Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

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They wouldn't even need to go that far. The current way YouTube's system works is so deck-stacked against the creator to a ludicrous degree. Basically any "copyright holder" just has to say "this belongs to me" and YouTube immediately funnels all revenue for the video to that holder, with basically no oversight whatsoever, and as anyone in the space will tell you, a video makes 90% of it's money in the first few days which means these holders can grab the monetization right out from under a creator and steal just, all their fucking money. It's ridiculous.

Like all you would have to do to, perhaps not fix, but heavily mitigate this, would be to have YouTube just... hold onto the revenue until the dispute is resolved. It's barely even a change. And most of the time, when creators do counter the claims, they're eventually dropped but again because of how that system works, YouTube has already funneled all their money to the claimant, irrespective of the determined validity of the claim. And it would discourage bullshit claims because even as low-rent a scam as this is, it is some amount of work, and if there's no payout, you necessarily reduce the number of scammers who will attempt it.

I don't know if that's a DMCA thing, I admittedly haven't researched it in a long time, but I don't see how that would put YouTube at any kind of liability. Any reader, do feel free to correct me.

It's not a DMCA thing at all. DMCA 512 is actually pretty straightforward, you're referring to YouTube Content ID, a completely separate parallel takedown system that YouTube made at the behest of their content licensors.

If the media companies had their way, everything would work like YouTube Content ID, because that's the system that minimizes their enforcement cost. What they want is to make everything Someone Else's Problem.

> hold onto the revenue until the dispute is resolved

They do that: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7000961?hl=en

Caveat is if you file the counter within 5 days. From listening to a few creators describe the counter filing process, you need to gather a lot of evidence to prove that you are not infringing. It apparently takes a lot of time and what happens is that targeted harassment very easily turns into a DOS-like attack. So 5 days is an unreasonably short time window that puts an extreme burden on the content creator.

Edit to quote the full section because the cherry picked quote is misleading:

> If you dispute a claim within 5 days, any revenue from the video will be held, starting with the first day the claim was placed. If you dispute a Content ID claim after 5 days from the original claim date, we'll start holding revenue the date the dispute is made.

There's a guy on YouTube that does discussions about star wars, and has an into music that he got the rights to use from the author.

Someone who didn't have the rights resampled the original song and submitted it to a label (not sure that's the right term), and the label proceeded to DMCA every single video the guy had posted.

Over a thousand videos, having to gather all that info for all of them, go through the appeals process on all of them. For him it was a manual action one at a time. From the label they have an API to bulk initiate claims

There was also the example of family guy copy-pasting a 10 year old youtube video of an exploit of an old NES game into an episode, and that video which predates the episode by 10 years (or something) then got taken down because it infringed on the family guy episode that copied the video.

Hold on, A video that infringes will almost most certainly be a mix of their content and your own new content.

You should have to negotiate a percentage fee, not assume the claimant is entitled to 100%

Big tech has such a twisted incentive structure for devs that I don't see this getting solved unless it impacts YouTube's bottom line. Execs won't care, and ICs will be actively penalized for fixing this vs working on "business priorities."

God I wish there was a decent competitor to YouTube. They get away with so much horseshit because there's just nobody else that can match their service scale and network effects.

Why is that? Video streaming isn't the behemoth it was last decade.

Google owns the platform and the ad network / marketplace. A lot of videos ‘lose’ money and just take up space. Any viable competitor to YouTube would need a solution that allows signups, watches and video uploads, without requiring a fee. Which typically means displaying ads. For Google the ad network is already there. For anyone else, they need to either create their own marketplace, or have Google (or some other network) take a large cut of their ad revenue.

This is likely why the only other ‘competitors’ you see are peering based or based on a subscription model. Neither of which can really compete with YouTube which really doesn’t need to *directly* make any money

And how long do you think it would take until the competitor would end up in the same situation? How can the god help with it? And which god?

> And how long do you think it would take until the competitor would end up in the same situation?

YouTube ended up in that situation for two reasons. First, the original YouTube before Google bought it was playing fast and loose with the law and was in the process of getting sued over it after Google bought them. Second, Google wants to license Hollywood content for YouTube TV etc. So between wanting to settle the lawsuit and wanting to sell their soul and become Comcast, Google agreed to do a lot of this draconian BS that isn't otherwise required by law.

A competing service that just wants to be YouTube without being YouTube TV could plausibly follow the law without steamrolling the little guy quite as much.

So like dailymotion? Why won't people use that instead of youtube?

Partially because it kind of sucks, but maybe more because Google owns YouTube, has 90% search market share and heavily favors YouTube videos over other video hosts in search results.

Which means you need it to not suck or have some other countervailing advantage which is enough to overcome that, e.g. TikTok, but without the geopolitical issues of that one.

Why would they implement this instead of de-monetizing it completely?

I mean, then YouTube is substantially cutting into their own revenue too, but even that would be better than just handing over all the revenue to an unverified 3rd party that clicked a button.

They're an ad company at the end of the day; they still want their cut of the monetization.

Additionally both sides of the dispute normally still want the monetization, they just disagree about who gets the proceeds. And because of the time value curve of YouTube videos (most make something like 90% of their revenue in the first few days), demonetizing has a good chance fo essentially erasing the revenue of the video for the creator.

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