YouTube loses court battle over music clips | Hacker News Reader

YouTube loses court battle over music clips

bbc.com

68 pointsnsns40 comments

As usual: This is a decision by a LG (Landgericht), it will surely go to the next higher court: OLG (Oberlandesgericht). In this special case it is a decision by the "LG Hamburg", famously known in Germany for its useless decisions in 'internet cases' that will be reverted by the next higher court. Nothing to see here, people. Move on. :)

I thought that they already did this automatically? I uploaded a video I took from my old apartment, because I lived behind a club* you could hear music and Youtube automatically detected it on upload. Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOANhQ9nQYk and the message I see via my account:

""Hi Friend", musical composition administered by: EMI Music Publishing. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases, ads may appear next to your video. Please note that the video's status can change, if the policies chosen by the content owners change. Learn more about copyright on YouTube.".

I have also uploaded videos from TV shows that have been detected automatically as content owned someone else. This clip from a UK TV show "countdown": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuHREvK74-4

""Countdown-Countdown", audio-visual content administered by: Channel 4" Your video is blocked in these locations: Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, United Kingdom. Please note that the video's status can change, if the policies chosen by the content owners change. Learn more about copyright on YouTube."

Doesn't this satisfy the courts that Youtube is going to great lengths to prevent this?

* Never live behind a club, it's ridiculous.

Interesting. Is that why BBC and Channel 4 stuff seems to live on YouTube much longer than you would think? Because it's blocked in the UK?

They block stuff within the UK because it's available on 4OD, iPlayer etc and then leave it for people outside the UK.

I am from Germany and I am really embarassed by the stupidity in my country. Youtube should just disable its service for Germany. Grooveshark did the same. Everyone who is serious about the internet could enable the service anyway.

There is more than music videos on YouTube.

I hope this will give a boost to free music.

That is true. But if a company like Google takes a stand against those ridiculous court orders, we get one step closer to freeing the internet from the oppression of the copyright industry.

Well they do take a stand in that they will censor the respective videos. The alternative would have been to pay up. Although I think the prices GEMA asks for are ridiculous and infeasible.

I'm sort of glad to see it's not just Italy that produces inane rulings regarding Youtube and posted content.

Could you give a little more insights as to why this is happening specifically in your country?

Because we have certain organisations protected by the state (they're like early-retirement homes for political friends).

The organisation in question here, the GEMA, "protects" artists (in a similar way the music industry protects them) and they have special legal privileges (like that they can assume that every music record is protected by them and the other party has to prove otherwise).

We have a public broadcasting service that enchroaches with (redundant) channels (annual budget of 7 bn EUR). You have to pay a monthly fee once you have a TV or radio or computer, next year it's mandatory for every househeld (240 EUR annually). Good place for political friends.

We have chambers of commerce that you're required to "join" once you start a business. They waste money all the time and are unaccountable. Also for good political friends.

I guess you see the pattern... :( I won't go so far to call it a managed democracy or a crony cleptocracy, but often I get this impression.

[inflammatory comment] So following that logic car manufacturers are responsible for all the car accidents in history; its their users, they should check that the person is able and fit to use their service (car). It just makes me mad. It's just a bad precedent.

I'd argue that car manufacturers are indeed part responsible for car accidents.

Oh yeah - guns don't kill people, people do...

This is the same as saying gun manufactures have liability in any murder committed with their product which many argue, they have not done enough to prevent the wrong people from getting firearms. But it is the wrong analogy. In sites like youtube, it is more like a property owner that rents a building and is aware of his tenants performing illegal activity on a regular basis. Which depending on the crimes and the amount of knowledge could make the property owner liable or even an accessory. But all of this leads to the same arguments and worthless discussion about semantics. The correct discussion is what value we place on media as a society. The easiest way to solve this is to stop supporting artists on major labels. Advances in technology have lowered the barrier to entry in recorded music to a widely attainable level. Artists trade the rights to their music to labels for the label's marketing and distribution. Now days, interesting things go viral with little to no marketing effort and there is no argument that the labels are decades behind in their distribution channels. Even if you wan to avoid iTunes or other services, It is relatively easy for a moderately tech savvy individual to push a digital album to S3 or the likes, link to it from a static site and serve millions of downloads. Could even get fancy and deploy a web store template from godaddy for taking payments. Yeah, it might take some learning but so does negotiating a 100 page recording contract... ask Aerosmith.

We can't keep bashing labels for defending/protecting their aging distribution channels. You can't blame a dog for acting like a dog. We can create truly disruptive new distribution channels with better terms for artists and go head to head with the labels.

I'm probably in a very small minority here, but given that Google is making money by placing ads next to most YouTube content, then yes, perhaps they are responsible for determining who actually owns the content first.

They do and they share the revenues with companies that claim to own the copyright. They even check videos and proactively decide who the ad revenues should go too. Sometimes their fingerprinting tool does make mistake (thinking bird sounds are copyrighted music by some copyright troll was an example recently).

If Google wanted to make a big stink out of this, they could decide not to offer YouTube in Germany at all, citing the country's royalty laws as a reason it cannot operate viably there.

A stink? Shut down your business in the 4th biggest international market? Lose millions in revenue?

Think those German clone crazy brothers wouldn't release DieTube.de the next day? Lose your dominant market share overnight.

Good luck on still being the CEO the next day!

You make it seem a lot easier than it is. Youtube has tons of content, not specifically German, that I wager lots of Germans would like to watch.

But your point comes across, all the same. It'd be really nice, if all the big tech companies could band together in favor of internet protection. I'm sure if Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook (just to name a few) would say "we won't operate in any country that filters internet content", I'm sure we'd be seeing much less of these actions. I suppose though, that may spark antitrust.

Internet protection?

You actually mean a copyrightless internet. That's never actually existed or everyone would still be using KaZaA.

YouTube got greedy, they got slapped. Good for Germany for actually doing this to an American monopoly. Big deal.

YouTube lied for too long about it being able too expensive to filter content. But now suddenly they can do it! And that now coincides almost exactly with when they started to want to justify injecting ads into everyone's videos.

We're still in the scenario where aggregators, Google, YouTube, are making money when the content creators aren't.

No, it's perfectly fine to enforce copyright. However, we have something called "due process of law" that should be applied.

So you've started a business, and against all odds you actually have users. Millions of them. Hundreds of millions of them. Now some ancient industry whose toes you've tread upon comes along and says, "Nein! Your users are doing things we don't like! It's your responsibility to stop them!"

You're telling me that your reaction would be, "you're right. We got greedy. Good for you for forcing us to police what millions of people are doing on our open forum."

No, you damned-well wouldn't. If you ran a taxi company, you wouldn't jump at the responsibility to ensure your fares aren't visiting prostitutes or high on drugs. If you built houses, you would not leap at the duty to ensure they weren't bought with drug money. Because that's not your problem. You aren't doing anything wrong; your customers are.

It's an ancient principle of common law that an individual (or corporation, now that we're playing that game) cannot be punished for the actions of another. This ruling, and your argument, violates that principle. You want to force a company to spend its shareholders' money on stopping other people from doing bad things, and there is quite simply no moral justification for such an edict.

'ancient principle of common law'? Well thanks for the laugh at least.

According to you if I make and sell bombs it's unreasonable for a government to say 'make sure you don't sell them to nutters'.

It's a stupid argument. Of course there's a moral justification for such an edict.

Say I started a LOIC server tomorrow that people can use to attack websites. It's on EC2 so can scale wonderfully on demand. You think I can use your 'ancient principle of common law'?

I'm all for better delivery mechanisms, better competition, all that shit, but YouTube were making money off other people's hard work. They've always played with fire. YouTube even sailed close to the line of where things like gorrilavids are these days. At one point you could go on there and find pretty much any tv show you wanted. Do you know how you found them? Search for [series name] episode [x] series [x] or some variation like that.

Does that actually sound that hard to detect these with a simple automatic script? A bank breaking script? It's supposed to be user generated content, not ripped off content.

Depends if these royalties make it less profitable to run in Germany why should they continue and that clone site would get sued just as much.

You're ignoring half the equation.

It's possible the millions in revenue is not enough to make up for the huge fines and extra work required to do the filtering .

One of the big appeals of youtube is that a submitted video is available everywhere (well majority of the countries). Google would rather pay hefty fines than lose that.

It wouldn't be enough to just shut down youtube. They would have to shut down all of their business in Germany.

Otherwise the local offices would be made liable for the main youtube.com.

Could Youtube just silence the videos?

Sometimes I just want to see some cool flying robots and the full video is disabled, because the creator decided to include some background music.

That would certainly be a nice form of protest. They could even show a tiny message on top of each video explaining why all videos are silent in Germany. I really think Google should protest this rather than agree to make a deal with GEMA (if the decision remains final, at least).

Wow, this precedent covers much more than YouTube. If German courts will hold any such service accountable for what the users post, pretty much all widely used services are susceptible to suing.

Germany doesn't understand the internet from what I've seen. They're the country that legally requires you to post your full name, address and telephone number on your website. (search for "Impressum")

Hopefully with the Pirate Party starting to gain support, that will change.

I remain surprised by how much music piracy seems to take place on YouTube. Nearly any popular song out there has a YouTube video with essentially blank/random video content and a nicely encoded layer 3 with the music. Combined with all the tools/plugins out there to "download YouTube videos" it seems like quite an easy spot to steal mp3s of most popular songs.

Another great example how the german court again and again tries to kill internet innovation with ridiculous stuff like this.

Really hope this isnt the last word in the debate!

The next elections in Germany might bring a change as the German Priate Party is gaining more and more votes in the polls.

This could bring the change we all hope for.

So actually, due to disagreements with GEMA, many Youtube videos are already blocked in Germany, even if uploaded by the video clips copyright holders. I was in Stuttgart and couldn’t open a video by SBTRKT that was posted by their own label http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdUINbi4wSY

As Germany seems to be more strict than anywhere else, does someone know if these actions there had effect on the industry revenues ?

All negative effects on media industry revenues are always due to piracy!

I guess music in Germany is going to suck for the foreseeable future.

No matter, as long as I can still discover Scandinavian metal regularly, this court ruling won't affect me as I am not a fan of the Scorpions or David Hasselhoff.

Rammstein is ok though

http://youtu.be/Ef3zxiOaYgI

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