The US recording industry is stealing from me | Hacker News Reader

The US recording industry is stealing from me

aardvark.co.nz

237 pointsmitchie_luna54 comments

Several companies have falsely filed claims on the stock sounds in Final Cut Pro and GarageBand as well. It irritates me to no end.

More importantly though, it illustrates how Google likes to make sweeping solutions based on generalizations. They created a system which allows content owners to claim they own any and all content, regardless of the veracity of their claim.

Certainly Google doesn't "like" to make any kind of solutions to help a dying industry. The content recognition system likely cost in the tens of millions in development and is probably eating up lots and lots of processing power just to operate it.

Which makes one wonder why they pandered to the content industry with it at all. There's no requirement they make such a system, and it makes their service less desirable and usable.

Google's responsibility is to respond to DMCA notices; that's it. They have no requirement to create a Draconian copyright monitor.

(The standard response is "so the content industry would work with us!!!" Who gives a shit? Oh no, we wouldn't have any of the shitty "Vevo" channels laced with advertising without Content ID. What a terrible loss that would be.)

If the record industry is dying, how much do you imagine they're willing to spend on lobbying to delay their fate? Any regulation of the internet places a disproportionate burden on Google, simply because of their size. They know this, the RIAA/MPAA know this. The RIAA would happily spend billions and kill Google in the process if it bought them another few years of the good old days.

Because responding to DMCA notices would take people, and Google always prefers algorithms over manual labor. I'm half convinced that the whole reason they're developing driverless cars is for Google Maps, the one Google property that requires a huge labor force.

Excuse me, but despite Google's opposition to SOPA, which was purely motivated by self-interest, they have put themselves firmly in the camp of the copyright mafia.

They have been very outspoken in their support for the "fight against piracy", and have regularly implemented "solutions" without any legal obligation to do so. One example being filtering "piracy related terms" from it's autocomplete feature in Google Search.

Google actively supports that "dying industry", because certain parts of Google, like YouTube, have a vested interest in good relations with said industry.

Perhaps, or it could be their answer to "how can we avoid fighting frivolous lawsuits". Remember, Big Content can sue Google for any reason they want to. If Google can placate them and they back off, that might be in their short-term best interest. (I work for Google but know nothing specific about this beyond what I've observed as a user of YouTube.)

To me, content filtering seems like a nice bullet point in the "we don't condone copyright infringement" department. It reduces complaints that result in lawsuits, and doesn't really hurt anyone. If anything, it discourages reuse of RIAA/MPAA content and encourages the creation of new free-as-in-speech content, and that's definitely a good thing. Your cat video doesn't need a top-40 soundtrack to be enjoyable!

(It's similar to how Microsoft's attempt to lock up the web with proprietary technology resulted in Free Software web browsers becoming usable. Remember the days of "This site only works in IE"? Now pretty much every site works in pretty much any browser. Epic win.)

Their content matching system came about in the middle of a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Given that youtube was full of Viacom's assets (such as videos of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) I find it hard to classify such a lawsuit as 'frivolous'.

Which makes more sense, youtube implementing a content matching system and running it on all of the videos uploaded or Viacom and every other copyright holder making their own systems (or buying into one) that tries to go through every video uploaded to youtube?

So why are they doing it then? They are not obligated to do this for the big labels. They're voluntarily doing it because they want to be on the labels' good side, now that they want to sell music and other content.

The same thing has happened for videos created with iMovie. Specifically, a video I made for friends using the trailer creator feature.

More importantly though, it illustrates how Google likes to make sweeping solutions based on generalizations.

How would you scale YouTube? Extrapolating from historical data, YouTube gets 1.3 million uploads per day. That's a lot of videos to sort out.

TL;DR - "They flagged my video as containing their content, even though it doesn't, which means they get my ad revenue."

Is there no penalty for incorrectly claiming others' content?

Perhaps the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality is justified by saying that there is so much infringement, that due process would always be 3 steps behind the uploaders.

Even if that's true, is there no financial penalty for incorrectly flagging others' content? What incentive does the RIAA currently have for not flagging every video on YouTube simultaneously, other than public opinion?

Who says they are claiming it? For all we know, the videos were flagged by Youtube's content matching system, and of course they are free to take down any video they want or share part of their ad profits with whoever they want - it's their website.

YouTube is not free to do whatever it wants with the videos of legitimate creators. The true content owners don't waive all their rights when they upload their videos.

But they give YouTube a license to them:

"8.1 When you upload or post Content to YouTube, you grant:

A. to YouTube, a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence (with right to sub-licence) to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that Content in connection with the provision of the Service and otherwise in connection with the provision of the Service and YouTube's business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels;"

Thankfully, I never said they could do "whatever they want" with them, I said they could take them down and share the profits of the ads on the same pages as the videos. And they can.

The TOS section quoted by simonbrown doesn't say anything about letting third parties lay claim to others' content.

If it's a DMCA claim being filed by the third party, the third party is committing perjury. If it's via an extralegal agreement set up between YouTube and the third party, then the third party is at the least defaming the legitimate uploader, and the third party taking direct action to receive royalties for a video they did not create is fraud.

Furthermore, the current copyright laws which apply the synchronization and public performance rights of music owners to home videos of dancing babies uploaded by amateurs need to be revisited. The present situation is entirely unfair and unproductive to society at large.

Like I said in the first post, Youtube has an automatic content recognition system[1], which was probably what caused this, which means that there probably was no DMCA claim, defamation or fraud. The third party probably doesn't even know the video exists.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/t/contentid

Companies can be held responsible for their automated systems running amok. If this is the case, then either YT's ContentID system is overly sensitive, the third party uploaded something like a sample of white noise or silence that ContentID matched to the silence or jet engines in the video, or the third party uploaded the original author's video to ContentID.

If Google can be accused of defamation for automatically suggesting "sucks" as an additional search term after a company name, then they can be accused of defamation for automatically indicating that an original author's video contains another's content. If the third party deliberately uploaded ambiguous content, hoping to trigger spurious ContentID matches, that is fraud.

At the end of the original article, the author says the situation has been rectified, but this is not an isolated incident. The article links to another example of a third party uploading someone else's royalty-free audio tracks to ContentID, giving them ad revenue from any video that includes those audio tracks.

No third party should have this kind of unchecked power over others' creations, and YouTube's ContentID system has been upheld as an example of how all sites with user-generated content should operate.

The "flagging" that is being done is done by youtube's automated content id matching system. Youtube knows it has many faults so even if your content is flagged, you can deny the flag and continue to gain ad revenue. A more accurate TL;DR would be: "Youtube flagged my video, even though it doesn't, it may lead to me losing ad revenue if the music companies illegally pursue me."

Its likely I have missed something, if this guy's video matched another video, why is it his one which is the offender and not the other video? Does this mean that the videos uploaded by the record companies are flagged as being legitimate by default ? If so, who decides that one then? Must every "legit" publisher register are some how legitimate?

If it were me, I would want to find out which video was supposed to be the original of which the IP was allegedly stolen, and accuse them of taking my material. Surely by these standards one of r them must be illegal, right?

Or does this lark only work one way for the benefit of the dear old mega-corps?

His video isn't identical to another video. Rather, something within the video (it might have been a five second sample) triggered a false positive match against something else that someone thinks they own the rights to.

I understand that. But then surely that match works both ways. Something in the other video must also match with his, right? So, why is it this guys getting accused and not the other video? If his video came out first, then the newer video can be said to be copying his video.

See what I'm getting at?

The samples provided by companies who have a deal with Google - the recording industry - are the only "master" samples, not your uploaded stuff.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would think that maybe the title of his video "talking head to camera" triggered the match, as there is a band called "the talking heads" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talking_Heads] Now this raises the whole question of, is using a title that overlaps a band name a copyright infringement, a trademark infringement, or none of the above. While we all may agree the latter is the correct answer, YouTubes infringement algorithm probably says otherwise. And while we're on the subject, how interesting is it that you tube filters content based on title, and most likely not based on actual content.

I do not think he was saying his video was entitled "Talking Head To Video". He was saying that that's what his video was, a description of its content, and that there wasn't anything else in the video other than that to be matched on.

https://www.youtube.com/t/contentid

Interesting to hear about the company pursuing royalties for the use of the default sounds that ship with Sony Vegas. I've always wondered what the legal specifics of using the included loops and samples in Logic, Reason etc are, since I hear them in pop songs and commercials and so on - definitely could trigger a pattern match.

It's probably mentioned in the documents that come with the software. I know that when I bought my Korg ER-1 way too long ago, I pored over the manual and the bit about the presets definitely stuck out to me - you were apparently not allowed to use any of the preset beats in any commercial music. Is that ever enforced? I can't possibly see the legal department of a musical instrument company going after a musician for using presets. That's especially true for music software companies, which (I presume) operate on much smaller budgets.

I know Native Instruments doesn't pursue anything if they have the same clause; dance music producers love Massive and it's presets, you here them all over the place.

" The FM office was alive with debate this morning as it surfaced that both the drum loop and the main riff from the club-classic Faxing Berlin by Deadmau5 are available as loops in FL Studio 8. Not only that, but a little-known artist is currently being struck down by the wrath of the law for using the loop (which he assumed was Royalty-free and claims to have used not knowing it was Deadmau5's riff) in a recent release. "

http://www.musicradar.com/futuremusic/dont-use-fl-studio-loo...

"I've always wondered what the legal specifics of using the included loops and samples in Logic, Reason etc are [...]"

I cannot speak for all music composition hardware and software, but from my experience, the primary constraints on the products that I use (e.g., Reason) are generally two-fold:

1. Packaging or recording factory-included loops or sounds for the purpose of re-distribution as a stand-alone audio library is prohibited.

2. Using factory-included sample tracks for commercial purposes is prohibited.

Otherwise, factory-included loops and sounds can be used commercially in your compositions.

Again, the above are just my experiences. However, as noted by leviathant's comment with the Korg ER-1 experience, it is always a good idea to read the license agreement.

Can non-US-citizens sue US corporations in small-claims court?

Because at $5k or $10k a pop, you might find them stop this behavior.

They do it now because there is no downside for them for false DMCA claims.

$10k a pop might become a downside.

I think the time and money investment just isn't worth it. I'd fight it, but that's just me being an agitator. Even if you did win 10k, most of that money would go to lawyer's fees anyway.

there are no lawyers in small claims court

We have no evidence that they're actually sending DMCA claims at all.

Nobody sent DMCA claims in this case (at least, this was not covered in the story). It is Youtube's automagic copyright-infringement-detector falsely labeled one of author's genuine clips as something using copyrighted material.

Author need contact Youtube in this case to fix this.

DMCA or not Google's negligent algorithm is causing people with a legitimate income to lose out. Maybe they should be at the end of the lawsuit to have them drop their automated system?

Lawsuit for what? Google has every legal right of rejecting any video they feel like it. That's defined in their ToS and there's no law that overrules it.

Sure, Google can ostensibly reject any video they want. But this video wasn't rejected, it was erroneously given to a third party.

Google didn't "give" the video to anyone. They gave part of the income of the ads they happen to show alongside the video.

Legally, they're their ads and they can give its income to whoever they want. And they'd never be given to the video author unless he registered in Youtube's Content-ID, anyway.

Now I'll concede and say you may be right so long as the contract or ToS reads that way. My intuition would tell me that when a user agrees to allow youtube to use their content as a revenue stream in exchange for a cut of the revenue then that is what the uploader/owner is entitled to.

Contract law is extremely clear on what is necessary for what's called "consideration" and allowing one party of the contract to willfully provide that consideration to an unauthorized 3rd party without the contractual party's consent opens themselves to lawsuit.

Again, I'm going to go on the record here and admit you're probably right. Contracts by youtube and the like will be as vague as possible providing the maximum power to themselves in order to run the system. I would fully expect terms of the contract to provide the uploader with next to 0 rights regarding their content once its handed over.

Just on youtube's copy checking, I got a FB message from a friend who stumbled on a vid that uses one of my songs, it has 280k + views and advertises a motorcycle shop. No mention of the song or my band. Normally we license stuff through jamendo pro (all our music is cc). Anyone know how youtube polices this kind of thing? It's obviously a commercial usage but we got ne'er a penny nor even an attribution.

Maybe you can fill out an application for ContentID: https://www.youtube.com/t/contentid, or try contacting the video uploader first.

Thanks, just looking at that link now I'll get on it. We did have a licensing issue before with a video blogger who asked my permission to use one of our songs as his theme. Youtube were fairly sticky about it, that's why I was surprised something like this slipped through.

I did contact the uploader nothing back from them yet.

I'm a massive advocate of CC and I'm old school in that I believe the number one consideration for an artist is to be heard (as opposed to being paid) but being open and with so many platforms holding your work it's hard to keep track of things.

I wonder is there a way to use a Shazam like system to index audio usages on the web? Then scale could come into play and perhaps help to get cc artists paid on a fair and rational basis.

Is there a viable alternative to YouTube that isn't as persuaded by the powers that be? If so, and if this problem were pervasive enough, wouldn't the independent content providers prefer that service over YouTube. Then most independent content would eventually be on the other service which would drastically reduce the value of YouTube.

Well, there is http://megavideo.com/

Oh yeah, the FBI seized that domain didn't they? ;)

That's probably why YT is being so aggressive then: to keep the FBI off them. It is truly a depressing world when film/recording industry lobbies and law enforcement agencies get away with stifling free market competition in order to maintain the status quo distribution of wealth.

There used to be this site called Megavideo.

I'd be interested to know what the YouTube ToS says about this. It's likely that they can take away your ad revenue for no reason at all. Instead of complaining that someone stole your ad revenue, you should be thanking the all mighty Google every time they are gracious enough to give you a single cent of their ad revenue.

Wow, all I can say is fuck Google, three passes in as many weeks is to much for me. The golden child has surely now turned to rust.

The only language riaa understands is money, to fight back, it will take far more than whining about morality or fairness or justice. They need to be destroyed, and the only way this will be possible is to starve the corruption engine of its fuel: money.

Oh, the solution's simple: YouTube should just not check for rap music!

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