Anyone who thinks the injection of malicious hashes is an unrealistic scenario should take a look at the games now being played with Youtube‘s content protection system which is leveraged by scammers and blackmailers.
Additionally, the other party is actively trying to compromise the YTer's other accounts and identity to damage him, so any new data point given to this person represents risk.
I don't really care for this YTer (they made a video essay about someone who doesn't really want to be in the media circus anymore, could just MYOB) but the methods documented in this video can be used to doxx any user that uploads a video. All you gotta do is convince youtube that you own some piece of common non-royalty media that a youtuber uses to gain leverage on them. A lot of this kind of media is old with unfindable owners, so even if YT does want to spend the time to validate, there's nowhere to go with it.
The attacker then claims the video, and claims revenue on the video rather than taking it down. There's an appeal process which seems to work about 0% of the time, and after that the only recourse the uploader has is to submit a copyright counter notification, which becomes the start of a potential lawsuit.
The attackers in question will then typically relent if challenged with a copyright counter claim, but most videos don't get counter claimed once this happened.
This pattern of behavior seems so common that it has led to two interesting patterns of behavior that I've seen.
1) Any video that uses popular public domain music will be claimed not once, but dozens or hundreds of times, because there are so many channels operating this way now, and
2) If you post a video and immediately get hit with a huge wave of claims, rather than going through Youtube's process, most uploaders just delete the video, remove whatever audio caused the problem, and reupload.
Certainly there are issues with how we've implemented property ownership, but I don't think the concept itself is inherently flawed or ridiculous.
For this reason, many would suggest not using it. It's a vague way of combining the separate issues of copyright, patents, and trademarks. It also illegitimately tries to equate those things to property, which changes how many feel about it.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Intellect...
Uploading popular (public domain) music and claiming you own it is just fraud
The CSAM detection isn't proper hash collision either, in so far as I understand it. There's some fuzzy matching formula that generates the fingerprint, it's not simply a byte for byte hash taken of the image, and therein lies the comparison.
The fraud in question is reliant on content ID attempting to fuzzy match audio content, in this specific instance.
But there are penalties for false claims. There is a fine for claiming copyright you don't own, and if you go further and ask for takedowns, you are also liable for damage.
The problem is that these are rarely enforced. Even a $100 fine for a false claim on YouTube would be enough to weed out bots and click farms. And for the most serious cases, have the infringer pay damage and a bigger fine. No need to change the law for that, it just has to be enforced.
Why is it ridiculous, in a world where the penalty for sharing a single music file is $250,000?
Then again, I personally do think that knowingly filing a false report of law-breaking should be treated as a very serious crime. I think the harm of filing a false report of copyright infringement is greater than the act of infringing copyright itself.
For stuff that is actually copyrighted that probably could only be triggered by the actual rights holder.
The latter are overwhelmingly more rare, but overwhelmingly larger. Society in general thinks false penalties for crimes are worse than the crime itself.
"It is better that 10 guilty men go free, than that one innocent man should suffer." I think that if the penalty for copyright infringement is $250,000, the penalty for a false claim should be $2,500,000.
You're right that a $100 low-effort, frequently-enforced counterclaim process would weed out ContentID bot farms (just like a $0.01/email transaction cost would weed out spam). But remember that the whole ecosystem is already ridiculous; if the pro-copyright MPAA/RIAA are pushing for $250k/infringement you have to be equally ridiculous to balance counterclaims.
(And, yes, I would apply that to the criminal justice world.)
Or so I thought... Every single video was copyright claimed. Youtube falsely thought it was a recording (which do have copyright). The second a claim was created I stopped earning money. I would then dispute the claim, explaining that it's not even a sound recording and they had a month to react to my answer.
In almost all instances the claims were retracted but it would only take a couple of days until another claim would be filed on that video. Answering all those claims took up more time than producing the videos so I gave up after a while.
But in my experience it wasn't really malicious actors filing these claims but youtube's filter simply not managing to distinguish between a recording of a classical piano piece and a well synthesized version of it. I actually remember most claims being filed by Sony.
It's interesting to hear that it's still this way because I don't really believe that nowadays, youtube still can't distinguish between different recordings of classical music. I guess they have no incentive to improve in that regard.
But I think the fact that nobody but the large labels are able to earn money with classical music on these large platforms is actually an excellent argument against upload filters and in my experience it's an argument that non-tech people can much better relate to than hash-collisions.