I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next (2020)
gamefromscratch.com
gamefromscratch.com
Now you have paperwork establishing a crime.
If you're willing to spend legal fees, talk to a lawyer. You can potentially sue the extortionist as an unknown "John Doe", and Google as collaborating with the extortionist to extract money from you. Google is in a touchy position here, because they really did cooperate with an extortionist to extract money. Google can claim the cooperation was unwitting, but that can fall apart if an ongoing pattern of similar behavior can be shown, and if Google can be shown to have been negligent in determining whether takedown requests were valid.
This is routine in fleet auto accidents. Uber gets this all the time. They want to pass the buck to the driver, but they have to be able to identify the driver to do that. So they are very helpful about identifying the driver.
Because this arises from a criminal offense, Google's terms of service may be irrelevant. You cannot contract away liability for a crime.
So there's stuff you can do. This sort of thing usually settles out of court. But when you file a lawsuit, you're dealing with people well above the level of the customer service staff. Talk to a lawyer. Might even be able to find one willing to take this on a contingency fee basis.
This is an area where Google might not want extensive pre-trial discovery looking into exactly what level of cooperation they provide extortionists. If someone is extorting small dollar amounts, they're doing this more than once.
Reading, I wonder if it's the sort of thing where Google’s lawyers could brush you off because companies that large are effectively immune.
Is this just a legal hypothetical that is nice to believe it would work?
Has anyone actually done this/ been successful? How much did it cost?
In the letter I gave them 30 days to restore my account and pay the money they had wrongfully withheld. On the 30th day the account was restored and the money was paid.
Though I wrote the letter myself, I'd imagine anyone similarly situated could hire an attorney who practices contract law to write a similar letter for relatively low cost.
Could you please share why did they close the account and what argument did you make to have them open it back?
I have the same issue for another Google service
Since it was impossible for there to be such a relation I argued that under the terms of service governing the Adsense program my account was at all times in good standing and that by withholding payment Google had breached the agreement.
What you need is the "address for service of process" for the company. You get that from state corporation records. California lookup is here.[1] "GOOGLE LLC (201727810678)" seems to be the main entry. Google uses Corporation Service Company, which is a company that exists to receive and forward legal paperwork, and has an office in every state to receive mail for that purpose. Some kinds of legal documents have to be served by a process server, and there are companies which do that for you, for a fee. You get a report back from the process server on the delivery.
(Some years ago, I sued a retailer, and the process server's return read "person in charge threw papers out front door". It didn't help them. I got a default judgement in small claims court against them. They refused to pay that. I paid for a "till tap and 8 hour keeper", which meant that armed sheriff's deputies went to the store and took the money to pay the judgement. If there wasn't enough money on hand, they'd stay there for a day, behind the counter, collecting any money that came in, and explaining to customers why they were doing that. I had to pay a deposit to the sheriff's office for that, but the cost of that was added to the judgement, so that ended up costing me nothing. This is why businesses rarely ignore lawsuits. Eventually, cops with guns show up.)
Great work on the till and 8 hour keeper.
People in GDPR countries should also file a request for all data relating to the decision. They'll probably refuse it, in which case you should forward it to your Information Commissioner.
The advantage the company has it that they can drag things out for years and most people cant fight that battle with them. But smart companies will still respond, billable hours spent to fight it may often cost more than just doing what the customer asks. Using the adsense example, cost to do that all that was for sure way less than actually challenging someone over the issue. Demand letter means at least the legal intern is reading what you said at Google. Which is an improvement over nobody reading it.
You have “a record”. What does that get you?
This plan actually works?
There are many steps on the path to filing a lawsuit and actually going to court. For Google these steps are all fantastically expensive.
So if a credible threat exists, what usually happens is the case gets escalated to someone in the middle of the chain of command who has broad authority and a mandate to settle the matter as quickly and inexpensively as possible. If that includes giving you whatever you want, so be it.
They wouldn't have gotten to Google size if they were willing to die on every hill that came along.
That's what corporations want you to think. They hate lawsuits excessively. And you know, it was never really based on trust if you had to take them to court to pay and you were in the right.
Plus Fortune 500 companies set things up so fewer lawsuits reach higher sums. This is good for them, they pay less in total but get to complain and be bitchvictims much more.
Suppose Acme is selling dogfood made out of shellfish. Secretly puts a little bad shellfish in the dogfood, which could be out of sadism sometimes, or costs, but a combination. I guess they have contacts for cheap bad clams, do less cold-chain processing, less hygiene at the place, less protocols which also matter. All of these are money. Acme might be in bad debt, that's happening a lot right now, companies underwater.
It's gross and it kills ten of thousand of dogs. Now what would be fair is compensating each owner for about $20000, something of that magnitude, maybe more for a service dog, and with dogs it sucks but they're not valued exactly like humans, and the emotional bond might be worth more. So it can be argued in court, how much you cared about the dog, the breed the upkeep, the kids are heartbroken.
Now, instead of doing that, Acme does all these maneuvers, like selling the shellfish dogfood through an app with a sneakily-designed arbitration clause, dogfood-as-a-service, with a huge false advertising marketing push and a lot of subtly coercive funnel action. So you have these arbitration clauses, which is a total kangaroo court, and it's designed to be less expensive--which it is--but for the company. So then they kill a class-action lawsuit, and they use the legalistic equivalent of a growth hacker to work against the funnel for the lawsuits, so get people dropping out of their lawsuit. All but the most determined people. The most dogged dog owners, who just won't give up on justice for their dog.
Then, the Acme does appeal after appeal, expensive dilatory court maneuvers, legalistic abuses, like showing up with forty lawyers (some companies do this, talk about how many lawyers they have to intimidate people, plus it's a little mob in the courtroom which has a coercive physical presence. All these things in name of due process for instance (despite their funnel into the arbitration clause, which in my view is intent to avoid due process), because of the customers greed like the dead dog were a jackpot, all this shit. So finally after years and years of going back and forth--which the sadism element of Acme enjoys, especially watching plaintiffs get shunted out of the courtroom because of an eg eviction because they didn't get the money in time, or the lawyer sells them out to Acme (happened to me), well after all we're talking of a company that knowingly poisoned its dogfood--then at long last, there's a very skewed distribution of a very few expensive lawsuits. Like one for $6 million, one for $3, one for $2. Like a zipf distribution. And it cuts out after like $400000 because the suit has to make sense (ergodicity) if they can't get Acme to pay for their lawyers. But this is good for Acme, they can play the victim by pointing at those few expensive lawsuits, proving the customer's greed, and save a lot of money, because morally they owed $200M for poisonings. It's just multiplication.
Plus, the bitchvictim media then gives them moral authority to act super super paranoid and say "oh the lawsuits" with employees, with suppliers, with everybody, when they know full well those few lawsuits were their own work to distort the effect of the law. Again, sadism. They were always in business to cheat people, hence the dogfood-as-a-service app with the "firmatage", semi-coercive contract-signing funnel backed by huge marketing push with false advertising. Instead of just selling it at a supermarket, or on an online store WITHOUT that arbitration contract.
Plus, Acme is a shitty company[1]. Acme does not make a profit on their public-facing business model (the one in their ads after eg football games, about how good the quality is because they work so hard and do things so right, beautiful nature photos, model dogs actually eating a different food with food makeup), only on their internal-facing business model of selling poisoned dogfood. Adultering the dogfood. Shitting in other's mouths, and they're not surprised either, despite their customer support all saying "this is the first time we've heard of this." Their business model is poisoning dogs, it's not an accident their app has that arb clause.[2]
See this post I wrote, about a garbage company killing a toddler as part of its business model and the question of suing them or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30768600
They can't stay in business as a virtuous company, if they even wanted to, they dump the risk of bad clams on their customers. But paying out suits requires real profits! America in general is much less profitable than it once was.
And it's a class thing, how dare you, you middle-class American, take money from me, a higher-class group of managers?
Blackballing, basically.
So if you want to blackball me, go right ahead, I don't want to deal with shitty companies, I'll pay the company that can be taken to court because it does have make a real profit, and can feel shame, and understands the need for regulation. Besides I'm a Roman Law hero, literally a champion on the street, you expect me to take it lying down when it's legal arguments instead of street fighting? I took landlords to court over defaulting on the deposit, I took a former employer to court over unpaid contracts, I take people to court. Let that be known. Especially due to intellectual property, the whole thing is intrinsically litigious, well like all property. But the bigger picture is, the profits are really really solid because my algorithms are so dominant (10x, 50x, 10000000000x speedups). Hey would you rather it be like ordinary property, asking for my wallet and seeing what I do about it?
And court is not a terrible place to talk things out. There's no violence, everyone is accountable for what they claim and say and do, if you ask exactly what you deserve and turn down any amount beyond that it changes the game, too. Just being righteous.
[1] Google I would say is not, but I heard of them not paying out eg Adwords, like that other guy had to take them to small claims say they couldn't discriminate just if he had brown eyes or blue eyes, where Google said they reserved the right to welch for any reason, and had made money on the plaintiff they didn't want to actually share.
[2] Businesses can run it in default mode, which is what LLC's are for, then you get some liability but like limited, and the law is basically designed to be fair. Especially because judges smell "oh this is a shitty company trying to game the system" and juries are wise a lot of the time. If on the other hand the business actually could profit from the public-facing business model, it would be a totally different story.
:)
ROFL
Google will probably settle out of court. Most commercial litigation never reaches trial. The reason you do this sort of thing is that it forces Google to send somebody competent to talk to your lawyer.
Just because the single incident is only $50 doesn’t mean the criminal or class of criminals are a trivial problem.
[1] “WTF Happened in 1971? | Hacker News.” Accessed May 26, 2022. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471602.
It's been a standard script kiddy attack since basically there were publication services where you could be banned/blocked/whatever by automated systems. Early blogs were frequent victims, surely earlier stuff was as well? Probably even basic BBSs had similar nonsense.
as creators decided to make themselves ever more dependent on ever-more-centralized services.
Nebula is one example where some of the more education-focused channels have been posting videos. Not sure if it’s been successful though.
And from my experience, people overwhelmingly watch YouTube on phones or tablets, and wouldn’t be messing around with anything like BitTorrent. If you think that is a good alternative, then you are not representative of the average YouTube user.
Yeah, probably not, as I never visit the site except through links or if I need a how-to-repair video. There's no reason people can't consume video through torrent or other p2p tech though. Webtorrents, peertube, etc are relatively mainstream and completely painless to use. There also exist torrent clients on Android for maaany years.
How well did creators do when they switched to Mixer from Twitch? Donald Trump had tons of Twitter followers, how many does he have on Truth Social? If you have a two sided marketplace, you need people on both sides for it to succeed.
Historically some people have decided to sell themselves into slavery, should we respect their freedom of choice?
Not just interface layout or visual themes, either— design is a lot more than the way something looks. The whole experience from learning about the platform to becoming a regular user— including for people who don't read man pages on a regular basis— is important. As soon as I need to explain to my parents that "yes, it's all PeerTube but PeerTube is just the server software and my cousin's PeerTube instance they signed up with isn't connected to the PeerTube federated service and so they can't see videos from the the PeerTube for their guitar hobby group" then its all over. There is zero point zero percent chance it will become a viable public service without big changes.
It seems to indicate a lack of communication in each review of how thoroughly the video was evaluated. By the third time round, there should have been a note attached saying something along the lines of "I watched this entire video looking for keygens, patchers, or anything that might be a circumvention. There are none. This is a legitimate review of the product in question and nothing more."
Someone protesting? Charge them for brwaking the law fuve years ago that noone understands.
Employee speaking out? Fire them for breaking company policy on something random, company policy that no-one follows.
Transparent law enforcement has never succeeded anywhere. (The US makes the laws notionally "transparent" but written so broadly that they apply to everyone, and the opaque part is under prosecutorial discretion, but in practice it's very much the same mechanism as what the likes of e.g. China do)
This complete hyperbole. While transparency can make some rules easier to dodge, it doesn't necessarily make those rules completely ineffective. There are also different types of rules that are more or less sensitive to transparency.
It is thus definitely possible to design abuse prevention systems that, while not perfect, do function in a transparent environment.
For example, a level of non transparency is important for criminal investigations, many criminal trials can be completely transparent and expose previously secret details of the investigation. All criminal trials must have a certain level if transparency because fair trials are impossible if you are told the evidence that is used against you.
If this was Google's The Process, Joseph K. would have been told he cannot know the exact nature of his crime, because that would allow him to subvert "The Algorithm."
This is simply another case of "if you put all your eggs in one googlebasket, you deserve what's coming to you".
"Any YouTuber" isn't vulnerable to blackmail unless the bad actor has specific compromising information about the YouTuber to threaten with.
This is not a new thing. It's been going on for at least 4-5 years if not more.
Blackmail is also a thing. "take down video x or I'll strike your account" and such.
That's still not blackmail. Blackmail is when you threaten to divulge information about someone unless they pay you.
Blackmail is when someone threatens to release your nudes unless you pay them.
Extortion is when someone threatens to get you banned on YouTube unless you pay them.
Maybe that's because of trolling, because they don't like your content, or simply because they can get paid.
"Extortion is a form of theft that occurs when an offender obtains money, property, or services from another person through coercion. A form of extortion could include the threat of physical injury, destruction of property, or improper government action."
"Blackmail, in contrast to extortion, is when the offender threatens to reveal information about a victim or his family members that is potentially embarrassing, socially damaging, or incriminating unless a demand for money, property, or services is met."
If I threaten to tell your partner that you are cheating even if you don't, that is blackmail.
If I threaten to tell your google that you are circumventing technological measures even if you don't, that is blackmail.
Neither is physical injury, destruction of property, or an improper government action.
Threatening to call a SWAT team to someone's house if they don't pay you is extortion, not blackmail, even though you're providing 'information' to the police, it is to cause a physical threat, not to damage reputation.
The result here is destruction of income, not damage to reputation. It's extortion.
But if I tell your threaten you to tell your employer you are stealing from him it's blackmail. If you get fired it's destruction of income but still blackmail.
Or an example of former times. I threaten to tell your boss you are gay, you get fired if I do, also destruction of income.
It's not the result but the type of threat. Extortion requires some sort of physical force blackmail is verbal
Spurious copyright strikes are just an attack on income, no different from a DDOS, ransomware, or running up a bunch of spurious purchases, in anything but the mechanism (in this case providing fraudulent information). That's extortion.
Not: "I will take down X video of yours unless you do Y". That's just extortion.
Maybe it's time to reimagine content sharing that has full uncensorable control of the creator and reach of today's centralized platforms, with a fair way to monetize.
Youtube was initially successful because hosting video for playback in a browser was difficult and expensive. It's not difficult anymore, but it's still expensive at scale. It was not profitable and only managed to keep operating because Google bought it early on and absorbed losses for a decade.
Youtube only became profitable when it started running lots of ads and using a recommendation engine that's prone to amplify misinformation and political extremism. That's not the only thing the recommendation engine does of course, but everyone running a massively popular service with user-generated content and a recommendation engine seems to have the same issues. Of course, advertisers are nervous about having their ads run next to controversial content, so these kinds of services tend to remove first and ask questions later.
Those are the reach and monetization bits. What's a better way to solve those problems than ads and a recommendation algorithm?
Perhaps we (for a random definition of "we") should have legislation requiring these companies to provide warranty for the services they provide, under a common set of minimal and inalienable rights, when the service is "free" but the company has revenue from ads and such. Having warranty for the services require some level of tech support, of course.
Will this scale for a Google-sized company? Probably not, but that's their problem. It would even be better, for us as a society, if this makes these companies unsustainable; I can only dream of they being replaced by thousands of smaller ones for which the approach is sustainable.
We had a YouTube video that we manually recorded and uploaded. Some random guy no way related to it claimed copyright without any proof and YT immediate removed from listing.
The appeal process is so complicated and probably have to deal with another bot, it was not worth the process so we just ignored.
What i've learned is, if anybody want to blackmail or jealous of your channel, all they have to do is submit a request and your video will be out with an endless and almost impossible appeal process.
Agree.
>The people that aren't affected by the unjust terminations and bans obviously don't care enough to stop using the product, so they tend to not lose any money when it happens.
Hard disagree. A good portion of the world turns because of these companies, and you have to spend an absolutely extraordinary amount of effort to avoid using the big services like Google/Amazon. And even more often, you aren't given a choice at all. Find me a workplace that doesn't use any of the FAANG (or whatever the acronym is now) companies at some level.
Google cattl^^product might not like it, but customers are being kept happy.
They should (and probably do) keep records of a creator's history with confirmed copyright violations. If the creator has repeatedly violated copyright, then the auto filter can kick in. Otherwise, if it's a channel that regularly gets hundreds of thousands of views and does not get copyright violations regularly, they should give the creator time to respond.
Finally, they should keep records of people filing copyright claims. If the people are repeatedly filing false copyright claims, they should have some sort of action taken against them. I don't know, maybe if you file more than 5 bad copyright claims, if you file another invalid copyright claim you have to pay the withheld revenue to the creator. Maybe that would make people think a little before filing baseless claims.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/26/this-is-really-really-du...
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/23/11th-circuit-disagrees-w...
https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/08/conservatives-want-commo...
Something should be done to ward off the Kafkaesque future we are heading for, but declaring websites as common carriers is a poor way to do it.
- Google tailors results to users, so it shouldn't be considered a common carrier
- Google doesn't charge users for access, so it shouldn't be considered a common carrier
- Internet search isn't a vital public service, so Google shouldn't be considered a common carrier
I totally believe you that there may be reasons not to consider common carrier a magic solution, but... I disagree with all three of those points.
(in other words: I think two people searching for the same terms at the same time should see the same results, and I don't think it matters that the service is funded based on indirect (advertising / tax) revenue, and I do think that many people -- in all kinds of environments -- can reasonably expect Internet access and web search to the point where we should consider it a public necessity)
I agree, but that's not the point being stated.
The point is that the entire concept of Google is about ranking (a form of discrimination) the relevancy of websites to the search query. Common carrier status means that a search for "Microsoft official website" would not be able to prioritize Microsoft's official website, because that would be discriminating against all other websites that claim to be Microsoft's official website (and, by extension, discrimination against the people hosting those websites, who would then be able to sue Google for that discrimination).
Common carrier status also throws a giant wrench into the already problematic issue of content moderation.
The 11th Circuit's ruling explains the concept much more eloquently and with much greater detail than I can hope to (the full ruling is available via the 2nd link in my post).
>I agree, but that's not the point being stated.
I mostly agree, but I can see where being located in completely different locales might lead to slightly different results without nefarious intent.
Sure, I can get on board with some niche cases where tailored results are non-nefarious and beneficial to the end user.
And that sort of hammers my point further, as common carrier status would make discrimination based on location a potential lawsuit.
I dislike that google hides what is being done.
Not really. All you'd have to do is make the algorithm public, and become a commodity. When you're a common carrier, you sell bandwidth, not magic fairy dust.
> Common carrier status means that a search for "Microsoft official website" would not be able to prioritize Microsoft's official website, because that would be discriminating against all other websites that claim to be Microsoft's official website (and, by extension, discrimination against the people hosting those websites, who would then be able to sue Google for that discrimination).
This is absurd. Trademark violators can't sue for not being treated like the real deal any more than I can demand that my phone company say that all of my calls come from the White House. If Microsoft backs up their claims to all be official, then they all should be able to sue.
edit:
> Common carrier status also throws a giant wrench into the already problematic issue of content moderation.
No it doesn't, it decides it for Google. And Congress would be free to allow Google to do whatever moderation it wants, and this shitty court might give it even more latitude. Count me as someone who is perfectly happy with preventing Google from doing any content moderation not required by law. All of the drive to censor has been coming from Congress and the administration anyway; the real danger in the current climate is that Google becomes a common carrier and gets the analog of the Great Firewall dropped around it the next day.
As to the first amendment concerns, OK. We tie the section 230 protections to keeping their hands off the delete key instead. There are no first amendment concerns for holding nigh-monopolist social media companies responsible for the libelous, threatening, defamatory, terroristic content they choose to host every day.
These companies are not good faith actors. It is time to stop treating them as such.
I thought I made it super clear, but to make it even more super duper clear; I agree. What we have now isn't working.
However, I don't think common carrier status is the appropriate or effective way to go about making changes. And I think the articles I posted are a good (mainly, they are convenient and the first two are timely) introduction to why I believe that.
Several parts of that directly contradict the arguments that techdirr is trying to make.
Edit: For example, one of those articles says "American courts identify industries and businesses as common carriers if they do not distinguish between customers or decide what they will and will not carry. " Which gets the relationship between non-descrimination and common carrier status exactly backwards. Non-discrimination and interoperability are legal requirements imposed on private companies due to their common carrier status in exchange for reducing their liability.
Truly love Google's customer service!!!!
CaaS
Most of them don't notice because it's DMCA bots anyways. The way I see it I have no obligation to read your mail if you have a history of just wasting my time.
I'm not in the US and probably wouldn't recommend anyone to do the same, unless they're themselves absolutely sure their legal system will have their back.
OK, yes I'm a somewhat bitter when I hear about stories like this. Brings me back to the iPhone App store "early" days. "early" because these problems persisted for more than 4 or 5 years... when anyone with a little bit of try could raise their app up in the rankings and send yours down in the rankings just by spamming the app reviews.
I suspect the YouTube _complaints_ staff are much more likely to be contractor micromanaged call centre staff with 90 resolutions per hour targets and stopwatches on their bathroom breaks, instead of the sort of staff slurping down barista-made solent green smoothies while getting Reiki hot stone massages during work hours...
Maybe if we trigger that stuff enough they'll realise what a terrible idea auto banning is.
Or probably not, no they won't.