Facebook’s Piracy Problem
slate.com
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He was unable to get YouTube to reinstate the original videos nor block the illicit new copies. After several months of shouting at the wall that is YouTube administration, he gave up and transferred his energy to creating numerous ad-laden blogs saturated also with Amazon affiliate links and embedded affiliate stores. On the one hand, it is possible that his original channel looked more like the channel of a spammer than the one that stole his videos (from my recollection of the old channel, not entirely implausible). On the other, it is possible that YouTube itself doesn't care much for its content creators outside of the few super-rich/popular/powerful users with enough influence to get their attention.
What happened here is that there's a talk show on that TV station where she appeared as a guest, and they aired the music video during the show (with her consent, of course). The episode got uploaded to the Content ID system and YouTube detected the music video as part of the station's intellectual property. However, the fact that they immediately lifted the claim without even bothering to ask for a legally binding document, signed by her, confirming what I said in the counter-notice, is indicative of the fact that these claims are all hit-or-miss and that the companies who issue them are blatantly aware of that. As soon as someone issues a counter-notice, they bail out pretty quickly in order to escape the potential legal ramifications of issuing false DMCA notices, even though my counter-notice could have been completely false and with no legal ground of itself.
And that's why it took a few days?
That's entirely possible but the company making the claim that they owned copyright is committing a [serious IMO] fraud and should be punished severely for it. If copyright infringement is a such a crime as the corporate world tries to suggest then false claim on copyright is far worse. The company knows that they will get false positives but continues.
One reason it's worse than mere infringement is it's an attempt to deprive either the public domain or the original owner in order to make financial gains whilst mere infringement is usually just for use. It's much closer to theft than plain infringement as it seeks to deprive the owner (or public domain) of the enjoyment (i.e. use or licensing) of the work whilst mere infringement generally does not.
AFAIK such fraudulent claims to ownership are not treated at all harshly in IP law? This is a case where it should be considered criminal [rather than just as a tort] as generally it's the action of a larger organisation against a content creator - the state should protect its citizens particularly when there are such imbalances of power.
If YouTube send you a DMCA takedown notification and those calling for the takedown can be easily confirmed to have acted falsely - eg you created the IP then the law _should_ enable you to successfully get punitive damages awarded. That would balance the current law and go someway to ensuring companies/people would only claim ownership of IPR they were sure they owned.
At the moment a company can just take a splatter-gun approach, claim everything is theirs, get paid. When you prove they made false claim all they get is less money paid to them - without punitive damages [and criminal proceedings] there is nothing to stop this sort of abuse.
So why did it take months? How were they blocked in the first place? (DMCA?) Was there an official counter-claim? Refused? Why?
It's a common YouTube scam - find a video with a lot of views that's rising quickly, download it and reupload it to your own account and submit it to Content ID. YouTube will automatically scan its library for copies of "your" video, and gives you the option to either take the copies down, or monetise them via ads.
Because of the DMCA's stupid counter notification process, it takes YouTube two weeks before they'll release the copyright claim, by which time the video is no longer viral and the original content creator has missed out on the bulk of the video's revenue.
The thing is, YouTube isn't really to blame for all of this, it's the idiotic way the DMCA is written and applied. As a service provider, YouTube is obliged to immediately respond to DMCA claims, regardless of how spurious a claim might be, or risk losing its protection under the DMCA's safe harbour provisions.
If the person against whom the DMCA takedown was lodged wants to challenge its validity, they have to send a counter notice, which starts a two week timer. If the person who submitted the takedown doesn't start actual legal action by the end of that two week period, YouTube is allowed to reinstate the content... at which point the DMCA troll can submit another takedown request, starting the whole Kafkaesque process again.
In the case of ContentID, which bypasses the DMCA, yes, they are to blame, along with all the media companies that demanded its creation.
People sometimes confuse the things which trigger DMCA safe harbor provisions with mandates but they aren't, and the only reason to be guided by them is to take advantage of the safe harbor attached to them. Real businesses often want to have better relations with big money content suppliers than the minimum required to avoid copyright liability, and can already structure their relations with end users in a way that they would have no liability for any take-down in any case, so exceeding what is necessary for the safe harbor on the content owner side while not concerning oneself with the safe harbor on the end-user side if perfectly rational, and doesn't bypass anything.
It might underscore why the DMCA isn't as balanced as it seems on the surface but instead radically tilted in favor of content owners, since only one of the superficially parallel safe harbor provisions is even relevant to most hosts.
AFAIK ContentID claims mechanism merely mimics DMCA mechanism – ContentID infringement claims are not actually DMCA notices.
That means that false-positive ContentID claims basically carry no legal consequences, unlike false-positive DMCA claims (perjury).
That means you can throw automated infringement notices at users knowing that X% of them will be false positives. That wouldn't work with DMCA.
It doesn't even do that, nor is it intended to. This isn't bypassing DMCA, though.
> That means you can throw automated infringement notices at users knowing that X% of them will be false positives. That wouldn't work with DMCA.
Sure, but DMCA isn't even relevant. DMCA notice provisions are a requirement for content owners to bypass the DMCA liability shield for third-party hosts in filing infringement claims -- they have to file notice in accordance with the DMCA, and then if the content host doesn't act within the parameters of the safe harbor, they can pursue whatever infringement action they would, absent the DMCA liability shield, have had against the content host.
DMCA notice requirements do not protect users from infringement claims, they protect content hosts. (And counter-notice requirements protect content hosts from liability claims from users stemming from take downs based on the DMCA notices.)
There are no DMCA provisions that exist to protect users posting allegedly infringing content.
Because of the DMCA's stupid counter notification process, it takes YouTube two weeks before they'll release the copyright claim, by which time the video is no longer viral and the original content creator has missed out on the bulk of the video's revenue.
What I don't understand is why someone uploading videos like that isn't being sued for straightforward copyright infringement.
The measures under the DMCA (and similar measures elsewhere, such as under the EUCD in Europe) were supposed to protect YouTube, the hosting service, in cases like this. Otherwise, the host is vulnerable to fallout from illegal acts committed by others and of which it has no knowledge. It's a similar argument to the common carrier principle in other communications channels.
Now, you can certainly debate whether the protection is too generous. For example, under this sort of scheme it is possible to build a business that facilitates and encourages copyright infringement and generates huge revenues as a result of that business model, yet wash your hands of it by claiming to just be the innocent third party host. This is still about the hosting service, though.
As far as I know, none of the DMCA-style laws protect the original uploader who actively and in this sort of case knowingly shares someone else's content in breach of copyright. If they're doing that with the kind of content that picks up millions of views and consequently denying advertising revenues and marketing effects to the legitimate creator/rightsholder, why isn't that grounds for a regular copyright infringement suit and, in a jurisdiction like the US, seeking statutory damages that make it worth pursuing one?
A month ago one of my videos about a reported and fixed XSS vulnerability was taken down for violating some rules (it didn't say what rules exactly). I submitted an appeal and it was reinstated a few days later.
Several years ago one of my videos that used some public domain footage was taken down for copyright infringement. I appealed it saying the footage was in the public domain and they reinstated my video several days later.
I posted how all 3 times I've had something negative happen on youtube, it was resolved through the appeals process. I'm trying to give hope/advice to people that appeals do work in many cases.
They followed the same procedures as described in the DMCA (even if this probably wasn't an official takedown request): if someone claims they represent the copyright holder and the videos are infringing, the service provider must take them down expeditiously.
I have videos up I literally can't get off. Their was a password clitch in their software when Google bought YouTube. I tried to get to my account, and got tired of hearing, "Go to the help boards sir-". I got to the point where it just wasen't worth the frustration. Too bad--at one time I really liked YouTube! Now--I only go there when absolutely necessary; Then I turn down the sound--try to guess when the skip advertisement pops up, watch, and gone for months.
(I have used YouTube from pretty much day one. I put up self help stuff for Contractors --A lot of This is How you put in a Hydronic Heating System. They were terrible, but I always had the option to remove/replace? I can now only get to them as a commenter. In one video, my dog died the previous week, and you could tell in my voice I wasen't doing well. Even one commenter suggested I should redo the video. I explained to him in the comment section I can't even get to the video.)
I mean, Youtube was serving pirated versions of his videos, refusing to block them, and refusing to attribute credit to him. Youtube was also gaining money from the operation.
In my experiences, Youtube these days are pretty responsive to even the small guys in settling out problems of this nature.
In my experience a letter or even just an email from a lawyer does wonders here. Dunno why.
https://www.youtube.com/user/GeekSquadSupport
and here is one such video, including the logo of the original channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0rEa-4mMk
If you spend enough time scrolling through the offending uploader's account you will find a whole block of videos blatantly taken from the channel known as GeekSquadSupport.
Now we have incredible machines that can reproduce intellectual property almost infinitely, distribute it anywhere on Earth, and find it almost anywhere on Earth. Wow! Maybe we should embrace that innovation, and find a model that encourages the spread, use and re-use of IP, for the betterment of society. Yes, motivating creators is a problem, but there are many possible solutions.
Another radical thought: The notion of IP created from whole cloth obviously was always a fallacy; we all "stand on the shoulders of giants", "good artists borrow, great artists steal", etc. Now that our IP machines make finding, copying, and distributing IP so easy, we can expect even more of that wonderful, creative larceny. As IP creators are benefitting from these amazing IP finding/copying/distributing systems and so much of their own product is stolen, perhaps they have less claim on the profits from those things they put their names on.
A third: Many creative people are motivated to do great things withhout payment. Remember, all those FOSS creators, from RMS to Linus Torvalds to Tim Berners-Lee to every little FOSS project on Github. Remember also Van Gogh and millions of other starving artists you have and haven't heard of (quick, name a poet who cashed in on their life's work). Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary (and perhaps we'd have less crap with less of it).
Is it that in your world, eating and paying the rent isn't necessary either?
'Many' creative people sounds like some programmers, which is somewhat small subset of all creatives. I'd be surprised if the majority of creative people — artists, writers, actors, and more — would happily go about saying that financial renumeration doesn't matter to them.
Destin, for example, puts a lot of effort into his videos and his work. Financial renumeration not being necessarily inevitably means Destin does something else for the majority of his time and does Smarter Ever Day less (if at all). This is almost certainly the same for every other artist out there. Sure — maybe all art isn't necessary. Maybe some of it is crap. But saying that being paid to be creative isn't necessarily means that you get very little art, if at all.
Financial renumeration per copy is not the only method to have artist eating and paying rent. Far from being the only way, historically it is just the most recent method and one which has strong down sides to it. The old way was simply to pay an artist so they can continue to create, which some artists has returned by using services like Patreon and get paid in order to creating more content. They are eating and paying the rent, and copyright aren't doing squat.
There is also substation proof that art is created regardless of renumeration. Several studies have look into why people create art, and none of them marks renumeration as the primary reason. Surveys show instead that people create art to express themselves, to improve their skills, to social interact with others, and to make their other other peoples lives better. They do however need time to be artists, and this is where the partial truth exist in. Money enable them to spend their time on art, and copyright provide one if the many way to create that money.
Humans have always created art. Modern conceptions of intellectual property have not always existed. Why would art depend on that?
But we have an alternative: leverage digital technology's nigh-zero marginal costs and charge very reasonable prices to large numbers of people.
The idea that because the marginal cost is zero that the cost should be zero is a horribly greedy devaluation of creative labor.
So I'm all for new economic structures, but AFAICT no one's stepped up with a better way that's actually proven to allow creative folks to continue to make a living. (Or that even has a snowball's chance once tried outside of armchair philosophizing.)
One last thought, since it's universally sizable corporations who control those digital distribution channels... do we REALLY want to cede even more power over content to these entities? If we just drop IP laws, that further enriches these corps at the cost of individual and/or small creators. That makes no sense to me whatsoever.
A good question, but I'm not sure. Those large corporations produce a lot of IP; maybe the small guy will benefit more than the big guy. Remember we're all stealing from and building on each other's IP. Imagine if all the proprietary software was open source, from OS X to Office to SunOS to SAS to Mathematica to Photoshop to AutoCAD to Google's search algorithms.
It would be a dream for many to be able to study, learn from, and reuse that code. It would be like the IP of the academic world, which generally is open and reusable by others.
Most of this wouldn't even exist if it had to be open-source from the start.
My 'radical idea' is that maybe they would exist. What if we had a system that provided a payment mechanism but did away with IP restrictions, for example? Consider how most of science is funded and shared, for example. Massive projects like the LHC and space probes are funded, and their data is openly shared. I'm not saying that the exact same system would work for software, but that there are other systems that work very well.
I'd expect that with 'open' technology, innovation would be faster and products would be better, as everyone could use and learn from best-in-class tech.
Yes it did; that was always the case. There's no requirement that art be produced by people who need the money.
Substitute playing music for your creative endeavour of choice.
Eh? The people who painted on cave walls surely didn't get paid, but they also surely didn't spent much of their time painting. Michaelangelo got paid, painted full time, and achieved mastery. He didn't need IP because copying a painting required a painter. Whatever you think of IP, it's a modern idea to address a modern situation.
Yes, there will always be art. But mastery and time are linked, and time and money are linked. If you want full-time artists, they need money somehow.
Of course it is, and thus figuring out an occupation or business model that allows you to eat and pay rent is important.
tl;dr: There should be a way for creative people to make Creating Art the occupation that pays them money for rent/food/etc.
Come to think of it, to what degree does IP protect only the most successful artists, and may even be a net hinderence to most.
Honestly, that's not really radical. It seems to be pretty clear to anyone who knows anything about computers. There may be flaws your other thoughts, as other commenters have suggested, but not with the first one.
The big problem -- in the U.S. anyway -- is that there are huge companies with a vested interest in maintaining something like the late-ish 20th century copyright regime. These make campaign contributions to lawmakers, who pass laws in their favor, which allow them to continue making money, which they contribute to lawmakers, etc. It appears to me that little is going to change until that cycle is broken.
Agreed. For a poster-child of this one need look no further than the Disney corporation. By US copyright laws existing up until 1978[1], "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" should have entered into the public domain sometime around 1993. Now? It's locked up until at least 2032 and will likely be "protected" by further copyright law modifications.
Now that is an interesting thought. Let Disney have Mickey Mouse forever, in exchange for lots of recent stuff.
However, I'm not sure it would work. Say I'm an artist. I know that my heirs will have to right to control my works until doomsday if I assign the authorship to a corporation. So I form a trust for that purpose. This sounds like a simple thing to do. It is also very reasonable, from my POV; I'm providing for my children. And if it were commonly done, then it would negate the benefits of this change in the law.
Or outright require that the corporation in question shows continuing profit from the work. If they're not profiting, then they're not using it, or are outright misusing it, so everyone else should be allowed a go at it.
Or allow for this transition of authorship to only happen when the corporation itself is inextricably tied with the work in question and would be severely damaged by its passing in the public domain (yes, this is in effect "do you have enough lawyer money" - kind of the same principle as above). Maybe require that the corporation was funded no more than delta(Disney creates Mickey Mouse, Disney creates the Disney corporation) + 1 years after the work in question. This will prevent for example book publishers getting perpetual rights to a book.
However it is formulated, I do think we can afford to cede certain corporate icons to their respective corporations in exchange of saner laws for the common cases.
It's actually the entire point of IP. Copying it is so easy compared to the creation of the work itself. So we legally restrict it.
>A third: Many creative people are motivated to do great things withhout payment.
Sure, but many aren't. Even more aren't willing to do boring, yet necessary projects. Finally, IP existing doesn't hold back FOSS at all.
Also, not all types of creative work lend itself to FOSS-like material. Many require extensive capital to get working.
As a creator with a day job, money isn't a motivator. But having my name tied to my works certainly is. And for all the programmers you listed it is as well.
The video freebooted by Zoo is a perfect example. They stripped his name and branding from the video and it went more viral as a Zoo video. If this happens regularly, there's literally no incentive to create content and distribute it. In fact it's a big de-motivator.
In the case of the FOSS creators you mentioned, I wonder how motivated they would be if their work could have so easily been entirely re-apropriated by someone else (in total violation of their licenses). If Linus' name and source code wasn't attached to every linux and linux based distribution on earth he would have moved on a long time ago. No one in their right mind would just freely write code and let others take all the credit for it (with no monetary incentive).
So I ask, could you please elaborate on your "many possible solutions"?
How about, YOU, quick name a television/book/movie you enjoyed , where every artist went unpaid. There is a reason Netflix PAID people to create content. There is a reason that today YouTube still pays people to make content for YouTube. Quality content comes from smart people who if not paid to make media, will gladly take their talent somewhere else. In your "solution" the outcome isn't that Destin makes content for free, its that he continues his dayjob as a missile engineer and the world misses out on great content like Smarter Everyday. We get great content when artists don't have to starve to produce it. How about you work entirely for free in your day job (Hey the kernel your program for was built for free, why should you get paid before Linus?), and see how long you last.
We are already seeing the print industry go this way - with cheap, easily churnable content listicles and articles that may-or-may-not be written by PR firms at corporations. I don't know about you, but I vastly prefer the content on HBO than to cheap formulaic YouTube shorts and corporate pr films.
We should be thinking about how we funnel the billions of dollars of the media industry to the best content creators and out of the hands of RIAA execs, not wiping it all away because "lol artists who needs to pay them?"
You're right in that some works do require significant budgets to complete. Is there absolutely no other possible way that such works could get funded without an individual person buying only one individual copy of that work to post-hoc fund it in aggregate?
"No! Nothing but this system could ever possibly work. It's pointless to even speculate on anything else existing."
I don't think that's your position, but you sure couch it in those terms. You sure ended that dialog in those terms. Did you mean to?
I'd like to see real discussion around this topic, but before it even gets off the ground, the mere existence of such systems are assumed impossible and the seed of such a conversation is accused of what you accused the grandparent. I want to entertain the notion.
That has very little to do with the matter described in the article - the "system" that exists today that the channel in the OP used doesn't require an individual person buying one copy - users can already watch the content for free on YouTube. The "system" that you are assuming "the mere existence of such systems are assumed impossible" already exists, its called YouTube (at least in one version).
What the poster was advocating is relinquishing IP, which is very different from "an individual person buying only one individual copy of that work". Consider that FOSS ecosystem is held together by licenses. Would it make sense if a movie exec came along and said "we are going to use his software, not give any credit, nor contribute changes because software developer's notion of IP is outdated?"
FOSS was always a hack, the desire was always that the content get released for the public good, and the intent was to use the licensing system to create an incentive for self-interested actors to release works to the public. Such a hack might not be necessary in the context of an economic system that incentivises the release of public works by it's nature.
In such a system, the movie exec would not want to say "we are going to use this software, not give any credit, nor contribute changes because software developer's notion of IP is outdated?" Because it would not be in that exec's interest. Perhaps because releasing updates to the software in and of itself earns them money, or maybe something else? I dunno, these conversations never seem to get off the ground so I rarely get to see ideas discussed.
So someone like Van Gogh is a perfect example of where it all breaks down. He (admirably) wasn't very interested in wealth or material things, he just wanted to be able to make a living doing what he was passionate about, and generally failed. There are millions of people throughout history who perfected their craft but since it wasn't recognized or rewarded, their potential contributions to society went largely unrecognized and unutilitized.
Today underemployment, tragedies of the commons and uncounted externalities are so rampant in our economy that (to me at least) it seems that they actually underpin it. So many problems like hunger, reliance on fossil fuels, lack of access to technology, just on and on, are relatively simple to fix and would only require a handful of dedicated people to make it happen. But say someone has an idea for a new generator that runs on waste heat, he or she can't get funding for it. Corporate and government research grants are all but gone, banks don't lend money for that stuff, and the only places that pay (universities) have erected nearly impassibly barriers to entry.
So here we are doing the same thing we’ve always done, toiled away our lives on generally pointless enterprises to make rent, while a few dispassionate sociopaths reap the benefits. The internet is completely broken right now in the way it ties data to its source. That’s not only likely, it’s destined, to be demolished here in the next few years. Stopping piracy is a fool’s errand, propped up by rent-seeking corporations that will go to the ends of the Earth, even undermine our legal system, to maintain the status quo.
What we should really be asking is how much longer we’re willing to tolerate the smoke and mirrors rather than just solving problems on a step by step basis once and for all. If we had a non-scarcity economy that did away with IP and started using technology to meet our basic needs, we wouldn’t need copyright in the first place. The robots could tend the hydroponic gardens while the living breathing humans could work on, I dunno, little things like enlightenment.
But this is a story about people who take other videos, strip the attribution, go viral, and get the benefits from work they had nothing to do with, while the person who actually did the work is cut out of the picture.
There is nothing forward-thinking about that, it's just classless rip-off.
The basic idea of a compulsory licensing scheme is that publishers are compelled to take and producers to offer a license to play any item covered by the scheme. And that publishers pay into a pool which is distributed to producers based on usage.
An idea like this would be actively resisted by the large internet publishing companies ( Google and Facebook, etc. ) but would be much more fair for small producers.
Unfortunately producers do not have much of a lobby in the current environment.
Also, heard about Payola? Back in the 1950's record label paid to get their stuff on the radio, just like people pay for sponsored content today. Attention is the scarce resource here.
The only issues with the Facebook and YouTube things here today are: they are undemocratic, show ads, and support plagiarism. Sharing of cultural works with credit and without ads is perfectly fine and is promotion for artists.
Intellectual personal property, like intangible personal property more generally, is, by nature, not generally tied to a physical object.
People who have money to pay for content, can designate an amount to donate per month. And then the "likes" that they place on content can cause their monthly budget to be divided up and paid to content creators each month. If Facebook implemented their own version of Flattr that could be game changing.
A work-in-progress attempt to fund creative work without artificial restrictions or ads etc.: https://snowdrift.coop/
We let people who do the creating decide if the want to give what they created away for free, or try to make some financial gain from it as permitted by our society's IP protecting statutes?
But we are living in times where IP laws are facing technological problems. For example, no one can copyright a joke and expect to make a fortune off of it, because anyone can hear a joke and repeat it their friends. The joke might reach millions of people, but no one can profit from it. It's unenforceable to limit a joke's distribution. And no one expects to, nor to make a fortune off of a joke. Humans are too good at making copies of jokes.
The same is happening to other media. Anyone can see a clip on YouTube and share it with their friends anywhere else, including Facebook, the topic of this article. With wearable tech, this will get even easier - as easy as repeating a joke, or even easier - just tell your device "record", "stop", and "share". And you've made a copy of anything you can see or hear.
When humans are too good at making copies of anything they can see or hear, the way they already are too good at making copies of jokes, IP law will have to change.
Youtube clip sharing/embedding is what Youtube is designed to do. You can turn it off on clips you upload. I think the problem here is duplication and passing off someones work as your own for clicks amd/or profit. Corporations do a lot of "clearing" clips that appear in documentaries so owners are compensated and not to be sued.
You are right, Individuals now empowered with their computers have their own duplication and distribution system and love free (who doesn't love free). Thus Napster. DRM makes purchasing less appealing than pirating, gone from music now, maybe someday from video.
Attempts to make individuals responsible for "sharing" was a PR disaster with fines and laws set in the pre-computer days. Even when the media companies won huge settlements from individuals they lost.
This will get more interesting when those 3d printers get better and cheaper and people start trading design files. I'm waiting for a R2D2 design to be shared...
Steal intellectual property for one reason and one reason alone: Make as much money as possible.
That's what happened in this case.
Not very radical, really. "Criminal" seems more apt.
> good artists borrow, great artists steal
In what deranged interpretation of reality could the stealing pointed out in this article be considered art?
Please, do tell.
But if someone is making money from the material, then the creators should get a cut.
There's plenty of discussion to be had on improving copyright. Making it better. I think it's definitely been an net benefit.
In all probability the "invisible hand" or what have you is indicating that my time spent doing the day job is much more valuable, and I'm completely fine with that. In my own tortured estimation the creative stuff is pretty much all "crap" by your definition ;) and there is not much of it. But I suspect it is not the situation you're in favor of.
For reference here are links to some of the creative work, which has all been great fun doing, so again, compensation is not at all an issue.
A comedy arcade game about fracking in space (use Firefox or Chrome plz): http://guscost.github.io/spacefrack
An amusing Arduino project: http://guscost.com/2015/02/26/fun-with-tailgaters/
A small tutorial on complex numbers (the most successful content I've made): http://guscost.com/2012/08/06/degrees-and-freedom/
A library for wrapping Kendo UI widgets in React components (not as artsy but useful): https://github.com/guscost/kendo-react-wrappers
A music game for iOS (had to renew my developer subscription but it should be up tomorrow): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mixball/id578469049?mt=8
A cover which needs a lot of work and a professional mastering job: https://soundcloud.com/guscost/i-get-carried-away-semi-rough
I've long believed free is inevitably part of the future of the industry and largely agree with you about the technical argument.
And a funny anecdote, spam ad blogs had copies of my linked articles within minutes of posting that comment.
Nobody cares about the IP of a rare gemstone because it's just plain old property.
IP was existed literally to protect the fact that it's very expensive to produce an original idea/work/poem/video/etc. but very cheap to reproduce it.
Reproduction getting cheaper only makes IP even more necessary.
Insanity. Cheap reproduction means "IP" is that much more destructive.
Mechanisms to stop plagiarism need to be entirely separated from laws against copying and sharing.
Are you one of those people who thinks we shouldn't have public libraries?? Freely distributed and shared ideas are a social good, period.
Every copy of a book in a library was bought, not randomly stolen from the author's personal library or illegally printed.
Every video copied to Facebook in the discussion here was originally a legitimate video uploaded to YouTube for public viewing.
If you want to continue the actual discussion about the place of the public library versus online sharing of ideas, you'll find only one reasonable distinction: the library isn't for-profit and putting ads on things. Facebook is awful here, but not because videos are being copied and shared — they are awful for their ads and tracking of people and their enabling of plagiarism (which is when someone makes fraudulent claims of authorship and has nothing to do with whether or not copies are made).
I think the main problem with this line of thinking is that it takes nothing to reproduce IP, but creating it takes thousands (and sometimes more) man-hours.
"A third: Many creative people are motivated to do great things withhout payment. Remember, all those FOSS creators, from RMS to Linus Torvalds to Tim Berners-Lee to every little FOSS project on Github."
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=linus+torvald+net+worth
Linus has a net worth of ~$150 million. So I'm not sure if this is a good example of someone creating FOSS out of the kindness of his heart.
RMS makes money through autographs, donations from big organizations, and winning prizes likes this: http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N59/59stallman.59n.html
Again, he's making a very good living by pretty much anyone's standard.
"Remember also Van Gogh and millions of other starving artists you have and haven't heard of (quick, name a poet who cashed in on their life's work). Perhaps financial renumeration, while fair, isn't entirely necessary (and perhaps we'd have less crap with less of it)."
10 years ago, I remember many people saying the exact same thing that you are saying now. The result has been less developers actually being hired. With so much free software out there, why would a business want to hire an actual engineer when they can hire a software mechanic (at a much lower wage)? Since the engineered parts are given away for free with so much free sofware, it makes the choice pretty easy.
Intellectual property has made it so with basically a computer/tablet/phone/very little startup capital, anyone has a real chance at making a living. Why are we actively trying to take away a very good way for social mobility?
It already happened in the music industry. Before the explosion of piracy, an indy artist could make a living selling music. Because of piracy, music is pretty much seen as worthless, which is what piracy does: It's not stealing, it's counterfeiting. Which completely devalues the item being counterfeited.
> With so much free software out there, why would a business want to hire an actual engineer when they can hire a software mechanic (at a much lower wage)? ... Why are we actively trying to take away a very good way for social mobility?
On one hand, that's a very good point. On the other, it's hypocritical for our industry to complain about jobs lost to efficiencies; much of what the IT industry does is replace human labor with computers or 'disrupt' whole industries. That's the 'creative destruction' of the free market, finding more productive solutions and shifting now-unneeded resources to something new. Should we maintain IP barriers so that engineers can be paid to create something that already exists?
> It already happened in the music industry. Before the explosion of piracy, an indy artist could make a living selling music.
Agreed, but before the explosion of recording technology, indie artists made money from performances. The technology changed then, now has changed again, and will change yet again. The business model built on last generation's tech isn't sacrosanct.
I don't mean to be callous about people's jobs or suggest I have the answers, but I think we can do much better than graft the old IP system onto the new technology.
If you're like me, and think of the pieces of shit that run the RIAA when you hear about piracy complaints... it's worth watching Destin and his videos to see a much more sympathetic actor.
(Also, his big beef seems to be facebook's incentives to make money off those videos w/o giving him some... he's not talking about torrents specifically)
Well, the kinds of things that people hate the RIAA for and the kind of things Destin is trying to fight are entirely different. There's a difference between getting a digital product without paying for it (or getting sued despite not having pirated anything ever) and taking someone else's digital product, putting your own name on it, and using that plagiarized material for your own personal gain.
Interestingly, a lot of people are getting very frustrated with Facebook for other reasons as well. Famously, there's Veritasium's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
I can really appreciate what they're feeling. With piracy as we have traditionally known it, at least usually the pirate is not directly profiting from his act of piracy. With freebooting, Facebook is literally profiting from other people's work. It's directly diverting money flow from the creator (who REALLY NEED THE MONEY) to Facebook. I think it's plainly ridiculous this is happening, and obviously Facebook will turn a blind eye to it because it's making them money. This is one of the reasons why I encourage whitehat security researchers to turn a little gray when it comes to Facebook and do things to bring them down, it'll be for the greater good to bring the behemoth down.
* Even if the profits are intangible, as in Facebook likes.
The people who manufacture the shirts? Yes, at least in theory.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ff/c8/73/ffc8...
It seems like YouTube's main incentive to build out copyright infringement tools was all of the record labels that had songs being uploaded and re-uploaded on the platform.
I can see YouTube getting really aggressive in fighting FB on this legally, because they need to defend their own content providers before they move to Facebook (or start uploading to both facebook/youtube).
It seems like it would be in the interest of producers to register their works in well-known repositories so that viewers can have a high degree of confidence that the content they are viewing has the claimed provenance.
If you even know it's there. Is a Facebook video with a million view likely to cross your particular feed? Especially if it's in another country? Especially if someone took pains to remove identifying characteristics?
> It seems like it would be in the interest of producers to register their works in well-known repositories
YouTube seems like a pretty well known repository to me ...
Want to access Facebook mobile? Hope you have an iPhone, because Google pushed a mandatory update last night which banned Facebook from all Android devices.
Want to access Facebook through Chrome? Sorry, it seems that site has been flagged as a malicious piracy hub; however, you might enjoy this 302 redirect to an automatically-generated clone of your Facebook profile hosted on a safer alternative called Google Plus.
Because this kind of censorship and manipulation may be acceptable to you when it's Facebook that's targeted at the moment. But what would you do when this kind of action is taken against some other entity that you want to access?
But screaming bloody murder because they are doing to the site what that site did to others seems a bit of a stretch.
If hating on Facebook needs to happen (probably does, BTW), how about it's done for reasons such as their laughable "Terms of Service"[2] and how it blatantly states they instantly own anything passing through them without any consideration?
Now that's a bitterness I can get behind.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
A new entrant to a business domain will look to their more-established competitors to learn lessons of what works and doesn't. They may disagree and look to differentiate themselves on some of the points, but overall it would be silly to suggest otherwise.
If this was a mistake that youtube made and facebook duplicated, people (especially stockholders) would have quite fathomable outrage at facebook. Youtube was the first huge name in the type of video delivery that they do, so their missteps have less "should have known better" attached.
So, it depends on if Facebook doing "what Youtube already did" with regard to copyrighted material is duplicating their mistake, or if Facebook is engaging in an amoral "get away with it for as long as you can" situation.
In either case the outrage makes quite a bit of sense.
There was no legal Netflix alternative, so people felt much more okay with watching shows there as well.
Now it's the little guy not only getting hurt by two big players cooperating, there even is a well functioning alternative!
I'm not saying this is different from a legal point of view, but for small content consumers it definitely feels different.
My point is that there are many comments here which are along the lines of "string Facebook up on the nearest tree because they allow people to put stuff up which is owned by a content creator who published it on Youtube!!!" The logic being, as you imply, that the content creators on Youtube are not being compensated.
And how is that different from Youtube profiting from their users ripping off content creators and putting it up on Youtube?
My closing point was that I believe there are better reasons to take the pitchforks and torches out regarding Facebook.
By bringing up Facebooks privacy policy you are adding nothing to the discussion of the culture of FB users stealing YouTube users' videos sans accreditation.
My point exactly.
> All this talk of "so what, YouTube did it too" ...
I didn't say "so what." I said Youtube became the billion dollar acquisition it was by doing exactly what Facebook is doing to them. I believe the appropriate term is "Quid Pro Quo."
> ... it disguises the fact that YT arent the ones who are suffering from the consequences of this trend - publishers using it as a platform are.
Cannot the same thing be said to the people employed by content producers such as Viacom et al? When Youtube used the same "we'll take this stuff down, but drag our heels doing it" tactics Facebook is doing now, were not real artists impacted? How is "publishers using it as a platform" in any way different than "publishers using Viacom as a platform?"
> By bringing up Facebooks privacy policy you are adding nothing to the discussion of the culture of FB users stealing YouTube users' videos sans accreditation.
I brought up Facebook's "Terms of Service" because I find it repugnant. If you don't see it that way, so be it.
If you are so ardently dedicated to this cause, why not follow the path of Metallica[1]?
1 - http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/04/35670
Is Facebook supposed to somehow know the video was uploaded to YouTube before? That would require Facebook to have an index of all the content on YouTube (an unreasonable proposal).
The next best thing is to allow takedown requests which they do!
The same thing can be done by reposting on Vimeo or any of a million sites. There just is no technologically and legally sound method to detect this sort of behavior.
If you don't want your video to be reposted by someone else, post it yourself. That's not to say it's okay for pirating to happen but this isn't Facebook evil, it's people.
One might blame Facebook for prioritizing it's native videos over embedded YouTube content but their policy on that is very public and the user experience IS better.
Why is Facebook being demonized?
The fact that it took so long for either to even acknowledge the problem existed is evidence that facebook has little incentive to speed up the takedown process to a reasonable bureaucracy.
I'm not sure what the exact timeline in the DMCA is (72 hours?), but the 17,000,000 views that went by before removal is something... (Not sure where the counter was when the removal request was received.)
Not sure what that status of money made on material you've been told was infringing and haven't taken down is..
The meme background of e.g. not sure Fry doesn't substantially detract from the value of an episode of Futurama. The video reposts by various radio stations are exactly the same as the behavior in question.
As far as piracy is concerned, I fail to see how Facebook is any better than MegaUpload. You might even say it's 1000 times worse, considering its alexa ranking is 1000 times better than MegaUpload's ever was.
Why hasn't Zuckerberg's house been raided yet, and all Facebook servers confiscated?
The model goes like this: Watch a few different pages and try to identify something that's bubbling up - that can be different viral facebook pages, reddit, whatever... there are a few different ways, but basically you constantly ping and scrape and try to identify stuff that's going viral as early as possible.
Once you've done that, you have an automated script that downloads the video and uploads it to your Facebook page or scrapes the content and throws it on your wordpress site with a really weak "link back" to the original content. You build up a Facebook page that has a few million likes, cover your wordpress pages in ads, and profit. It's not incredibly difficult to create an automated-if-unethical Buzzfeed.
It's incredible to watch one viral post or video spread throughout the web. It spreads out on different sites and platforms as quickly as it spreads on social media. Few end users really care what the original source was (especially since it's usually click-baity BS anyway), and the winners are the ones who can find the content the quickest and have the biggest reach.
I talked to a guy a couple of days ago who is making $60,000/month using this exact process, and has very little programming ability. He is, however, an absolutely shrewd and ruthless marketer with no ethical qualms about much of anything.
The content producers send him DMCA requests on occasion, and when that happens he or Facebook takes it down. But that's just a cost of doing business, and 95% of the content stolen never sees a DMCA request, so who cares? (Assuming you have no ethical compass). Content creators aren't constantly searching and scraping and trying to find other places where their content is hosted. That's hard enough to do on one platform alone (i.e. YouTube), let alone monitoring other platforms (Facebook) and a bunch of wordpress sites.
It's a game of content creators vs. "marketers."
It gets even more difficult for the content creators as the "marketers" get smarter - heighten the pitch of a video a little bit so sound matching software can't find it, reverse the video and choose different thumbnails so reverse image/video searches don't find it, spin the text content (visitors aren't really there for the great writing anyway), and you beat the vast majority of software. It's up to the individual content creators to play the same game Google is playing to kill the spammers, which is not their core competency. Unless Facebook does something on its own platform, this won't change. And even if they do, the best spammers will continue to outsmart the system.
The only way Facebook (and the content creators) win is if it becomes a core competency, much the same way defeating spam is for Google. I still know guys who can beat Google, but the level of sophistication is high enough that 99% of people can't keep up.
There are a few simple ways you can beat the vast majority of the content theft though; if anyone is interested feel free to email me and I'll point out some of the breadcrumbs the marketers leave behind.
The most spammy ones use clickjacking; basically they throw up something that covers the page with an ad (or a "like us on facebook" prompt), and use some JS to turn a click anywhere on the site into a facebook like. That's playing with fire though, as most of those pages get flagged and shut down.
They do get a little bit of traffic from Google because their social reach is extreme (one of the bigger things Google looks for now) but it's around 85% pure Facebook traffic
Screenshot of his Google Analytics: http://imgur.com/Edfo3cm
You mean like Buzzfeed.
I'm not sure I understand what the problem is.
There's companies with order of magnitudes less traffic who have people fielding DMCA requests full-time. If FB doesn't, that's completely unacceptable, full stop.
This would give YouTube a unique feature that would keep their content producers hosting content on their platform.
However, the mechanics would be somewhat tricky. I'd guess it would work something like the following: submit a URL for a Facebook post/Wordpress post, that prompted YouTube to ContentID against your existing videos, and if it found a match, it put your flagged violation in a queue for human verification, and subsequent automated DMCA takedown gets sent to the hoster, along with a report of if the content is still available. Of course, that becomes open to the sort of abuse mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
FaceBook certainly have a team responding to DMCA requests. They are just slow.
Ideally, someone like YouTube licenses their technology, and opens up their contentID DB to the licensee for consumption... But again, I can see many avenues for abuse by licensee's (for example, automated "content capture" of content not currently in the DB), that would need good policies to help prevent.
Destin mentions in his "intro to freebooting" video his various attempts to contact Facebook regarding the piracy, and that it was only removed after a Twitter campaign led by his viewers: https://youtu.be/L6A1Lt0kvMA?t=3m49s
I don't know much, or have any experience with DMCA, but it's my impression that if there's a copyright violation on Youtube, the video can be taken down very quickly, and the burden of proof is then placed on the uploader to get it back up.
Channel4 has whole TV programme, Rude Tube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rude_Tube), devoted to internet clips, which are all from YouTube AFAIK. I wonder if the creators get any money from that.
I know, I know. Piracy, copyright, "I made it, they just remixed it by cutting me out". "It's mine, where is my money?!" Internet apparently doesn't care.
Either you serve the market your content or the market gets served your content without ever knowing about you.
Is Facebook profiting from this? Sure. Was/is YouTube profiting from the same thing? Yes. Do internet providers profit from piracy in general? Of course. Same as writable DVD manufacturers were. XEROX owners and whoever.
Is that bad? It's way better than if it was to be made absolutely sure that they don't.
Sure, you can fight back by appealing to the public about facebook's evility, or by spending lots of resources in legal action. Or you can roll with the punches and figure out the myriad ways in which even the currently broken facebook system can work for you.
YouTube has a system to recognize copies of known videos, so they can prioritize the original video when they serve search results, or recommended videos. This allows them to soak up the demand for a particular video, and direct it at the appropriate copy (the one uploaded by the video's creator).
Until Facebook has a similar system, multiple copies of a single video can exist within Facebook and potentially never cross paths, since propagation depends on the local shape of the social graph, and how EdgeRank moves content through it.
That means that even if a video creator uploads their own video to Facebook, they can't soak up all the demand for it.
As the guy in the article says, the only way for him to become aware of a copy is if it lands in the NewsFeed of one of his fans. Whereas on YouTube, anyone can search for any title, and Content ID also finds matches.
edit: additions and clarity
Then you don't get any money at all fore it, so that doesn't seem viable for people who treat it like a job.
I think this is the quintessential definition of "Quid Pro Quo"[1].
1 - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quid%20pro%20quo
> Maybe this is just a stage of development for online video platforms: grow first, then cover your legal bases. Some might even see poetic justice in the potential disruption of YouTube’s business by an upstart that plays a little faster and looser when it comes to copyright enforcement.
Maybe the technologies of internet will improve up to the point there will be no multinational group able to reap the benefit (a more decentralized internet with bitcoin-like architectures), but I don't see it happening very soon. I can guess consumers could understand the complexity of technology only so much, I wonder if improving those technologies and making them also as much accessible is really possible.
Facebook is really the low hanging fruit of the web. They might have open sourced stuff, but they're really evil in the google sense of the word. I can already remember 2 examples: the click farms and internet.org, and I'm sure there are so many other examples.
All of this makes me really sad, because the internet is the #1 tech tool that is improving the lives of so many people, and there is already so much greed involved.
Example:
Offending video: My Video (can include youtube/vimeo/other link):
No, not automatically scalable. Facebook started this, they're gonna have to staff up to handle the problems associated with it.
I see Facebook has only recently started allowing people to monetize their uploads, so the primary benefit the "freebooters" got was traffic to their site. Maybe Facebook should take a page from porn and link-skim an equivalent number of page views from the freebooter to the victim. Talk about restitution!
(incidentally, I've found Facebook far more responsive than Twitter. Imagine what happens when the big T gets into the video game in a big way)
How do they not also work around this system?
Say I go on youtube, download Destin's video, cut out his talking and advertizing portions. I'll just change the watermark while I'm there and then slap it on facebook.
Even if we go cryptographic, and replace the watermarks with public key signing, does facebook only host properly signed videos? Then how does the chain of trust work? For automated transcoding by youtube and the like work? How do I get a trusted public key for cute videos of my cats that doesn't create an infinite well of keys for freebooters?
So maybe we can't just sign, we have to add in DRM so that only authorized player widgets can even decode the video in the first place. That doesn't stop piracy of hollywood material, why would it stop a media company from freebooting?
Shameless plug: we (FullScreen) have a video uploader service that uploads to both platforms with several custom options such as staggered release on the two platforms or say putting a short preview clip on Facebook that links to the full video on (monetized) YouTube: http://www.fullscreen.com/2015/05/21/fullscreen-uploader-is-...
No, stealing (yes, stealing) people's work sucks. Unjustified takedown requests do suck (and what makes them suck so much is platforms' craven response to frivolous requests). But we're talking about real, willful infringement here.
"Content creators don't want that"
You probably shouldn't try to speak for all of us, because you are wrong.
Secondly, just playing along, what he gets is his audience going to the legitimate source for the content, where he will get his full measure of remuneration, where the work will be seen in its proper context, and where he can ensure that it's not tampered with.
An overwhelming number of creators prefer to set their match policies for ContentID to monetize. Some have tiered track/monetize/block policies that are contextually dependent on match length, % match, and country of viewership. But the great majority of creators prefer to monetize. Your mileage may (and does) vary.
Why would they want to until they're somehow forced to? Much like all the fake accounts and associated "like" markets, there's zero incentive for them to correct the issues.
I think everyone can agree that putting a movie up on the pirate bay, and putting a movie up on the pirate bay after stripping out the credits and putting your own name on it are two different kinds of things.
I sometimes wonder if the tech startup crowd really believes "eyeballs," "exposure," and "active users" are inherently valuable. Maybe if you're shopping around to investors or patrons. Not if you're the other 99% of the population. For them, exposure is just a chance to grow the modest revenue stream they already have, or nothing at all. MAYBE you could get lucky and parlay it into a book deal or something, but probably not.