More phony copyright claims for YouTube creators | Hacker News Reader

More phony copyright claims for YouTube creators

larryjordan.com

78 pointsrelwin51 comments

Wouldn't it be great if, for every false copyright claim, the person/entity making the claim received strikes and had to compensate the person subjected to the false claim? Make abusing the system costly? Attempt to compensate victims of the copyright claim system abuse? Maybe?

> Attempt to compensate victims of the copyright claim system abuse? Maybe?

It is called following the law! DMCA Section 512(f) basically says that if you issue a false claim, you are liable for all damage you caused, including attorney fees.

I don't know what lawyers have to say, but it looks like easy money for a law firm if DMCA false claims are so common and so obvious.

Reminder that the normal YouTube copyright process isn't the DMCA process, but instead a process YouTube came up with as part of a settlement with the record labels that gives those making the claim nearly all of the power.

The youtube TOS does not shield people making false claims from liability. It is extremely lopsided in every other aspect, though.

But the DMCA section about liability for false claims doesn't apply if it wasn't a DMCA takedown in the first place.

There are other actionable laws that could potentially be used here though. Slander of Title [1] certainly seems to apply here, given that the claims disparage ownership, and could be argue to have caused damages, through things like unwanted ads being played before and during the videos.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slander_of_title

Which doesn't come with attorney's fees by default. So if they screwed you out of, say, $10k, it might not even be worth it to go after if there's a large disparity between your resources and theirs.

You don't need the DMCA to be able to sue someone, this is just tort law.

No, the section where you agree to binding arbitration does.

> (f)Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1)that material or activity is infringing, or (2)that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

512f is currently unenforced by the courts. Judges are not state machines, it matters not what the technically correct decision may be, they are not required to make it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenz_v._Universal_Music_Corp.

> 512f is currently unenforced by the courts.

It's not unenforced. It's just that there are basically no counterclaims because they're not worth doing.

> It's not unenforced. It's just that there are basically no counterclaims because they're not worth doing.

Right, they're not worth doing because the cost of doing them won't be reimbursed.

Unsure if you read the above link for the other court case, but moving in a different direction. There have been plenty of DMCA requests for 127.0.0.1 [1], there is no argument that those are in good faith. It would be easy money to get reimbursement for dealing with them but you won't because the courts do not have to give you it.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=DMCA+request+for+127.0.0.1&o...

YouTube circumvents the DMCA with a custom process, which is why fraud is so rampant - they intentionally designed a system to enable fraud (at the behest of media companies)

I have chatted informally with probably half a dozen "big law" lawyers about the current state of rampant DMCA abuse, though none of them specialized in trademark/copyright. The initial reaction i got was that there wouldn't be enough money in it. The other reaction i got was basically "who cares?" Those aren't really the right people to ask, but that was my experience for what it's worth. To be fair those attorneys were probably far too expensive for anyone involved in a DMCA dispute to use, but personally if i had an airtight case i would want those types of firms to be running up the bill.

But we don't see people getting money from false DMCA claims. We wouldn't be having this conversation if we did.

I believe the keyword though is "knowingly" which is really hard to prove

I would guess that using a system that is known to produce false positives without second checking (as evidenced by the obvious mistakes) counts as "knowingly". But again I am not a lawyer.

This system was setup to make the DMCA easy for copyright holders. There's zero consideration about whose holding.

Before YouTube, I was getting takedown notices from Qwest internet and when I wrote them demanding proof, they ignored me and just flipped the switch back on.

Eventually they just automated the takedown system so you had to go through some isolated dcma system.

They have no cares about consumers because consumers present zero legal threat.

And remember that YouTube’s system is not DMCA. DMCA rules do not apply nor do any protections. The YouTube system is designed to favor copyright holders and those who claim copyright.

Even $50 would probably be decent compensation for most YouTubers. It would probably reign in false claims dramatically, and reduce the numbers of appeals enough that real humans can check each one.

Yeah probably, but wouldn’t really be sufficiently punitive to really deal with the problem. It should be a % of the abuser’s revenue

If a claimant makes a bad-faith claim or the claim is done by undersupervised automation? Sure. But I think some of these claims are false positives by YouTube's ContentID system. In those cases, does YouTube pay? I agree there needs to be a disincentive to over-claiming (including but not limited to holding ad revenue in escrow and returning it to the video's owner if the claims are false) but in practice, I don't know how it needs to work.

If its an automated system, then yes I think youtube should have to compensate users when the system youtube created, screws over an innocent user. If the government, who is almost as powerful as google, similarly created a system where they falsely arrest huge swaths of innocent people, then they too should have to compensate their victims. The goal here is to get youtube to do better, and the only way to do that is economics.

This would only work if a successful claim resulted in the YouTuber having to pay, otherwise such an asymmetric situation would never be sustainable.

Given how many popular videos sit on the edge of copyright abuse it’s not really in Google’s interest to do this anyway.

This is how the DMCA, as written, is supposed to work.

Step 1: Alice uploads some media to Bob's website

Step 2: Charlie decides Alice's upload violates his copyright

Step 3: Charlie sends Bob a DMCA takedown notice.

Step 4: Bob takes down Alice's media, issues Alice a notice that he's received a claim, and is now protected from being sued by Charlie.

Step 5: Alice disagrees that her upload violates Charlie's copyright, and issues a counter-claim to Bob.

Step 6: Bob reinstates Alice's upload, notifies Charlie that Alice has contested his claim, and is now protected from being sued by Alice.

Step 7: Charlie sues Alice, because he still believes the content to be in violation of his copyright, or gives up

Step 8: Court case / counter suit decides damages between Charlie and Alice

The problem is not the DMCA system, which if anything is too generous to the media host. The problem is YouTube's added bullshit layer, which goes something like "Charlie hints that he might send a DMCA takedown, Bob takes down Alice's video and threatens to ban her from the platform"

Given how the DMCA works and the liability involved, why would it work any differently?

I would agree with this. It should work both ways. There may be a few edge cases where it really wasn't clear if it was or was not copyright infringement; both cases were reasonable. These would be the exception where neither party may be fined.

And how do you figure out what these cases are without spending $2 million in court fees each time?

Fair use is another one. I'm not a musician, but like listening to music. I recently discovered Rick Beato's YouTube videos where he breaks down "what makes this song great"

He plays snips of songs, analyzes them, talks about the chord progressions, the key changes, melodies, drum fills, bass lines, solos, and sometimes gets pretty deep into technical/music theory analysis. Then he'll play a bit more and then talk about that part of the song. It's clearly fair use, and if anything it promotes interest in the artist and their music, but (according to him) he's constantly getting videos blocked or copyright claims.

> Actually, probably the majority of You Tubers don’t use any music

This just isn't true.

YouTube music falls into two camps: 1) Licensed music from paid royalty sources. AudioJunkie, Epidemic, etc. 2) Video game music, because that isn't in ContentID because otherwise you'd claim people playing their games (it can absolutely be manually claimed, but creators just take the risk here).

I suspect Pond5 here aren't a great service.

I also keep on re-parsing this article because of the English, but

> and for many of those who do, the more ads the better as the reason for uploading a video is to make money and they really don’t care about quality.

If you get copyright claimed for music, you don't get the money from the video? More ads won't help? I'm so confused at to what this person is getting at, as they've meddled a diatribe about advertising with a diatribe about music copyright claims.

YouTube's copyright controls have been a constant sore spot for creators for years at this point. YouTube/Google seems uninterested in addressing the problems. It seems that improvement is either imperceptibly small or just outright doesn't exist.

What will it actually take for this to improve? Copyright legislation (e.g., DMCA) roll back or alteration? Content creators and/or viewers leaving the platform over it? Something else?

Many-trillion dollar lawsuits similar to what media cartels threaten them with if they don't implement highly abusive mass takedown systems with little to no oversight.

It might be enough to just have a class action lawsuit against Google requiring them to actually follow the actual DMCA process.

As long as there is no viable alternative to YouTube, Google has zero incentive of improving the situation. The current system works for Google, with no downside for them thanks to their monopolistic grasp on the market.

>What will it actually take for this to improve?

Mass, coordinated DCMA takedown notices against disney and other parties that designed DCMA.

For max impact, a mix of legit & fake DCMA notices should be used.

>What will it actually take for this to improve?

People willing to pay for content.

One one extreme, you will have YouTube and it’s user generated content and ads and the huge moderation costs.

On the other is professionally produced content, like Comcast, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, etc.

It may or may not be economically viable to have an option in the middle, or at least it has not been so far. Vimeo is the only one that came close to making it work, as far as I know.

Twitter really needs to move into the longer form video space to give YouTube some competition. YouTube has gotten very lazy with their near monopoly on long form video and now only innovates by increasing the number of ads every quarter to show revenue growth and desperately copying TikTok.

I don’t see how Twitter could afford to compete with YouTube financially. YouTube has the larger audience (3x MAU) so they get the best advertising deals, and they STILL don’t break out YouTube’s profit/loss individually, suggesting it’s probably either low margin or a loss leader for alphabet.

Reads like an argument for breaking up Google, so they can't dominate and suppress markets by funding unprofitable units indefinitely.

I absolutely understand that argument, but this seems like one of the few cases where this tremendous consolidation provides a net public benefit. Despite its flaws, YouTube is still an excellent platform and resource, and it seems that video streaming is still impossible to do well without Google-level resources.

I honestly think there isn't a good solution here. If Google didn't prop up YouTube, we would lose the utility of free* video streaming and hosting. Other than Google, it seems like the only organizations in the world with the resources to maintain YouTube would be far worse (i.e. governments).

This isn't to say Google shouldn't be broken up, but YouTube's existence is perhaps the best argument against it.

We don't know what options we're missing out on because there's a monopoly dominating the market. Relevantly to this discussion, it's certainly created a situation where creators don't have anywhere to go if Youtube is abusing them. It may also be suppressing their compensation, for the ones who do it for money. Free-to-the-user services like this even discourage open-source development of competing applications, adoption rates and development-interest in related open protocols, and nonprofit services.

Open source doesn't pay bandwidth bills.

I would also break YouTube up, but that's because I think the death of free video streaming wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

I'd welcome competition. Vimeo is the closest thing I can think of and it differentiated itself. But I don't think Twitter is the right one to do it. IMO, these services are best when they're narrowly focused. YouTube branching into shorts, Facebook and Instagram branching into... well, everything... has made those services cluttered, and makes their once core features worse.

To truly compete with YouTube, Twitter would need a video discovery algorithm at least on the same level. Multiple large-following (1m+ subs) YouTubers have said that as much as they have grievances with YT, other platforms like Twitch and Twitter don't have the kind of discovery tools they would need to grow an audience there and make money. (Twitter would also need really robust advertising infrastructure for this, IMO)

Considering how cheap bandwidth is, and how good compression is, are we yet approaching point where it makes sense for content creators to host their own videos?

99% of what's on YT doesn't need to be in HD, anyway.

1) People won't find the content if it's not on Youtube.

2) You will struggle (even more) to monetize the views you do get, if you're not on YouTube.

3) Bandwidth is sorta cheap when you're getting a little bit of it bundled with other things that have high margins (say, cloud VM hosting) but video hosting can exceed what you can get with that kind of "free" bandwidth pretty quickly. It begins to really add up, after that.

I think bandwidth hasn't been cheap since up till very recently. Cloudflare's R2 seems like a game changer here, before that you'd be paying a hefty fee to host your videos if you have a decent size following.

There's also the network effect: nobody will find your personal site without some kind of cross-site interaction. ActivityPub and friends try to change that, but I haven't seen it take off yet because nobody seriously considers switching to such a model.

I'm watching what Floatplane is doing for the video hosting landscape; they seem to run a pretty bare bones operation (though they often run into limitations in practice, i.e. routing problems with some networks, transcoding equipment, dynamic quality, etc)

One of the main reasons creators put content on YouTube is the discovery algorithm. It's much easier to grow an audience for videos on YT compared to hosting it yourself.

I would argue this is a problem that can’t be solved. At the scale of youtube, it is virtually impossible to provide quality customer services.

Some have proposed to break it into multiple entries, but it couldn’t help either. Each entities still have to deal with the complexity of international copyright laws.

Maybe I'm naive but I don't see how that's impossible. Does there not exist an integer number below 7 billion which represents the number of people required to manually validate each of the claims? Or is this number so high that Youtube's $20+ billion revenue could not pay for those people? Unfortunately Google doesn't reveal net profit but it's well known that Youtube has been profitable for years and it's hard to imagine it being less than 10% of revenue. If it really is that extreme it sounds like more of an issue with Youtube's systems.

I don't know what the solution is, but with every year it's becoming more and more apparent that the entire concept of copyright is incompatible with a global communications network.

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