11 ms·

YouTube Bans Award-Winning Short

204 points by protomyth 9y ago

linarism 9y ago
I'm kind of surprised that Patreon hasn't made a spinoff platform to compete with YouTube for all the YouTubers flocking to their donation service.
- lotyrin 9y ago
  Why? It's really convenient to offload bandwidth and DMCA etc. to YouTube, and that lets creators double-dip if their content can be monetized there.
- baybal2 9y ago
  It is in making, they don't even hide it that much. For now, it seems, they will hold strategy to "let Youtube do the hard stuff"
- egypturnash 9y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they're playing with one; they're regularly sending out "how to grow your audience" suggestions to creators that want everyone to make video content, regardless of how appropriate it is to their craft and/or personality. That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment. Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing, there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond "managing some AWS virtual storage for video files".
  - baybal2 9y ago
    >That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment. Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing, there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond " As I know, current Patreon's stance on what to do with it when they reach that stage, is to focus on English speaking speaking audience, and have no legal presence outside of US. As the US is the only paying off market for 9 out of 10 of any online media businesses, it makes sense. Same thing with CDN, if they go that way, they only have to deal with much smaller loads, and have no need for multi-dc replication. If they only have to deal with the most creative and valuable share of makers that they will skim from yt, the will not have to deal with exabytes of cat videos and other garbage content. Same on the legal from, for as long as most content is original, the only issue will most likely be music, but there is already a thriving industry of RIAA-free music licensing specifically for makers thanks to YT yielding to requests for automated takedowns/DeMo/and revenue divertions. Maker relationships? Very straight, steal top 10% makers from YT, depriving it of majority of genuine creative content. Here YT can't counter that with pretty much anything: Google sells ads, Patreon sells makers themselves. Google stays with cat videos, while Patreoners take the tasty stuff. Predicament looks rather dim for YT unless they will have the willpower to make a U-turn in their relationship with the creative community
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  It's so expensive, though. Video streaming bandwidth costs serious money. And that's apt to get worse with paid prioritization; large incumbent players can already use these kinds of money sinks as loss leaders for other products, but adding reduced negotiating leverage to the massive capital barriers is just the nail in any prospective startup's coffin.
JadeNB 9y ago
Without wanting to stand up for YouTube—I don't—this complaint: > While Villa Antropoff contains a few short scenes of cartoon nudity, Youtube makes clear exceptions in its policies for works that are presented in “artistic contexts.” The fact that a Youtube employee could have reviewed this film and not recognized the film’s artistic context illustrates a serious breakdown in the company’s ability to police content based on its own policies. seems a bridge slightly too far. To be sure, it would have been nice if the YouTube reviewer had recognised the artistic context to the piece, but the failure of one reviewer to do so seems to be evidence of a mistake, or at worst of misapplication of policies, not of a company run amok (although there is plenty of evidence of that elsewhere). Since there is a process for appeal, that seems like the step that should be taken before, or at least in parallel with, public complaint (although the author mentions that Lunohod has decided not to appeal).
- cromwellian 9y ago
  The idea that everyone who is a reviewer will have exactly the same appraisal of what's obscene, extremist, hateful, or even pornography, is ludicrous. No one even agrees on what art is.
andrewflnr 9y ago
Deciding whether nudity (or anything, really) is "artistic" is hard, and probably doesn't scale. There may not be a good solution for this problem in the general case.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Google Maps is crowd sourcing business and location data. I wonder if YouTube couldn't do the same, rewarding (like Maps does) YouTube Red subscriptions for enough effort. Then they could have more granular controls in clients, like saying "Block videos where at least half of the crowd say there is sexual content".
  - wolco 9y ago
    The problem you might have is that most who search for terms that would bring up similiar results will have a vested interest in sexual content and will produce false flags
    - katastic 9y ago
      Not to mention when you can crowdsource banning content, competitors will intentionally flag content that competes.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        I didn't say banning content. I suggested categorization. Like the categories in the detailed MPAA breakdowns ("violence", "sexual content", "language", etc.). Maps asks more opinionated questions as well. YouTube alternatives would include "Good for kids", "Funny", "Good on a small screen", and things like that.
        int_19h 9y ago
        What do you do when people flag random things they don't like as "sexual content", solely so that they would be less visible?
touchofevil 9y ago
Why doesn't Youtube have a few formally trained filmmakers or film theorists on staff that they can kick these sorts of edge cases up to? Someone with a filmmaking or film theory education would instantly classify this short as art that should be available on Youtube. I could see this video being given an age restriction, but never banned.
- chris_st 9y ago
  According to google, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube... every minute. There's just no way to have humans moderate that. And if we assume they'd only decide on films where the ban was appealed, I'd bet it's still too much to do. Weirdly, the creator of the film in question said they wouldn't appeal the ruling.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I disagree there's "too much to do" when it comes to having humans moderate reported or detected cases of terms violations. We have a near crisis with people having a harder and harder time finding jobs that don't require college degrees. A lot of older job fields machines can do just as well, so a lot of old jobs are going away. The people are there. Google is sitting on many billions of dollars it just doesn't want to spend (like $100B or so, I believe?). The money to pay for people is there. However, Google would not be nearly as profitable if it wasn't automating away jobs that as we've continually seen, automation is pretty bad at doing. This is a business decision, plain and simple. New jobs for humans aren't opening up because tech companies are insisting on using automation to do things automation isn't good at.
    - delecti 9y ago
      At 300 hours/minute they'd need 18,000 pairs of eyes judging videos constantly (not all videos need to be judged immediately, but that's fine). Assuming a normal employee works 50 weeks of 40 hours a year, that means that each employee is only working about 23% of the time. In the end they'd need about 80,000 employees to judge everything that gets uploaded. Wikipedia says they had 57,100 employees in 2015. With inefficiency (HR, payroll, managers, manager-managers, devs to write video audit software, etc), they'd need to triple their workforce solely to keep up with youtube.
Nihilartikel 9y ago
The case of this article is unfortunate, but it's actually missing what I think is the more serious problem with YouTube for independent artists right now.. This is just a problem of an unfortunate strike against a video - I imagine that it will be fixed under appeal. These things happen, as a great great number of videos need to be evaluated by staff against a complicated set of criteria and precedents. It doesn't actually speak very much about any kind of systemic bias against independent artists. What DOES create a problem for artists is the tuning of the algorithms to be highly preferential to long form frequently posted content E.g video game commentary. This is a big problem for creators who work in short, high effort, highly polished media - E.g animators. This really really bums me out. I was an employee at YouTube during their period of great growth and I absolutely loved the platform and potential for compensation that they gave to niche and indy animators and musicians, and had great hope for a future where the democratization of video distribution would lead to a flourishing of art and entertainment that caters to a higher common denominator than the over-polished, focus group approved, mass market creativity that passes for main-stream. Sadly, it looks like the prime goal of increasing return visits and raw view time has lead to algorithmic optimization of that same mass-media race-to-the-bottom in quality and diversity in search of a broadly palatable and compulsively consumable product. It saddens me and I still feel that they could have it both ways if they took a more aware approach to niche content. YouTube offers monetization - the fact that artists even need Patreon means that GoogTube is ignoring a need, and thus a business opportunity. Just because a piece of work may only appeal to 50,000 people world wide doesn't necessarily mean that it has less value or merit than one that appeals to 10 million. I support quite a few animators on Patreon, and the impression I get is that they are all struggling to keep working on it as a primary job.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I think it's entirely possible that youtube is still in a growth phase (or they are treating it as that phase), where they see the goal as convincing people it's a real platform to visit for content, and recurring content (such as a network channel, or Netflix now), and not just that place hosting videos that you get links to. Once there's enough people that see it as a network of content that they can spend time on, they can then start encouraging and optimizing for specific, high-impact items instead of recurring content. Right now they are in the "let's pump out as many sitcoms as possible" phase, and hopefully they'll progress towards a "let's release a couple mini-series and made-for-TV movies" phase (allowing that they aren't generating the content in either case, just encouraging it's production and dissemination by offering cheap hosting and monetization).
TheTruestKyle 9y ago
Check out the guys behind Dragon Ball Z Abridged. They are a parody of the original Dragon Ball Z series. It seems they are getting sued like crazy from Toei animation because they don't understand fair use and YouTube does nothing to help them.
tudorw 9y ago
Is there a tipping point where the independent content creators tire of this? Patreon seems to have some traction and just seems a good fit for artistic endeavours, the fact that you need $100 in income from YouTube before they pay out must mean there are a lot of people with a lot of viewers whose income they hold in perpetuity. Same with Spotify, is there a point at which creators withhold their content, or is the lure of large viewer numbers irresistible ?
- QAPereo 9y ago
  For some things, like churned out entertainment for children, tweens and teens, YouTube probably has a lock. Those groups don't care about any of this. For The rest, fragmentation seems inevitable to me.
philfrasty 9y ago
If you run a fitness-channel on YouTube (I do) and your thumbnail contains a topless body, the video will not be monetized. No more sixpack tutorials I guess...
- Endy 9y ago
  Why not just create a static title card for your thumbnail?
  - overcast 9y ago
    Because that doesn't attract viewers like nudity does. How many times have you seen a half naked chick as the thumbnail, yet never appears in the video?
    - vanderZwan 9y ago
      Remember when YT immediately counted every view regardless of how long someone watched, and there was this plague of clickbait? For example headless women showing their cleavage in the thumbnail, because there were enough horny idiots dumb enough to click the thumbnail. That's why they switched to 30 seconds initially, and now to something more percentage based i think (Funny enough it is practically impossible to Google the articles that described these changes when they first happened; I read them bs k then and I've been looking for them for ten minutes to no avail)
    - Endy 9y ago
      I honestly wouldn't know - I don't usually watch videos with half-naked chicks in the thumbnails. Basically, when I'm watching on YouTube and not directed there from another video site, I only watch Takeshi's Castle, Cinemassacre, Channel Awesome, TheStrawHatNO!, newfiebangaa, World of Longplays, Playable Passion (sensing a theme?), Guru Larry, and a few other channels along that same theme.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Yet, you could probably do six pack tutorials if the six pack was beer. You could probably drink it right on camera and give drunken reviews. But nudity is problematic...
mschuster91 9y ago
I say it again and again: it's time to finally regulate the big social media/tech giants (Amazon, FB, Youtube, Twitter, but also big email providers like Gmail, AOL). Account closures and content removals must have a way to appeal operator decisions in a court of law. My telco provider is legally barred from shutting down my account unless I'm 3 months behind in payments - so why isn't the same valid for the tech giants? In fact, the services of Facebook and Whatsapp are something I more depend on than having a landline, but I'm straight outta luck if either service decides to ban me. And no, "choose another provider" is not a valid option, as there is no alternative because no service allows me to transfer my identity (e.g. email address) so old contacts can reach me, unlike with phone numbers.
- dageshi 9y ago
  > And no, "choose another provider" is not a valid option, as there is no alternative because no service allows me to transfer my identity (e.g. email address) so old contacts can reach me, unlike with phone numbers. With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at gmail? gmail removes your account, your email still works you just have to point it at a different backend. But therein lies the rub right? It costs money and people won't pay it, they'll take the free option every time. Personally I find it hard to see how these companies can be regulated in the way that you want for services that they give away for free.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at gmail? That costs money for the Google Apps Enterprise suite, and you're still dealing with a company that isn't known for customer service - you may point your MX records somewhere else but still can't access old emails when they terminate you for whatever stupid reason. (Yes, backups are a solution but many people blindly trust the cloud)
    - dageshi 9y ago
      Fundamentally companies are not obligated to give you their services for free, which seems to be what you're demanding? Now if you were to argue that companies must give you the opportunity to download your data before they close your account, that I would agree with. I'd even say a grace period of a few days so you can practically change your email might be worth considering, but I don't see how you can possibly argue that companies must give their services away for free just because they're good at what they do.
adekok 9y ago
It's impossible to believe that Youtube blocks this video, but can't tell that the copies are the same video. Which means they have provisions to block a providers video. Not the content of a video. They're happy to publish other copies of the same "inappropriate" content, and to monetize it. But they won't let the original author monetize it. If this is something other than "being evil", I don't know what it is.

204 points by protomyth 9y ago

I'm kind of surprised that Patreon hasn't made a spinoff platform to compete with YouTube for all the YouTubers flocking to their donation service.

lotyrin 9y ago
Why? It's really convenient to offload bandwidth and DMCA etc. to YouTube, and that lets creators double-dip if their content can be monetized there.
baybal2 9y ago
It is in making, they don't even hide it that much. For now, it seems, they will hold strategy to "let Youtube do the hard stuff"
egypturnash 9y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they're playing with one; they're regularly sending out "how to grow your audience" suggestions to creators that want everyone to make video content, regardless of how appropriate it is to their craft and/or personality. That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment. Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing, there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond "managing some AWS virtual storage for video files".
- baybal2 9y ago
  >That said: making a YouTube is a hell of a lot of work and a huge investment. Yes I'm sure you can kludge up a simple clone of the basics in Your Favorite Language in six hours, but can you build the infrastructure to deal with the inevitable copyright infringement, avoid falling foul to widely varying obscenity laws across the globe, hire people to screen for that sort of thing, there's a whole bunch of stuff above and beyond " As I know, current Patreon's stance on what to do with it when they reach that stage, is to focus on English speaking speaking audience, and have no legal presence outside of US. As the US is the only paying off market for 9 out of 10 of any online media businesses, it makes sense. Same thing with CDN, if they go that way, they only have to deal with much smaller loads, and have no need for multi-dc replication. If they only have to deal with the most creative and valuable share of makers that they will skim from yt, the will not have to deal with exabytes of cat videos and other garbage content. Same on the legal from, for as long as most content is original, the only issue will most likely be music, but there is already a thriving industry of RIAA-free music licensing specifically for makers thanks to YT yielding to requests for automated takedowns/DeMo/and revenue divertions. Maker relationships? Very straight, steal top 10% makers from YT, depriving it of majority of genuine creative content. Here YT can't counter that with pretty much anything: Google sells ads, Patreon sells makers themselves. Google stays with cat videos, while Patreoners take the tasty stuff. Predicament looks rather dim for YT unless they will have the willpower to make a U-turn in their relationship with the creative community
leggomylibro 9y ago
It's so expensive, though. Video streaming bandwidth costs serious money. And that's apt to get worse with paid prioritization; large incumbent players can already use these kinds of money sinks as loss leaders for other products, but adding reduced negotiating leverage to the massive capital barriers is just the nail in any prospective startup's coffin.

JadeNB 9y ago

Without wanting to stand up for YouTube—I don't—this complaint: > While Villa Antropoff contains a few short scenes of cartoon nudity, Youtube makes clear exceptions in its policies for works that are presented in “artistic contexts.” The fact that a Youtube employee could have reviewed this film and not recognized the film’s artistic context illustrates a serious breakdown in the company’s ability to police content based on its own policies. seems a bridge slightly too far. To be sure, it would have been nice if the YouTube reviewer had recognised the artistic context to the piece, but the failure of one reviewer to do so seems to be evidence of a mistake, or at worst of misapplication of policies, not of a company run amok (although there is plenty of evidence of that elsewhere). Since there is a process for appeal, that seems like the step that should be taken before, or at least in parallel with, public complaint (although the author mentions that Lunohod has decided not to appeal).

cromwellian 9y ago
The idea that everyone who is a reviewer will have exactly the same appraisal of what's obscene, extremist, hateful, or even pornography, is ludicrous. No one even agrees on what art is.

andrewflnr 9y ago

Deciding whether nudity (or anything, really) is "artistic" is hard, and probably doesn't scale. There may not be a good solution for this problem in the general case.

humanrebar 9y ago
Google Maps is crowd sourcing business and location data. I wonder if YouTube couldn't do the same, rewarding (like Maps does) YouTube Red subscriptions for enough effort. Then they could have more granular controls in clients, like saying "Block videos where at least half of the crowd say there is sexual content".
- wolco 9y ago
  The problem you might have is that most who search for terms that would bring up similiar results will have a vested interest in sexual content and will produce false flags
  - katastic 9y ago
    Not to mention when you can crowdsource banning content, competitors will intentionally flag content that competes.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      I didn't say banning content. I suggested categorization. Like the categories in the detailed MPAA breakdowns ("violence", "sexual content", "language", etc.). Maps asks more opinionated questions as well. YouTube alternatives would include "Good for kids", "Funny", "Good on a small screen", and things like that.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        What do you do when people flag random things they don't like as "sexual content", solely so that they would be less visible?

touchofevil 9y ago

Why doesn't Youtube have a few formally trained filmmakers or film theorists on staff that they can kick these sorts of edge cases up to? Someone with a filmmaking or film theory education would instantly classify this short as art that should be available on Youtube. I could see this video being given an age restriction, but never banned.

chris_st 9y ago
According to google, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube... every minute. There's just no way to have humans moderate that. And if we assume they'd only decide on films where the ban was appealed, I'd bet it's still too much to do. Weirdly, the creator of the film in question said they wouldn't appeal the ruling.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I disagree there's "too much to do" when it comes to having humans moderate reported or detected cases of terms violations. We have a near crisis with people having a harder and harder time finding jobs that don't require college degrees. A lot of older job fields machines can do just as well, so a lot of old jobs are going away. The people are there. Google is sitting on many billions of dollars it just doesn't want to spend (like $100B or so, I believe?). The money to pay for people is there. However, Google would not be nearly as profitable if it wasn't automating away jobs that as we've continually seen, automation is pretty bad at doing. This is a business decision, plain and simple. New jobs for humans aren't opening up because tech companies are insisting on using automation to do things automation isn't good at.
  - delecti 9y ago
    At 300 hours/minute they'd need 18,000 pairs of eyes judging videos constantly (not all videos need to be judged immediately, but that's fine). Assuming a normal employee works 50 weeks of 40 hours a year, that means that each employee is only working about 23% of the time. In the end they'd need about 80,000 employees to judge everything that gets uploaded. Wikipedia says they had 57,100 employees in 2015. With inefficiency (HR, payroll, managers, manager-managers, devs to write video audit software, etc), they'd need to triple their workforce solely to keep up with youtube.

Nihilartikel 9y ago

The case of this article is unfortunate, but it's actually missing what I think is the more serious problem with YouTube for independent artists right now.. This is just a problem of an unfortunate strike against a video - I imagine that it will be fixed under appeal. These things happen, as a great great number of videos need to be evaluated by staff against a complicated set of criteria and precedents. It doesn't actually speak very much about any kind of systemic bias against independent artists. What DOES create a problem for artists is the tuning of the algorithms to be highly preferential to long form frequently posted content E.g video game commentary. This is a big problem for creators who work in short, high effort, highly polished media - E.g animators. This really really bums me out. I was an employee at YouTube during their period of great growth and I absolutely loved the platform and potential for compensation that they gave to niche and indy animators and musicians, and had great hope for a future where the democratization of video distribution would lead to a flourishing of art and entertainment that caters to a higher common denominator than the over-polished, focus group approved, mass market creativity that passes for main-stream. Sadly, it looks like the prime goal of increasing return visits and raw view time has lead to algorithmic optimization of that same mass-media race-to-the-bottom in quality and diversity in search of a broadly palatable and compulsively consumable product. It saddens me and I still feel that they could have it both ways if they took a more aware approach to niche content. YouTube offers monetization - the fact that artists even need Patreon means that GoogTube is ignoring a need, and thus a business opportunity. Just because a piece of work may only appeal to 50,000 people world wide doesn't necessarily mean that it has less value or merit than one that appeals to 10 million. I support quite a few animators on Patreon, and the impression I get is that they are all struggling to keep working on it as a primary job.

kbenson 9y ago
I think it's entirely possible that youtube is still in a growth phase (or they are treating it as that phase), where they see the goal as convincing people it's a real platform to visit for content, and recurring content (such as a network channel, or Netflix now), and not just that place hosting videos that you get links to. Once there's enough people that see it as a network of content that they can spend time on, they can then start encouraging and optimizing for specific, high-impact items instead of recurring content. Right now they are in the "let's pump out as many sitcoms as possible" phase, and hopefully they'll progress towards a "let's release a couple mini-series and made-for-TV movies" phase (allowing that they aren't generating the content in either case, just encouraging it's production and dissemination by offering cheap hosting and monetization).

TheTruestKyle 9y ago

Check out the guys behind Dragon Ball Z Abridged. They are a parody of the original Dragon Ball Z series. It seems they are getting sued like crazy from Toei animation because they don't understand fair use and YouTube does nothing to help them.

tudorw 9y ago

Is there a tipping point where the independent content creators tire of this? Patreon seems to have some traction and just seems a good fit for artistic endeavours, the fact that you need $100 in income from YouTube before they pay out must mean there are a lot of people with a lot of viewers whose income they hold in perpetuity. Same with Spotify, is there a point at which creators withhold their content, or is the lure of large viewer numbers irresistible ?

QAPereo 9y ago
For some things, like churned out entertainment for children, tweens and teens, YouTube probably has a lock. Those groups don't care about any of this. For The rest, fragmentation seems inevitable to me.

philfrasty 9y ago

If you run a fitness-channel on YouTube (I do) and your thumbnail contains a topless body, the video will not be monetized. No more sixpack tutorials I guess...

Endy 9y ago
Why not just create a static title card for your thumbnail?
- overcast 9y ago
  Because that doesn't attract viewers like nudity does. How many times have you seen a half naked chick as the thumbnail, yet never appears in the video?
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    Remember when YT immediately counted every view regardless of how long someone watched, and there was this plague of clickbait? For example headless women showing their cleavage in the thumbnail, because there were enough horny idiots dumb enough to click the thumbnail. That's why they switched to 30 seconds initially, and now to something more percentage based i think (Funny enough it is practically impossible to Google the articles that described these changes when they first happened; I read them bs k then and I've been looking for them for ten minutes to no avail)
  - Endy 9y ago
    I honestly wouldn't know - I don't usually watch videos with half-naked chicks in the thumbnails. Basically, when I'm watching on YouTube and not directed there from another video site, I only watch Takeshi's Castle, Cinemassacre, Channel Awesome, TheStrawHatNO!, newfiebangaa, World of Longplays, Playable Passion (sensing a theme?), Guru Larry, and a few other channels along that same theme.
KGIII 9y ago
Yet, you could probably do six pack tutorials if the six pack was beer. You could probably drink it right on camera and give drunken reviews. But nudity is problematic...

mschuster91 9y ago

I say it again and again: it's time to finally regulate the big social media/tech giants (Amazon, FB, Youtube, Twitter, but also big email providers like Gmail, AOL). Account closures and content removals must have a way to appeal operator decisions in a court of law. My telco provider is legally barred from shutting down my account unless I'm 3 months behind in payments - so why isn't the same valid for the tech giants? In fact, the services of Facebook and Whatsapp are something I more depend on than having a landline, but I'm straight outta luck if either service decides to ban me. And no, "choose another provider" is not a valid option, as there is no alternative because no service allows me to transfer my identity (e.g. email address) so old contacts can reach me, unlike with phone numbers.

dageshi 9y ago
> And no, "choose another provider" is not a valid option, as there is no alternative because no service allows me to transfer my identity (e.g. email address) so old contacts can reach me, unlike with phone numbers. With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at gmail? gmail removes your account, your email still works you just have to point it at a different backend. But therein lies the rub right? It costs money and people won't pay it, they'll take the free option every time. Personally I find it hard to see how these companies can be regulated in the way that you want for services that they give away for free.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > With a bit of foresight there certainly is, your own domain pointing at gmail? That costs money for the Google Apps Enterprise suite, and you're still dealing with a company that isn't known for customer service - you may point your MX records somewhere else but still can't access old emails when they terminate you for whatever stupid reason. (Yes, backups are a solution but many people blindly trust the cloud)
  - dageshi 9y ago
    Fundamentally companies are not obligated to give you their services for free, which seems to be what you're demanding? Now if you were to argue that companies must give you the opportunity to download your data before they close your account, that I would agree with. I'd even say a grace period of a few days so you can practically change your email might be worth considering, but I don't see how you can possibly argue that companies must give their services away for free just because they're good at what they do.

adekok 9y ago

It's impossible to believe that Youtube blocks this video, but can't tell that the copies are the same video. Which means they have provisions to block a providers video. Not the content of a video. They're happy to publish other copies of the same "inappropriate" content, and to monetize it. But they won't let the original author monetize it. If this is something other than "being evil", I don't know what it is.