YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I uploaded the recording of my father's funeral to youtube, to share as an unlisted video. It attracted two copyright claims - for hymns written in the 18th century.
These were claims - not takedown requests - but I didn't think it was appropriate to share a link to the family that was unable to attend in person that would serve them ads. So I instead made the video private and shared it a different way.
But if I don't contest the claims, how can youtube possibly count them as abusive?
My YouTube account was recently mistakenly suspended; luckily, after a few minutes of panic, Google reinstated it.
I discovered the suspension because my kid wanted to see a video on my TV's YouTube app (LG webOS), which showed an error without further explanation. Trying to find out what happened, I saw an email from YT about my account breaking the ToS with a video. "WTF!? I got pwned!" was my first reaction (followed by panic as YT uses my Google account). But, no, the culprit was a screen recording in 2015 that I did at work to showcase a UI prototype about a key-based VPC setup workflow I was working on. The video was private and unlisted, and I didn't remember it as I did it as a quick capture to share an idea with the team. I hypothesize that the video got flagged because the algorithm confused it with a "crack/hack tutorial."
I was happy to see my account reinstated the same day. However, the whole experience didn't leave good taste: a small algorithm mistake can make your life miserable, and you don't have any human or support to correct it. Also, the "private" moniker in YT videos is an illusion.
When Google banned a user because their Google Drive was used to share a picture of their child’s skin with the doctor for diagnosis reasons and Google flagged the account as CSAM, I felt vindicated that I don’t create content for YouTube. Not because I believe my content would get banned, but because their automated systems catch irrelevant content and the user experience of those instances is like a DoS on your digital identity.
Presumably, there are Discord servers for that kind of thing, seeing as Discord has mostly replaced the forums of yore.
Can they just iterate through the URL keys?
youtu.be/v=a0000aa
youtu.be/v=a0000ab
youtu.be/v=a0000ac
youtu.be/v=a0000adPlus, they don't have to do it every day, and clearly don't, since some people get dinged for videos they uploaded months or years earlier.
It's not like these organizations don't have the cash for the system to do it. It's not going to be one guy in the basement of the building overclocking a 386.
That means you just need millions of years to go through the entire range.
Recordings are copyrightable even if the underlying music is public domain. If you record a performance of Mozart's 40th symphony on your phone, you can be sued for copyright violations by the concert hall. (Don't be surprised that concert halls perform for more than just the attendees.)
As usual, I am not a lawyer, consult a legal professional before making any decisions based on this information.
Even though an old work like that is in the public domain, if it was played as a recording, whoever owns the rights to the recording still has a claim to copyright.
But even if it was played live and sung by the attendees, that doesn't necessarily mean the sheet music is public domain. Pianos from hundreds of years ago didn't play exactly like a modern piano, so there may have been an intermediary step where the original piece was modified to work on a modern piano when the sheet music went to print. The modifications to the sheet music could grant the person who sold the book a copyright.
Doesn't necessarily mean the person has a valid claim, but it's not impossible.
This is preposterous.
Transcription takes time and effort. Time and effort equals a copyright.
If it were at all common, copyright would cease to function. E.g. someone could, in theory, write Romeo and Juliet word-for-word from their own imagination and then apply for a copyright. How on earth would enforcement work? There's no distinction between the copyright-free Shakespeare version and the newly copyrighted version, so do performers get to choose which version they're acting under?
If you're concluding copyright is impossibly complicated, vague, and confusing and the only reason the system works at all is because hashing out the details in court is either a nuclear option between two large companies, or enforcement on a large scale against small actors is basically impossible (but will unpredictably come down like a ton of bricks on some unlucky individuals), then you'd be right!
A specific arrangement of words, music, or light (in the case of film) are well protected. Painting & sculpture, perhaps less so; fashion, dance, and architecture, sweet fuck all. Which all have as much if not more creative input than an arrangement.
How I think they should be handled? Same as fashion or architecture, only direct copies in the same format are protected, everything else is derivative.
The copyright may have elapsed on the original composition, but a specific arrangement of a public domain composition may be entitled to copyright protection as a derivative work. For example, the song "Scarborough Fair" pre-dates the modern concept of copyright, but Simon & Garfunkel's performance of the song contains novel elements that are subject to copyright.
(see article 802.6) https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap800/ch800-performing-art...
They could include "paper towns" in the music, but that's not what these automated systems are looking for.
I am aware of that. In this case it was played from sheet music by a professional organist.
> The modifications to the sheet music could grant the person who sold the book a copyright.
Do you have a citation for this?
I assume the claim didn't come from that organist. But would it be an infringement if it was?
Here's some discussion on the matter that indicates that a transcription can be, but a lot of what I've seen is much like the rest of copyright, and it's a hot mess and very specific to what the circumstances are.
The "might have a claim" about that topic in my original post is pulling a lot of weight for me.
Last year I uploaded a recording of the mass for the wedding of my sister's sister in law (the husband had terminal cancer) My homebrew recording was expected days before the official recording.
Youtube decided it was agaisnt community guidelines or something. Religion? Music? Child abuse (the ones spreading flowers)? Who knows. My appeal was successful like 6 months later.
For the time being, upload it to somewhere else than youtube, like pcloud, dailymotion, etc. Youtube is the best techwise, but the legal situation is not stable. Best left for professionals (influencers)
I'm not saying Alphabet/Google/Youtube did this, but they do things on a massive scale and they could "look into" a reasonable sample of claims all on their own and generate very good statistics. (always good to remember, statistical significance is independent of population size, only dependent on sample size, and rather small samples have a lot of significance, see birthday paradox)
if humans have a 10% chance of having cancer at any moment, and you have one human on an entire planet, the probability for that planet is still 1/10 and not 100% or 0 based on whether that person has or does not have cancer, and having one sample from that population of 1 does not increase your confidence in the answer as to whether his cancer represents a cancer cluster.
or something like that. If you need a sample of 30 people to achieve a certain degree of confidence, whether that sample comes from a population of 30 people or a population of 100,000 people, same confidence. We aren't trying to establish what percentage of people have cancer at any given moment, we are trying to establish whether this population matches what we know about the percentage who "should" have cancer.
I'm really bad at explaining this.
the more times you flip a coin, the more confidence you'll have in understanding the probabilities of that coin. for a given confidence level, you don't need to flip that coin more by 100x, you already know. There might be a population of a million coin flips, but you just need a sample of a certain size to obtain confidence that your sample is representative.
There is a probably on Google Maps where a marketer will setup a website, a lot of business listings, and get a Google Business Profile for a "local business" which doesn't actually exist. This is all setup to attract unsuspecting customers to share their information which is then sold to local contractors often without informing the customers and/or the local contractors.
It's a practice known as lead gen and/or rank-and-rent.
For an example, you can look up a "business" called Seattle Grease Trap Services on Google Maps. It's part of a network of fake businesses run by marketer in Hawaii. Check the profiles of the people who leave reviews to find some of the others.
Another example is found by searching for deck builders in Chicago. There are several variations of Koval, TOD, CPC, and similar companies. This is all operated by a local marketing company that I managed to identify in less than an hour.
I report these frauds, nothing happens. I escalate. Nothing happens. So I've given up, but I know that these listings cost local businesses actually work. And even though they're against Google guidelines, nothing happens.
YouTube matches a lot of classical music even if it was played by a different person. I mean, I uploaded a recording of myself playing something and it was flagged. But you can just contest it and most of the time it just goes away.
If it was a Catholic funeral, the order of the mass is certainly copyrighted.
There is not a single note of that song in the video. The opposite in fact, the video was used for the song. With no attribution.
The video/film is from the Australian ABC afternoon show GTK, which way predates the song.
Sounds like the YouTuber won a DMCA fight with YouTube, as well.
Unfortunately, improving this will probably require changes to the DMCA, and given the general state of politics I would honestly prefer to let sleeping dogs lie on this one.
The current YouTube DCMA system is broken. Here's how it (mal)functions:
- Creator uploads video, gets ad revenue.
- First valid claimant gets ad revenue.
- Subsequent claimants are ignored, first claimant keeps all revenue.
This leads to a first-come, first-served system where the first claimant wins all, regardless of the actual IP ownership.
Would need to implement proportional revenue allocation and a more transparent with arbitrage claiming process, e.g moderators with subject expertise chiming in.
That's if YouTube wants to fix this. But they are rather worried about a/ being accused of copyright infringement for not taking "some" action and b/ aggravating their profit making distribution agreements with major content owners.
To note there is also an automated id system which applies primarily on audio fingerprints, to a degree visual frames as well.
- Creator uploads video, id system finds matching fingerprint against a large DB of copyrighted content and send ads revenue to whoever owns the match.
Also to note, that applies to largely most audio content at this point. Not much to big films (studios are still onto trying to keep distribution via their own streaming platform, to be platform or preferred partner platform).
We are in this mess, not because YouTube is dragging its feet, but because the IP laws simply aren't reconcilable with the way we create and consume content these days.
A brick needed to build a more fair revenue distribution system could be to revise legislations, e.g banning distribution exclusivity. That would give incentive for innovation, a startup could build an engine that redistribute somewhat fairly.
Ultimately, creators own their arts and can pretty much dictate how their works can be used, and call out their licensing fees. But when intermediaries step in and figure out exclusivity would milk more cash from consumers, it goes all the way to effectively lobby for the laws to remain crooked to their advantage.
Plus, they'd have to actively sue you for perjury which costs them a lot of money for zero gain, unless you're spamming bad requests or something.
Are you sure? I remember Jim Sterling used to show content from multiple companies because multiple claims locked them all out from monetisation. Maybe it's changed since, though, that was years ago.
but it's not true that youtube won't do anything about false claims. both the DMCA and youtube's pseudo-dmca takedown process care that about the identity of the person making the claim. if you claim "i am an authorized agent for Nintendo of America" and that's not true, then they'll throw out your claim. as long as you are who you say you are and are an authorized representative of the company you claim to represent, then google tends to trust you even if you're claiming ownership of content you don't actually own.
There are some documented cases where youtubers have been caught red handed doing this against competition
Stephanie Sterling famously came up with a trick to make their videos run without ads, even when including fair use content: by intentionally including content from multiple companies, each with different preferred monetisation preferences, introducing a conflict in the Youtube content-ID system that didn't get resolved automatically. Their videos were intentionally run without ads, being supported by Patreon and all, and companies kept claiming sections for themselves and inserting ads into videos.
Bizarre that to shield oneself from content ID bullshit (like including a three second snippet of a Ninendo trailer blocking an entire video), one needs to intentionally infringe on more copyright, but that was the Youtube system of yesteryear.
I don't know if the system still works like that, but based on the seemingly random snippets included in Sterling's videos I'm guessing they're still applying this trick.
In theory one could take this further, uploading parts of one's own video to content-ID so the system hands over some partial control over the content, but I feel like Youtube wouldn't take too kindly to that method.
Does that count as spoofing? It wasn't spoofing the domain, it was just outright fraud.
What on earth could be the motivation for this not-lawyer? A malicious thrill?
"The goal is to take the monetization of videos. You get enough 200k+ videos under your belt for a form letter and bot writing in requests. For little work you can get in the 100K per year income, providing you don't get shutdown."
Hopefully this type of blatant abuse of the law will motivate some changes. If not, expect whole offices to pop up in developing countries with fake lawyers pulling off this scam en-masse.
The sooner we can engineer around them, the better off we will be.