Achievement Unlocked | Hacker News Reader

Achievement Unlocked

blog.metamorphium.com

49 pointsguptaneil14 comments

This needs a better title (it's about YouTube's lack of an appeals process for takedown notices).

Do moderators have the ability to change titles? When I posted this, the title was "Achievement Unlocked (thoughts on bogus DMCA takedowns)" I don't know when or why it changed.

EDIT: I updated the title of the blog post to "Thoughts on YouTube's DMCA Takedown Process." Could a moderator please update the title of this submission? Thanks!

The moderators can and do change titles, and it is oft-remarked that they tend to do it from useful towards useless, rather than vice-versa, for unclear reasons.

This site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which seems to have gone down (http://status.github.com). Here is a quick copy of the post, in case you can't load the original. http://markdown.me/50d647e6c4fee09771000000

When clueless laypeople become judges (and they are judging you and punishing you) they commit atrocities unheard of since at least the Romans, in the name of 'justice'.

Oh, my. Tell the people at Youtube and Google to just read a book and cultivate themselves.

I know this is a private issue yada-yada, but then they should stop trying to seem 'honest' and 'just' and to make it look like they have a 'due process'.

It may be just 'capitalism', I get it. (Sorry: could not help this) </rant>

As much as I dislike the DMCA, behavior like this from big companies suggests that it wasn't even necessary to pass it. Why buy senators and get them to pass laws that are somewhat in your favor, when you can get big companies to create one-sided 'enforcement' regimes that universally assume that all individuals on the planet are copyright infringers?

YouTube doesn't let you appeal takedowns because there's no reason to: YouTube isn't about personal expression or freedom of speech or sharing information. YouTube is about selling ads. Who buys ads? Big companies that hold copyrights and want to be able to take down content without any sort of due process. Presumably the series of legal entanglements with companies like Viacom helped convince Google that it was more profitable to just roll over and do whatever the media companies wanted.

It's too bad there aren't any major video hosting sites I can think of that don't treat their users this way. Vimeo is the only one I know of that's theoretically attractive (you can at least pay them to host your videos), but given that they decided to universally ban the kind of content I produce (video games), I can't really try them out and see whether they actually treat their customers with respect. Anyone tried any services that do better here?

Curious to know if any B2B or other non-social hosting sites out there have been successful. Youtube is obviously the big 800lb gorilla in the room for wide distribution videos.

YouTube needs content to show ads against. Less content, and fewer views, fewer ads, and less money.

But that's looking at the big picture... something that clearly, the powers that be at big companies no longer do.

It occurs to me that the value of YT today is primarily the network effect / discoverability. Between the video tag, availability of cheap flash video players, and CloudFront/S3, the cost to create YT has fallen dramatically, and there are even things for ordinary people to self-host like VideoPress.

My suspicion though is that robustness to DMCA complaints is an "unfeature"--you don't need it until you do. Like an insurance policy or backup equipment, you're convincing people to pay now for something they might need later, which is a hard thing to sell.

YouTube does have a process to appeal complaints, though I've never had any success with getting them to restore a video.

They certainly used to have an appeals process, but apparently they no longer do.

I created a 'Downfall' parody video two years ago that was yanked by order of Constantin Films the day after I posted it. The notification from YouTube contained a link to dispute the DMCA notice, which I did, claiming fair use. YouTube restored the video almost immediately.

I would have been pretty pissed if I'd received this notice with no way to appeal the takedown.

Google, are you not even going through the motions of "don't be evil" anymore?

Maybe they are and parent's detail-void complaint was actually about infringing content?

There's still an appeal process.

A popular youtuber (2,314,015 subs) recently got hit by one of those for his Gangnam style parody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6U_dVGRFZQ&list=UUHiJwRo...

He explains the process pretty well.

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