Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream
bbc.com
bbc.com
> & thx for your patience as we sorted it out
But they haven't really sorted it out, have they? False copyright strike claims have been plaguing creators for years. This is just another case of someone needing social media and a huge reach or an inside connection to Google employees to get human eyes on a situation and "resolve" it, with no recourse on the lost revenue from the time it was down and no real guarantee it won't happen again.
Google is not paying my Admob money even after 5 months has passed (no violation, self-close of account)
Through the Kafkaesque maze of non-existent Adsense support, my case (they say) finally got escalated to a payment person at Google. Yet, I didn't hear update for the past month.
You can't ask anything about your case and you can't get any time projection on when you'll hear anything back.
If you don't have big traffic or huge social reach, you are expendable and can get stuck in a never-ending hell.
Do people have success when they notify (not sue) the legal team about Google acting against their Terms of Service?
Lawyers here are not willing to handle international cases except big business cases.
That said, I'd be surprised if your court system required you to lawyer up for every (relatively) small contract infringement- contracts essentially become pointless for anything less than 20 hours of billable time from a lawyer.
If you are a citizen of another country doing business with Google it should follow that your country's courts have jurisdiction, if you're in the EU I imagine any EU country has jurisdiction (not because I imagine you are, but just as an example of how you might be able to pick a better jurisdiction - but that of course would be up to talking with a lawyer about)
Your point is spot on, if you don’t have a huge social media following you might as well be invisible. This has to change, hopefully via law. Because it isn’t just a google problem.
I'm afraid I'll end up like this:
- unable to use Adsense/Admob for years
- and not getting the money
- money becomes basically nothing because of inflation
I would spend ~20 minutes following different resolution paths, get mad at them not helping at all, forget about it because this level of frustration is not worth $100 to me, repeat a few times a year. Don’t get me wrong, $100 is $100 - I just wasn’t in dire need of it I guess.
Wild guess: a bugfix was merged and deployed.
This was (and still is) the IBM model for B2B software; and it was also the industry-standard model for game developers (interacting with the platform owner through a "publisher" — essentially taking the role here of an integrator.) It's probably still the industry-standard model for musicians to engage with big record labels.
I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for this model. Their focus on "scaling services as much as possible using as few human support staff as possible" means this model is essentially perfect for them. But they ignore it. Maybe because they think it'd make them look like a dinosaur?
(I know they do do it in some places — we use GCP, and apparently, to be able to switch from card-based billing to invoice-based billing, we're required to also switch from direct GCP support, to a support-contract with a GCP reseller. So we'd be paying the reseller — the invoices would be riding as accounts-receivable on the reseller's books, rather than on Google's!)
Isn't this kinda what multi-channel networks are?
YouTube MCNs are more like book publishers: none of them are very large in number of supply-side entities aggregated. Some of them have "popular" talent that could very well get YouTube's attention on their own, but none of them are doing collective bargaining for thousands of creators. So there are still tons of them; so YouTube doesn't really relate to them on a first-name basis.
Like book publishers, MCNs mostly offer one of two benefits: either "we do the hard business parts of running a content-creation business for you" (not a lie, though it's a bad deal); or "we have at least one very popular creator, and so by joining with us, you're at-least-theoretically taking advantage of the attention they get." (When that's tenuous, as the popular creators aren't beholden to these groups and might leave at any time, and if they do, there goes your trump card in dealing with YouTube.)
We need to reform the legal responsibilities of sites like Youtube to enable them to take a more considered approach.
If every false DMCA notice resulted in a fine for copyright holder, or even better, filing X false DMCA notices resulted in a copyright holder's ban from filing more DMCA notices, then I think the problem would resolve itself in short order.
I have heard that some folks use DMCA as, basically, a "protection racket." Not sure why they would do that, because there are probably easier (and less risky) ways.
But, as long as there's no penalty for filing a false DMCA claim, there's nothing stopping the "blunderbuss approach," which is hugely popular, with lawyers.
That provides an incentive for companies to respond to the screaming demand from their users to have better review.
This isn't really true. The main grievance people have with Google is that they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person. They enable this type of abuse because they make it easy for people to abuse the DMCA system with impunity.
Even massive channels and companies have a hard time fighting back. A recent example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/bungie-slams-you...
Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to a human, would be flooded with people trying to step around the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to engage with it. People would post links to it on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR on the line" (even though that person is only empowered to do a very specific thing, and probably doesn't have internal contacts for their equivalents in any other department), and then those CSRs would be demoted-in-practice to level-1 triage, even though level-1 triage is supposed to be the machine's job.
As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above.
I'll give you a hint for three such side-channels, though:
- There are public product discussion and bugs mailing lists (Google Groups) for many Google services. The engineers working on these products monitor these lists.
- Some things you'd think Google develops in private, are actually developed in public. Examples: https://github.com/googleapis; https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform. You can file issues on these repos!
- When Google engineers and, especially, Product Managers, put their public @google.com email addresses on conference presentations, they do that for a reason. They want you to reach out with questions/concerns about the thing they've built!
This is because Google has no culture of human support, so when an agent does become available they're flooded with backlog. If Google started providing it, especially where money is involved, the backlog would eventually be caught up and this would no longer be a big issue. But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law because of the cost.
I would go further: I suspect that Google would just shut down many of its services if they had to provide human support, because the cost of serving the sheer number of people Google serves, with any level of effectiveness, would turn the the products from positive-margin or at least acceptable-cost loss-leaders, into highly-negative-margin.
In any case, Alphabet's net earnings in 2021 were $76,000,000,000. They could hire 760,000 people at $100k cost per year and still break even. It wouldn't take anywhere near that number to introduce humans into critical loops like copyright strikes and ad revenue customer support, so they could easily–easily—afford it. I think they just don't want to, because they'd rather make all the money and they don't institutionally care about people ground up in the cracks.
That cost is mostly imaginary. First, it’s already tiny - computers are cheap - and second, 90% of that cost is for stuff that only matters to Google; you could make that part disappear without hurting user experience.
Okay, and what about the thousands of people who legitimately need help? Do you really think it's acceptable that people have their content stolen or falsely flagged, or their channel demonetised or banned without recourse?
The only reason the scenario you've described could happen is because Google has made it impossible to talk to a real person in the first place.
> As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to engage with them — they just can't "say any of them out loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as above.
I'm aware of these. None of them are an acceptable alternative to having actual human support for paid products.
Furthermore, even if I were to concede that your first point is valid that still wouldn't excuse large channels or corporations having to navigate a Kafka-esque nightmare to get basic human support. It speaks volumes that Bungie's team of lawyers couldn't even stop someone from filing false DMCA claims on their behalf without considerable effort.
Yes. Or rather, these particular commercial relationships shouldn't exist in the first place — they're fundamentally untenable.
As I say in my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071124#32073569), Google shouldn't be attempting to work with independent creators at all; there's no way to make it work. It shouldn't allow people to directly post on YouTube. (At least, monetized. They could still support it for hobbyists who aren't out to make money and are explicitly opting out of any support.)
Instead, YouTube should be directly engaging — and encouraging the consolidation of — MCNs, into a small collection of reseller-partners; a collection small-enough that YouTube can scalably listen to those partners' complaints. Where those partners then act as collectors and filters for complaints, only raising to YouTube's attention the problems that actually seem to be YouTube problems rather than PEBKAC problems.
Am I reinventing mainstream media? Yes. Because mainstream media scales.
This seems pretty ridiculous though, right? Imagine a system like this for any other service. A self checkout with no help button, but they'll totally help you if you do the konami code on the screen and say the pledge of allegiance.
I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault. They are choosing to be this big, and they can choose to have better customer support. It would just cost them a lot of money.
You're being flip, but there are actually plenty of things like this.
For example — you know those arcades full of UFO-catcher machines, where the games are rigged so that it only allows you to grab the thing after N tries?
You can pump 10 dollars into the machine, and maybe still not get it... or you can just politely ask the attendant to get you the thing out of the machine after trying and failing once. And they will, because — unlike a carnival side-show operator who owns their booth+merchandise — for a gacha-store employee, it's no skin off their back if everyone gets a bear. Unacknowledged public side channels!
For another — it's a common belief that Adobe is perfectly fine with individuals pirating Photoshop, and really only go after companies who pirate. They think of individuals using the pirated version of their software, as future professional users in training; where the company those professional users work at, will inevitably buy them a Photoshop license. Adobe won't give you a Photoshop educational license (or at least, they didn't used to have such a thing) — but by pirating it, you're essentially taking advantage of an unacknowledged public side-channel left there by Adobe.
But really, in the Google case, it's not just about it being an unpublished side-channel; it's also specifically about engineers being okay with being reached out to by other engineers, who are signalling by their method of outreach that they understand engineering culture, and so, implicitly, that they understand the engineering problem implied by their request; have already tried to solve the problem themselves; etc.
It's the same reason that people in NOCs have unpublished numbers to get people in their peer NOCs on the line in case of a network outage. They're fine with people reaching out with a problem, if those people are going to tell them something useful that they don't already know.
The Google engineer is fine being told that their code breaks in edge-case XYZ. But they don't want to be asked how to empty your trash in Gmail. And they especially don't want to deal with demands and threats from people who have been scammed out of money over email, who want their money back, and think it's Google's legal responsibility to do that for them.
> I don't get why we act like google being too big to support all its clients is our fault.
It's "our" fault in the sense of Google being an American corporation incentivized to maximize profit; and profit maximization implying maximization of margin by cutting / avoiding cost-centres (e.g. support costs); and consumers enabling that by preferring services that have those lower-margins over services that have higher margins. Your ability to use email, today, for free, has higher Net Present Value than your future unanswered support questions.
Or, to put that another way: it's capitalism's fault. But not capitalists' fault, per se. It's the fault of people doing what's economically rational. It's economically rational to use Gmail instead of a paid email service. It's economically rational to build your following on YouTube instead of Dailymotion/Vimeo/etc.
People can complain all they like, but they still do it, rather than doing something else, because a free product with no support still optimizes better for their preferences than spending a single dollar on an alternative does.
This wasn't just a DMCA take-down of specific material (which for it's faults, does have an appeal process and some legal remedies.) This was a complete account ban imposed by Google, where the only functioning appeal process is going viral on twitter. While we do need to change the DMCA to hold issuers of fraudulent or abusive take requests more responsible, in this instance we also need to hold Google responsible for choosing to create an automated copyright strike/ban system that is clearly ripe for abuse and that does not have a functional appeal processes for the average user.
Even given those things, Google is complicit in the legal landscape being what it is today. Google has regularly defended the DMCA, and claimed it's working well. They're the largest lobbying organization in the tech world. They've even spent time and money defending other providers (e.g. Hotfile) in court for not implementing filtering, arguing that it's not necessary to receive DMCA's safe harbor provisions, but have implemented content identification and filtering in-spite of that.
How is defending /not/ filtering being complicit anyway? That is about as strong a "personal choice" a stance a company can take.
A much stronger statement would be defending their right not to do it and then, crucially, not doing it.
Sure they can. They choose not to, for obvious reasons. If they were able to confirm, after the outcry, that the takedown claim was "abusive" -- by whatever criteria -- then there's no reason they couldn't have done that before they outcry. But the cost of doing that would start to chip away at, well, you know what.
https://mobile.twitter.com/danbri/status/1545760855052193792
The reason - they quoted a small Richard Feynman clip from an archive BBC show. After fixing it took 12 more hours to unblock the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q
Way to go BBC, protect your rights, make sure nobody cites any of your precious videos. /s
I wish I could be more sympathetic, there are people sharing information and entertainment on youtube that is priceless. But they're working for a faulty employer with a poor history of worker rights. Worker beware.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/digital-trails-how-bungie-identifie...
The Bungie case was regarding actual DMCA takedown requests.
So was the Lofi girl stream given "takedown notice" and how it contributes to the 3-strike system: https://twitter.com/lofigirl/status/1546058721792507906?s=20
It never goes beyond that ever. What about restitution to the people who were wrongly taken down? Why is false DMCA takedowns so prevalent if it's illegal per DMCA? Turns out NO ONE has ever been convicted of a false DMCA claim, and that's by design. In fact, the phenomenon has its own name: Copyfraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud
That's what happens when we let businessmen write our laws. A fix to how Google handles DMCA isn't enough, DMCA is fundamentally user hostile. We need to fix this at the political level.
I don’t blame people for being skeptical. It’s easy to forget that big companies die due to being transcended, not replaced. The YouTube killer won’t look anything like YouTube, and tiktok fits that bill nicely.
Case in point: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR2KUDn8/?k=1
Google is realizing how bad it is that they can’t index TikToks, the same way they realized how bad it is they couldn’t index tweets in 2015 or so.
Damn, I was legitimately trying to not sign up for TikTok but if it can actually beat out Google in a search for terms like that, that’s actually huge
Tiktok does not fit the bill.
Tiktoks not being indexed is a win for content and UI quality.
Most of my YouTube watching is things like Anton Petrov's 15+ minute science videos, PBS Space Time, hour+ live streams, DefCon/Blackhat/Other Conference talks, and a hundred other things that I don't think are available or desired on TikToks platform (and maybe not even supported? I'm not sure what the max video length is on TikTok).
Not only that, but lots of tiktok accounts are literally just reuploading full youtube videos from channels like Kurzgesagt. Not happy about that, but it's also a sign of a successful platform. Facebook had the same situation going on.
Most of my tiktok watching is exactly the same as yours on youtube, by the way. My educational playlist is at 242 entries, whereas the lol playlist is around 160.
2016 launch: 15 sec
2017: 30 sec
Jul 2021: 3 min
Feb 2022: 10 min
No, not really.
Ripping Youtube content is trivial, so you basically have a raidable pool of high-quality content that you can re-upload and monetise, that you didn't have to pay for in any way.
If you're seeing a lot of Kurzgesagt vidoes on TikTok, all that means is that someone found out their monetisation success rate for those stolen videos is high enough that it makes financial sense to carry on doing it.
I honestly don't think something like YouTube ever could be profitable without destroying the product that exists today. I don't believe the primary purpose of TikTok is to make money.
You could already upload short videos, why would a shit UI for short videos be a plus?
In this case, it sounds like it was a malicious action by an actual human being, but I've seen a lot of great content creators say things like, "I'm only going to play you 3 seconds of this song to avoid having my channel removed." Seems like there's gotta be a better way.
Video "channels" should be like podcasts: hosting and discovery largely separate. Subscription, client-side.
YouTube shouldn't exist.
By your brilliant logic, Hacker News shouldn't exist.
Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
> Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
Right, and podcast fans largely hate that trend.
Heh, no big deal, that "like" in the original was crucial and easy to scan past. These things happen.
> FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video since the very beginning.
More generally I think the Internet and the markets growing on it would be a hell of a lot healthier if we outlawed the creepy & dangerous mass data collection that encourages lock-in and monopolization, and the video market specifically (including streaming services like Netflix and friends) if we outlawed certain kinds of vertical integration there. Economy of scale is quite enough to push things toward monopoly, no need to have those factors amplifying the effect and increasing the harm of such monopolies.
I find the push-back on this baffling. It's like if web hosting were all but completely controlled by one monopolist and questioning that drew all kinds of "LOL how could web hosting even work without one monopolist controlling the whole thing and dictating what can and cannot be hosted, it's impossible, you're nuts, no-one could ever start a hobby website again without that monopolist".
Who is buying these ads on this new video site that no one is using yet?
Bitcoin is an exception to this and it was most likely made by one guy as a FOSS payment solution which would compete against Visa/Mastercard, commercial banks and central banks all at the same time. On the other hand Satoshi could've patented his ideas and go straight to the VISA and try to sell them the Blockchain story but he decided to make it FOSS and truly decentralized.
I think they mainly won because they figured out that capturing a huge amount of data about user behavior (i.e. industrial-scale spying) was incredibly lucrative. That's also part of why, despite being free services, they despise anything that might take your activity (so, valuable data) somewhere else for even a second, so, open standards and any kind of inter-operation. This let them provide free services with tons of income to put into development and, vitally, promotion.
I think the key insight from there is that that sort of situation doesn't just discourage use of free alternatives—it discourages development of them. I'm certain we'd have more and better free (and paid!) alternatives, and way more developers putting free work into that space for protocol and client/server development, if not for the huge moat that is creepy data-hoarding to feed monetizable AI. Competing—even on a volunteer basis—against unassailable behemoths with what may as well be an unlimited advertising & development budgets is discouraging, to put it lightly. I'd never think of working on that kind of project right now, because the market, enabled by the legality of mass-scale stalking by corporations, means it's pointless no matter how good a product you make.
The same situation is with Zuckerberg and MySpace. When Zuck saw MySpace and other social networks at the time being free he made his own version of free social network and again when millions of users started flocking in with millions of data points ads were the next logical step and therefore surveillance capitalism emerged.
Tbh idk if Google and Facebook would be so successful if they were subscription based or would some free alternative come and destroy them.
Take Netflix and YouTube as example; they are both modern versions of TV and they both compete for screen time but YouTube being free and being fueled by essentially free user generated content is in much better position business wise than Netflix will ever be. Netflix needs to convince people to subscribe, they need to do movies contracting, they are spending billions to create their own content etc. And I think at this point YouTube is close to surpassing Netflix by revenue.
>I think the key insight from there is that that sort of situation doesn't just discourage use of free alternatives—it discourages development of them.
I agree with you but at the same time look how TikTok rose from the ashes of Vine. And now TikTok is the biggest Facebook and YouTube competitor for digital ad spending in the last decade.
I think if you want to compete against behemoths you need to dive into niches they do not dare to explore. For example imagine search engine which would allow you to search for "ad-free" websites. Google would never think of creating such feature yet implementing it would be unimaginable because they run the ad show on the web.
That aside, do we know the claim was really bogus? The article doesn't seem to mention that. It does seem like a rather easy grift to just nab a bunch of MP3 files plus some artwork from DeviantArt, throw them into IceCast or whatever, and go live on YouTube. I've listened to a few similar streams (not this one in particular since the "lo-fi hip-hop" genre isn't my thing) and just kinda always assumed the whole YT meta was basically a bunch of pirate radio stations.
It was more like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
Centralised services are fine to use as content delivery networks but they are not reliable as single sources for your material. Self-hosting - i.e. where you own the domain through which the material is distributed, you can choose to leave the actual hosting to a hosting provider since you always have the option of redirecting the domain to another address should the hosting provider fold in some way - gives control over a far larger part of the distribution chain, if the copyright police wants to block you they'll have to move down in the protocol stack to take down your internet access. We're not there yet and should it ever come that far there are ways around that as well (IPFS, I2P etc.).
Content creators are the only ones with the power to build up a competing platform such that youtube has to stop hurting the creators or risk losing their monopoly status as the de-factor video hosting platform.
Imagine if this content creator chose an alternative and linked to it in this tweet and everyone else started doing similarly. At the rate youtube is harming content creators, doesn't seem like it'd take long before users instinctively checked the competitions site anytime content gets taken down which might eventually turn into overthrowing their monopoly if they don't fix their issues.
I've been watching quite a few videos from a fairly popular Youtube channel, tldrnews. At the beginning of a lot of their videos, they've been advertising an alternate video platform, Nebula, with exclusive and more in-depth videos. Thing is, even though I might want to watch those videos, I've never been tempted to even click on the link.
It's not that Nebula costs money. Even if it were free, I don't really want to be watching videos on other services. I hate the way YouTube is run. I hate ContentID, I hate the copyright strike system, I hate the recommendation algorithm, I hate how difficult it is to get a real human to deal with the issues on the site. But everything's there, and that's what I want most of all.
It's a strange position to take, especially when I wish everyone would go back to having their own sites rather than just post on social media, but when it comes to video content, I want it to be like Star Trek. I want to be able to search in one place and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for.
I know it's greedy and irrational, but I want everything centralized into one service so I don't have to think about where to go to watch a thing. I want a monopoly, but without the problems that come with a monopoly, and I suspect a large enough percentage of users feel the same way that other platforms just can't get off the ground.
Podcast model. Client handles discovery and "subscriptions" and all that. Hosting is separate. YouTube's immense control comes from controlling all of that, but there's no reason you have to have a single provider to get the everything's-in-one-place effect—you can instead empower client programs. That kills the "ugh, but I don't want to go to another site..." effect because it's simply not an issue. You click "subscribe" and it's in the same "app" as everything else, regardless of where the videos are hosted.
If only there were some company dedicated to providing search for resources that others host online. Perhaps if they had a mission to make the world's knowledge more accessible. :-)
Plus, I'm pretty sure if you excluded stuff that's never likely to be watched by many folks except the odd fluke that gains viral notoriety (think: training videos, home videos that aren't aiming for virality, schools filming sports & activities and posting them, that kind of thing) you could cut that number to 10% or less of that. Most of the content going up isn't intended for a wide audience, I'd bet. An at-least-as-good video-podcast client wouldn't need to index or present the vast majority of what gets uploaded to YouTube. Much of that would be fine over on one of the lesser streaming services (Vimeo, say) now, but only ends up on YouTube because it's synonymous with user-uploaded Web video for most folks.
Coupling discovery and hosting means you're either killing your business by trying to do this, or finding temporary refuge with another soon-to-be monopolist that'll start abusing you in the same ways before long.
"Oh, you don't like it? Are you going to leave? No? K then."
YouTube makes its money because there are eyeballs on screens. As long as somebody is making content for those eyeballs, and the eyeballs remain on YouTube, there is literally z e r o incentive for them to change.
(1 day ago; 94 points, 16 comments)