5 ms·

I guess Youtube-mp3 and The Pirate Bay is bad and all the illegal stuff on Youtube is okay because...

ssharp 10y ago
...there is a legal remedy for it.
givinguflac 10y ago
This bothers me too. Sure one can claim there's a legal remedy, but Youtube was built on pirated content, and Google knows it. Even today I can go watch many, many pirated shows on youtube. It's been years that uploaders have evaded detection by simply mirroring (left to right, not hosting elsewhere as well) the video or slightly speeding up/slowing down the audio and/or video. Either google is willfully ignorant or they aren't as great at 'searching' for pirated content as they'd like us to believe. I think the former is much more likely.
- chrshawkes 10y ago
  I would say it's more so the case with Pinterest. However, YouTube does flag copyrighted content and in many cases the copyright holder is collecting video ad revenue even though somebody illegally uploaded it. This is almost always the case with music.
  - friedman23 10y ago
    pinterest? people don't go to pinterest for the express reason of watching copyrighted material
    - netrus 10y ago
      You seem to assume that pictures are not copyrighted material.
      - friedman23 10y ago
        Well if you payed attention to my wording you would have noticed that I was talking about the intention of the people visiting the website. Also people don't make money from uploading pictures to pinterest.
- rifung 10y ago
  > Either google is willfully ignorant or they aren't as great at 'searching' for pirated content as they'd like us to believe. I think the former is much more likely. Disclaimer: I work for Google (but not YouTube). Opinions are my own. I suspect this has to do with economics. YouTube has way too many videos so everything is probably largely automated. Having to go through videos and find all possible modifications to pirated content is really difficult, and it'd be very expensive for them to do both in terms of engineering effort and also computing resources. After all, it's not like you can search videos by their content, you can only search their titles or descriptions with text. Sure, they could start detecting things that have mirrored content, but then people would just change the method by which they modify the original video. People who are trying to upload pirated content only have to modify the videos they upload, while Google has to check all videos that are uploaded, the majority which are likely not pirated, and checking the videos is likely much more computationally expensive than modifying them a tiny bit. I admit I know nothing at all about video formats and that stuff so if I'm wrong please correct me as I'm always grateful to be able to learn more.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    it's not like you can search videos by their content Err... yes you can. It's trivial.
    - rifung 10y ago
      Care to explain how you would do that?
      - highd 10y ago
        I would construct a list of invariances that a classifier should be robust to, then construct (either empirically, analytically or via a machine learning algorithm using a synthetic dataset) a series of features that are invariant under these transformations. This is sometimes called "fingerprinting" and Shazam uses something like it to look up audio. I'm sure there are many specific approaches described in the literature. I would then use these features to identify videos that have the same content as these already reported - pick your favorite clustering algorithm. This would ensure that for a single copyrighted video being reported all plausible manipulations that fall under the model are also discovered. Point being, this is something that could be implemented in less than a month or two by an individual or small team. If Google hasn't implemented it it's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done.
- farm_code 10y ago
  There is no financial or business incentive for Google to block pirated content.
paulddraper 10y ago
> because... Youtube obeys US law by responding to DCMA
- iokanuon 10y ago
  So does youtube-mp3 by that logic. They don't store deleted youtube content.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    So did Megaupload.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    That's not how copyright works; videos are not "legal" or "illegal", it depends on who's doing the distribution. I may upload a video I made to YouTube, without granting anyone else (including youtube-mp3) a license to redistribute it.

...there is a legal remedy for it.

This bothers me too. Sure one can claim there's a legal remedy, but Youtube was built on pirated content, and Google knows it. Even today I can go watch many, many pirated shows on youtube. It's been years that uploaders have evaded detection by simply mirroring (left to right, not hosting elsewhere as well) the video or slightly speeding up/slowing down the audio and/or video. Either google is willfully ignorant or they aren't as great at 'searching' for pirated content as they'd like us to believe. I think the former is much more likely.

chrshawkes 10y ago
I would say it's more so the case with Pinterest. However, YouTube does flag copyrighted content and in many cases the copyright holder is collecting video ad revenue even though somebody illegally uploaded it. This is almost always the case with music.
- friedman23 10y ago
  pinterest? people don't go to pinterest for the express reason of watching copyrighted material
  - netrus 10y ago
    You seem to assume that pictures are not copyrighted material.
    - friedman23 10y ago
      Well if you payed attention to my wording you would have noticed that I was talking about the intention of the people visiting the website. Also people don't make money from uploading pictures to pinterest.
rifung 10y ago
> Either google is willfully ignorant or they aren't as great at 'searching' for pirated content as they'd like us to believe. I think the former is much more likely. Disclaimer: I work for Google (but not YouTube). Opinions are my own. I suspect this has to do with economics. YouTube has way too many videos so everything is probably largely automated. Having to go through videos and find all possible modifications to pirated content is really difficult, and it'd be very expensive for them to do both in terms of engineering effort and also computing resources. After all, it's not like you can search videos by their content, you can only search their titles or descriptions with text. Sure, they could start detecting things that have mirrored content, but then people would just change the method by which they modify the original video. People who are trying to upload pirated content only have to modify the videos they upload, while Google has to check all videos that are uploaded, the majority which are likely not pirated, and checking the videos is likely much more computationally expensive than modifying them a tiny bit. I admit I know nothing at all about video formats and that stuff so if I'm wrong please correct me as I'm always grateful to be able to learn more.
- contingencies 10y ago
  it's not like you can search videos by their content Err... yes you can. It's trivial.
  - rifung 10y ago
    Care to explain how you would do that?
    - highd 10y ago
      I would construct a list of invariances that a classifier should be robust to, then construct (either empirically, analytically or via a machine learning algorithm using a synthetic dataset) a series of features that are invariant under these transformations. This is sometimes called "fingerprinting" and Shazam uses something like it to look up audio. I'm sure there are many specific approaches described in the literature. I would then use these features to identify videos that have the same content as these already reported - pick your favorite clustering algorithm. This would ensure that for a single copyrighted video being reported all plausible manipulations that fall under the model are also discovered. Point being, this is something that could be implemented in less than a month or two by an individual or small team. If Google hasn't implemented it it's because they don't want to, not because it can't be done.
farm_code 10y ago
There is no financial or business incentive for Google to block pirated content.

paulddraper 10y ago

> because... Youtube obeys US law by responding to DCMA

iokanuon 10y ago
So does youtube-mp3 by that logic. They don't store deleted youtube content.
- contingencies 10y ago
  So did Megaupload.
- icebraining 10y ago
  That's not how copyright works; videos are not "legal" or "illegal", it depends on who's doing the distribution. I may upload a video I made to YouTube, without granting anyone else (including youtube-mp3) a license to redistribute it.