YouTube's eraser tool removes copyrighted music without impacting other audio

In principle, maybe. But realistically, even if we had a competitive and healthy video hosting market, the RIAA would still have a legal imperative to moderate those platforms. Although we don't perceive them in direct competition with YouTube, copyright takedowns still happen on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Platforms of a certain size become targets for IP holders, and platform-owners lack the time or accountability to deal with each claim on a case-by-case basis. It's less about finding a "someone" to tell-off copyright trolls, and more about paying enough lawyers to fight Sony & Friends when they make dubious claims.

It's a status-quo that sucks for us humans, but this is what intellectual property laws look like as-applied to real life. Art, video and even code are all obsessively licensed to prevent the accidental proliferation of good ideas.

I recorded a live performance of an orchestra in Barcelona at some cathedral. Some version of the song got copyright flagged. Really? Flagging live performances of (checks notes) a song composed in 1954?

Just bananas.

Someday hopefully the musical copyright folks on YouTube will share revenue with Visual Artists on there, too.

Now in 99.999+% of individual human situations, it never gets that far because it's pretty clear to a person in advance whether something is fair use or not, or they ask a lawyer and assess the risks, etc.

But when you're dealing with user media at scale, that system falls apart. YouTube can't have a human lawyer manually review each clip for fair use, YouTube certainly can't trust uploaders because there are tons of people trying to upload entire Hollywood movies, and asking copyright owners to manually review each flagged match is similarly not scalable.

So YouTube simply implements a content matching system that disallows more than a certain amount of copyrighted material period. There's no other scalable solution given existing copyright law.

And honestly, this new eraser tool is a really good solution if it works. If it can simply and effectively remove unwanted background music that was never wanted/intended to begin with, then it works for everyone -- pirated content uploads are still blocked scalably as well as unlicensed sountracks on webisodes etc., but people can still upload personal clips and instead of them being blocked, they can just remove the music instead.

In practice they never have much to fear from legal repercussions. There are countless examples of DMCA notices sent by corporations in error, or sent for reasons such as suppressing criticism, or to find out a blogger's identity, or to try to extort money, or as an attack/DoS but I'm not aware of any CEO or corporate lawyer being charged with perjury.

Even if someone wanted to fight a corporation in the court system they can't just prove that the DMCA notice wasn't valid, they also have to prove intent (that the corporation knew it was invalid when it was sent) and even if they manage to win, they'd be lucky to get enough money to cover their legal expenses (http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2010/02/court-nar...)

No, i won't cite. Even bing can find numerous publications on this very topic with "cops playing copyrighted music to prevent video uploads" which is basically what i said.

My guess is you could build an AI + limited human review tool that would do it better than the 75th percentile lawyer. But there's not much reason for YouTube to invest in this.

Meanwhile "Old Town Road" was made by "buying" the "rights" to an instrumental track that was created by Trent Reznor, but Trent Reznor had to be told that someone was using Ghosts 34. IIRC the "beat" was "bought" for less than a meal at a fast food restaurant, not from Reznor (or NIN, or Nothing Records, etc).

I made $0 after spending about a decade composing, writing, arranging over 4 solo albums and an additional 6 albums with another person. One thing of note, though, was the "Napster Bad" metallica workaround on file sharing apps was to change the name of the band... to our band name. We didn't stand a chance.

I'd be pleasantly surprised if nvidia can "fix" audio, as i have.. oh, a few thousand hours of audio that i could clean up in an automated way.

[0] hilariously, youtube gave me a copyright strike for this video, even though it's obviously an archival upload. Jerks.

The main difference in the above analogy is probably that a photo is not a primary intended way for the architecture to be consumed whereas it is for a song.

Sure, I agree with this.

>Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.

Gonna disagree there; in the same way that looking at a picture of something isn't the same as looking at something, hearing a recording of a performance is not the same as being present for the performance.

The Treachery of Images, as Magritte called it.

In the US though, architecture copyrights don't protect against people photographing building exteriors.

That said, if your building was covered in a mural or some artistic façade that you held the copyright to, then one can assert copyright against people posting videos of the building on YouTube. Of course, there's exemptions for various forms of fair use like critique.

This is way overly reductionist. Hearing a few notes of a piece of music in the background with crappy quality is not the same as hearing the full ucompressed piece with top of the line equipment. It is remarkably analogous to seeing a picture of building.

All in all I’d say yeah this definitely requires some clever engineering and I believe them that they use AI as part of all of this.