous free market competition and ContentID would have no power. Because even if 70% of the services were getting it wrong, anyone could switch to any of the other 30% with minimal friction, and then the original 70% would fix their shit or lose market share.
Capitalism isn't a synonym for anarchy. It needs, for example, government enforcement of property rights. But it also needs antitrust. Constraints on vertical integration.
The lack of effective antitrust enforcement has allowed markets to concentrate. Which removes competitive pressure, which allows incumbents to make rules that benefit them and their business partners at the expense of customers who now have high switching costs. Enabling the "Utopia of Rules."
Even so, I would bet the vast majority Google's customers that are aware of ContentID like ContentID and want it to spread everywhere, to all companies in all nations. I mean, how likely is it that Ford (a big customer) would move to UpstartVideo.biz because they don't automatically analyze uploaded videos?
Which part of copyright law is the ContentID part? It's not in DMCA 512 anywhere I can see.
YouTube in particular had problems because in their early days they were, shall we say, not well-counseled on the copyright front, and were still getting sued over that. They were also trying to make nice with Hollywood to try to get them to license premium content.
Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
And the "you're not the customer, you're the product" trope doesn't really apply -- in a competitive market, suppliers have a choice in who to sell through too. And Ford follows the eyeballs.
It's a measure to avoid legal ramifications under the DMCA and other acts.
> Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar. Or they'll restrict and moderate uploads manually which has exactly the same effect, or perhaps even worse (still erring on the side of legal caution).
Why would there be "legal ramifications" for someone complying with the ordinary DMCA notice and takedown process?
> It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar.
It has been decades. They're still there.
The lack of popularity is for the reason already mentioned. If your YouTube video gets on the first page of Google search results and the exact same video hosted on some other site doesn't, what are content creators going to use?
However, you have got my interest. What is the flaw in the reasoning?
Because the world is a very wide and varied place, with far more range of human situations than a set of rules is able to adequately deal with. Probably ever.
And if some individual's ability to find things or not decides what happens, then we're right back where we started, at a rather arbitrary system vulnerable to corruption. In which case, why did we even bother making this huge incomprehensible set of rules?
See for example the US Tax Code.
And if you can't say ahead of time what a judge should do with that law against that edge case, you have a legal vulnerability. Something that will cause "hard cases make bad law." Something that will be abused by the rich and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable. You have a bad law.
What you're advocating for is not thinking about the consequences of legislation before passing it.
And it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens on HN. Programming has taught me to specifically pay attention to edge cases and evaluate how likely they are and what kind of consequences may follow. This same pattern of thinking then gets applied to other things in life. Laws are one of the closest analogues to programming.
And honestly, uninformed people talking about a law without doing an iota of research won't make a single difference in the world. Hacker News armchair amateur lawyers are not fighting for anyone, not even for themselves.
Constructive feedback: the first sentence isn't necessary. People will only see the anger and not the actual point. The second sentence stands on its own.
This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."
How is that compatible with a democracy? Don't voters have to be able to understand what their legislators are doing on their behalf? Are we all just permanently screwed?
It's not as if these criticisms don't come to fruition. People said DMCA 1201 would be a bad law from the beginning, and it still is. Sex workers objected to SESTA even though they were the ones it was supposed to protect, politicians passed it over their objection, and the bad things predicted to happen then happened. It is the calls to "reform" CDA 230 that seem to lack any understanding of the law, the reasons for it, or even what it does.
The most common flaw in new legislation is the failure to account for unintended consequences from bad edge cases and perverse incentives. It is actually really hard to create a law without these things. The discussion of how to avoid them, or even if they can be avoided sufficiently to cause the proposed law to be a net positive in the world, is really important.
Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/supreme-court-reins-cfaa-van-bur...
This is your system working, right? But the CFAA was passed in 1986. We lived under that uncertainty, and it caused much turmoil, for thirty five years. That's bad. We should want for that not to happen.
It's not. It's more "these [otherwise very intelligent people] can't possibly understand the law because they haven't bothered to read it, as they're merely reacting to the description of it by another poster" and just posted their first reaction to it on a HN post. This is visible when the answers to their posts is "yeah... the law covers that".
People publicly criticising laws with informed articles (or even people repeating talking points from those) is very healthy, but VERY different from armchair commenters who use their own ignorance about a law as fodder for criticising it and for advocating for their own position (normally to dismiss the law altogether).
We are clearly talking about two very different things here.
Unlike you're implying, I also don't want to censor anything and I'm not advocating for anything. Discussion is healthy, uninformed discussion backing radical opinions is noise.
> Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
I also don't see how this has anything to do with what I'm saying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my first post, but I'm pretty sure I was in my second.
I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction.
And they're not always wrong.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
That's all from the point of view that this tyranny is external. I'd actually prefer to look at it as something we're subjecting ourselves to. We're half-knowingly turning our tools against us; painting ourselves into a corner; becoming increasingly entangled by our conflicting goals. We're not the victim, but the fool.
Comp - computer/tech
Pet - sub-human, regarded as secondary if at all
Tence - (tense), as in past tense and you will be forgotten
Welcome to new bureaucracy, same as old bureaucracy.
Maybe cyber-kafkaesque, but that feels redundant, since the only difference is that it is being done by computers, rather than thoughtless people.
Related phenomenons keep coming up (cities for cars, ecosystems of tokens and identities dependent on remembering secret passkeys, and so on). Desires to profit and to not have to trust each other keeps motivating humans’ attempts to devise environments that are hostile to humans themselves.
[0] https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-w...
Machine behaviour is only ever caused (i.e. syntactic), not reasoned.
When a human follows a rule, for example as part of a bureaucracy, then our behaviour is merely caused. But we can also be given reasons to not follow the given rule.
This is precisely why "I was just following orders" is not a valid defence; even soldiers are expected to use their reasoning to disobey illegal orders.
"You get what you pay for"
Get a record label or agent if you want or need “protection”
How about a term like "millennial business ethics"?
Seriously.
I know some will take this as an insult. I don't offer it in that way. Hear me out for a minute.
The generation that grew up without the internet was just as sophisticated --if not more in some areas-- than millennials. I have news for you, we were doing pretty amazing things with computers and hardware in the 80's an 90's and very little of it was about tricking people to click on ads. Go back and look at AI books from that era and you will find pretty much everything being done today...we just didn't have the hardware and the speed.
Excuse the digression. Growing up without the internet and with conventional brick-and-mortar, in-person businesses meant that person-to-person relationships were important. Nobody --nobody-- from my generation would seriously consider running a business where you absolutely ghost your customers and users. That's just unthinkable. That is not the way human beings related to each other in any pursuit.
However, for a generation who's reality has been looking at a screen and clicking buttons far more so than engaging with other humans in person, the idea of not bothering with real person-to-person problem solving might just be perfectly logical and sensible. Why bother? You can do everything with buttons on a touchscreen. Except, you can't.
To me this is a cultural problem. I have often imagine that some of the people who built these companies had the social skills and maturity of a brick. I know this isn't entirely accurate. Yet, how else does one explicitly make these choices? I can excuse social ineptitude as a sign of the time. The alternative would be to make such a choice while knowing just how harmful it could be. That is pure evil.
They have built mechanisms where destroying someone's business overnight, with no path to having a proper person-to-person business discussion, is deemed normal and acceptable. Talk to people who's lives were turned upside-down by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google and you'll learn just how horrific this kind of thing can be on the receiving end of the algorithms.
On this planet, today, if these three companies ban your from using their services, you do not exist. Period. Try running a business without using these channels (and their associated properties) for marketing and delivery and see how well you can do.
I am not a big government guy at all, quite to the contrary. However, I have, for some time, felt that this particular issue is one that needs truly intrusive government intervention. Companies of this scale and importance should not be able to kill your business on any given Monday and just ghost you forever. That is just plain wrong. And evil.
Don't forget that Content ID was created because of legislation, YouTube didn't invent DMCAs.
I have friends who invested their life savings in starting businesses on Amazon, only to be shut down without warning and losing it all as a result. Another one had their product cloned by Amazon once he achieved success, they shut down his account and absolutely ghosted him. No way to talk to anyone about any of it. He lost his home as a result. I know people who had their Google accounts suspended with no reason given and no way to contact anyone to resolve the matter, some suffering serious business consequences. Similarly with Facebook and FB advertising.
Such decisions are not made by people with the benefit of healthy human engagement in their lives. This behavior is evil, brutally so.
This should include how the royalties are split when multiple properties are connected to the same Ad (ex: one video that contains a song and a commentary). Right now, for their convenience they only pay the stronger party (usually the song rights holder) and ignore the other party. I think they should be legally required to split the revenues fairly.
Is it a hard problem to solve and risk a lawsuit hell? Sure, but they did solve way harder problems when they had the incentive to do so and certainly have the resources to solve this one. It's also rather easy to solve 90% of the problem and not being blatantly unfair, and I think 90% is way better than 0%.
The problem here is not convenience, it's that copyright was designed for an era when it was kind of hard to copy things. The DMCA was a good shim to make it feasible for Internet companies to even exist, but it's not enough to fix things in a world where literally every single bit of IP can be copied or downloaded in less than a day.
If, for example, Congress required content owners to submit copies of their works to some centralized US copyright database as a condition for being eligible to receive damages from platforms, that would go a long way to fix things on its own. Expanding the explicit set of fair use exemptions and allowing them to matter outside of a court would also be a big help.
Note that the system also has advantages. As a publisher you are protected from lawsuits most of the time, the worst case outcome is that you don't get revenue from a video or that you get banned from YouTube.
I'm not saying that the tradeoff is optimal for creators but I don't see how what YouTube is doing is illegal. Unless you try to assert that you were forced to accept the ToS because YouTube is effectively a monopoly. But I find that a really hard argument to make.
Which for example brings up the obvious approach of to sue YouTube for copyright infringement as they don’t have the rights to display your video if their not paying you. I expect you would lose that argument, but it might not be thrown out of court.
Google is respobsible for decisions they make, it's their problem that they use faulty automation.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...
>>Over the years, countless YouTube users have complained that their videos have been claimed and monetized by entities that apparently have no right to do so but, fearful of what a complaint might do to the status of their accounts, many opted to withdraw from battles they feared they might lose.
This fact and the aggressive-anti-support policies should setup Youtube for a class action suit.
Merely to avoid the expense of actually sorting out who is the actual copyright owner, Alphabet (& others) setup a system that systematically enables this type of fraud against artists, and provides no way to resolve it, and so they happily pay millions to fraudsters like these instead of the actual owners.
It'd be nice if the actual artists could get paid and if Google etc. could get the point that some things require actual support. Unlikely, but it'd be nice.
Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook.
Just a regular ISP in my country of Sweden needs an entire call centre to handle the calls it gets from customers.
Now scale that up to the levels of Google.
I can totally see why they've made the decision to avoid consumer contact. Their consumers are the entire internet.
I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.
Yes, I can.
Youtube knowingly traffics and sells stolen goods and services. Youtube's officers and directors know it. The key words there is knowingly. Arrest Youtube CEO as a head of a criminal enterprise. Bust her door pre-dawn and drag her out into the slammer. There's zero difference in how we should deal with Incs be that Mafia, Inc. or Youtube, Inc.
The mere prospect of that will quickly solve all the technical problems. It is all about motivation. Youtube's executives currently are not motivated to solve the problem. The government needs to provide the motivation.
Your ISP can afford to do so...
But yes, as they have a monopoly, they can afford not putting any call center anywhere.
Humans can be bribed, manipulated, or lied to. This introduces a whole set of new problems. It just turns "YouTube algo removed my channel because I got report bombed" to "A YouTube employees removed my channel after they were social engineered".
If you can't provide a service safely, equitably, and predictably at a given scale, maybe the answer is "don't do that".
Go back, pre-internet, and Bell Telephone surely had a sophisticated and expensive tech-support, customer-support department. They managed.
I think we've just come to begrudgingly accept that outsourcing, automating everything is okay. It's okay now to let the customer find your support phone number, navigate your phone tree, spend 30 minutes or more in a phone queue for, in the end, no real help.
Doesn't mean we have to excuse it.
Those services were a lot more expensive to their users as well. If everyone paid $xx/mo to YouTube I’m sure the customer support would be a lot better. But then most people wouldn’t be users in the first place.
So they have an unfair advantage over competition by avoiding the cost of customer support? Am I meant to feel sorry for them?
I think I lean in this direction, too. Customer service should go hand-in-hand with having customers in the first place. If you have grown so outrageously large that you have no feasible way to plumbing some of your astronomical profits to servicing those who facilitate your profits, then maybe you have grown too big.
The other day, I really really needed to get in touch with a human at Amazon to resolve an issue (Amazon issued me a refund, apparently in error). After an hour of researching how, I gave up.
The last time I needed to get in touch with a human there was 15 years or so ago. I was able to send an email to an actual human there, who responded! And was able to resolve the issue after 3 or 4 emails back and forth.
Now, all you get is a "Chat AI" who can't help you.
It's the beginning of their end folks. And that's a good thing (Martha Stewart voice).
(The other canary in the Amazon coal mine: their search engine results seem manipulated.)