9 ms·

Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices

336 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Ygg2 9y ago
Didn't people discover sound of rain is copyrighted as well? Along with bird song, <s>children smiles, and joy?</s>
- sharemywin 9y ago
  http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-face/ http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-face/ I'm just sayin'...
manmal 9y ago
Do the authors mean that the claimant had uploaded their static noise video before 2015? Or were the videos matched after the fact?
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  It doesn’t matter. You can’t copyright white noise. Unless you’re John Cage, or possibly Donald Trump.
  - andai 9y ago
    We have the best noise.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    I can't see any reason that a work comprising primarily of white noise couldn't be copyrighted. What you can't do is stop others copying your idea (as long as they don't copy your implementation), nor stop others implementing the same thing who don't copy you. Now, a work needs in most jurisdictions to be distinctive, but IMO the length of the work would inter alia be enough to make it distinctive, or perhaps use of a specially designed noise generator. But when you release "10 hours of noise" and I copy your idea and make "9 hours of noise" there will be no tort there.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      In the US, the threshold of originality seems to be a bit higher than that. E.g. this logo was denied copyright registration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/media/File:Best_Western_logo.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/medi... Refusal letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightAppeals/2006/Best%20Western%20Logo.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.inf...
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        It's not that simple though, Cage's piece -- Silence 4'44" -- I don't think was tested, but taken as a whole I'd grant it copyright. It was art that caused reflection on the nature of a "work", it was designed to be "played" by a musician with any instrument, it was 273s long presumably to reflect on whether silence could ever be absolute. I suspect it was also intended to encourage the listener to observe ambient sounds as if they had meaning. That makes it distinct as a performance piece. That logo is, within the field of logos, indistinct, boring if you will, if you sat down 100 logo designers I bet you'd get a few that look very like it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it but having copyright but for a logo RTM is probably a stronger right anyway. In short I don't think just being white noise is sufficient, but I don't think it excluded a piece of itself.
        EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
        Importantly, if I sit down at a piano for a few minutes, stare at the keys, and don't play, I have not performed Cage's work. There is a subtle nuance here.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Exactly, you have only performed Cage's work if you set out with the intent to play Cage's work. This obviously makes it impossible to determine if a particular performance of silence is a performance of Cage's work without reading someone's mind, but that same issue of determining intent comes up a lot in legal matters.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mindvirus 9y ago
For the sake of argument, assume that we want to protect copyright on sites like YouTube. What is a good, fair solution here? Given the scale, I think that automated solutions are required to have any reasonable enforcement. However automated (and non-automated) solutions will have false positives. Right now it seems like there is no cost to a false positive (claiming that a video is copyrighted when it is not), and so systems are happy to be aggressive with these notices. Likewise, the cost of a false negative (missing a copyrighted video) is high to the rights holder, as they are losing revenue. Since these systems use machine learning, it seems that it’s easy to add noise and fool them. I’ve seen videos that are flipped, slightly skewed, and have audio sped up or slowed down, presumably to get around the system. So I would assume that the system would have to be a bit aggressive to catch added noise. I think it’s ultimately an economics problem though. Since there’s basically no cost to the person making the claim when there’s a false positive, there’s less incentive to avoid false positives. However, it seems hard to charge fees here - if you’re charging people to take down content that they hold the rights to, that’s basically extortion. Any thoughts on what could be done to improve it? I think long term, we have to evolve our understanding of copyright and licensing, but given the current regime, is there even a solution?
- millisecond 9y ago
  There doesn’t need to be a charge to remove legit content violations but if the removal is contested and found to be false the original claimant should pay up. I’d like the penalty to be steep enough that if you’re using machine learning to flag content a human should still be incentivized to take a look before the claim is submitted.
- emsy 9y ago
  The problem with the current system is that it‘s the opposite of due process. Instead of letting some copyright violations slip as the cost of freedom of expression, the current system restricts freedom as the cost for minimizing copyright violations.
- gridaphobe 9y ago
  Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth the time/effort. This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.
peteretep 9y ago
Surprised Google don't detect white noise, and stop if being copyrighted, if for no other reason than the bad publicity this generates.
- ianai 9y ago
  From their perspective, the purpose of the platform is not to host white noise. I could see them seeing white noise itself as such an extreme corner case as to be not defendable from their content identification. One could imagine a ddos of white noise in an attempt to overwhelm their system. (Devils advocate.)
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    They let people upload video/audio, I'm sure their definition of corner case[0] is very narrow and I'm not sure this would qualify. It's really no different than computer generated music. [0] I don't think corner case is appropriate terminology in this discussion. I think it should be edge case. But even still, I don't think Google would think this is an edge case.
  - peteretep 9y ago
    Sure, but from a PR perspective, it should be easy enough to check for, and then this never happens again.
appleflaxen 9y ago
Since you have to attest in a legal document that you are the copyright holder in order to file a DMCA, then you are guilty of a crime (would it be perjury?) if you provide such an attestation under false pretenses. If we don't punish these false claims when they happen, then they will continue. An alternative approach based on civil disobedience would be in the form of a large group of individuals filing claims against large swaths of content (basically using the same broken rules of DMCA against the people who advocate them).
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  That's why the article says "Copyright Notices" and not DMCA takedown requests. Youtube has a not-legally-binding made-it-up-ourselves copyright notice system where you're allowed to file as many false claims as you want without breaking any laws. No need for an actual DMCA request.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    Has this changed at some point? Many years ago I had a takedown request on one of my videos. It was me showing a musical composition I made in some sequencing software and the claim appeared to be from the published of that software. I don't know why that company would have done that but I wondered if just anyone could have filed it claiming to be that company. They told me that to contest I had to provide loads of legal documentation and essentially escalate it to a serious claim. It wasn't worth my time or worth risking actual legal trouble. I decided to just never upload a video to Youtube again and felt like it was a case of guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure it mentioned the DMCA in the request, though.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      They still respond to real takedown requests (it'd be illegal not to), so you may have gotten an actual DMCA takedown. But the term "copyright notice" as I understand it applies to less serious flagging, mostly done automatically by some kind of content fingerprinting system.
  - 9y ago
raverbashing 9y ago
Sounds like an opportunity for copyright "trolling": upload videos, wait for the strikes and removals, sue.
- ouid 9y ago
  Right, but what's wrong with that? you can't win the suit if the people who issued the request are acting in good faith, so you can't trick them into issuing a takedown if they are not acting maliciously. in the early days of the do not call list, you could make quite a lot of money off of bad actors who ignored it. there was incentive to get your number on both the do not call list, and cold calling registries, and very quickly made malicious telemarketing untenable.
- icebraining 9y ago
  On what grounds would you sue?
coldcode 9y ago
I sleep with a powered air filter running (HEPA and charcoal) every night and its a perfect noise (maybe not exactly white but minor variance) to sleep by. I should upload a recording and see if anything complains.
- icebraining 9y ago
  They don't complain, they just insert ads and gain money from your recording.
aheppy 9y ago
There have been similar experiments & results posted before. Seems like a consistent issue with the platform: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325
ouid 9y ago
When the "copyright holder" decides to monetize a video, google gets a cut, right? Doesn't this create an incentive for google to prefer false positives?
- gizmo385 9y ago
  Google already takes a cut of ad revenue regardless.
Asdfbla 9y ago
This seems to be one of the less surprising false-positives of Youtube's copyright detection algorithm. You match millions of hours of copyrighted material vs. noise, seems like you have a multiple testing problem and at least one thing will inadvertently match somewhere in the 10 hours noise video Wonder what Youtube can do here, except speed up dispute resolution. With datasets of their size, false-positives seem inevitable. Do copyright-owners just set the system to auto-monetization or -takedown? If so, maybe Youtube should change their policy to require more manual action from copyright owners.
inertiatic 9y ago
Probably by 65daysofstatic, I mean it's part of their work!
amelius 9y ago
If you watch static long enough, then at some point you will be able to read the collected works of Shakespeare. So this probably also holds for copyrighted works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Panino 9y ago
Bogus claims are an ongoing issue and this same basic article (about static videos in particular!) has been posted before -- which is not to say it shouldn't be posted, but rather that Youtube hasn't fixed this known, albeit difficult, problem. Is it considered WONTFIX? It's one of the reasons that makes me self-host videos, which is actually very easy to do with HTML5. Check the examples section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video It's just a few lines of HTML and you're done. Try it with a test video -- it's surprisingly easy.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  What if one of your videos goes viral? Would that not get very expensive?
  - Panino 9y ago
    The videos are only of interest to family and friends. That said, I've seen a few stats of top-page HN links generating 10,000 or more unexpected visitors, and a 1TB cap with a 20MB video would easily handle that. But if that weren't the case, if I were making professional videos intended for a mass audience, then I would just add more servers with appropriate bandwidth. Scaling for your own content is vastly different and easier than scaling for everyone's a la Youtube or imgur.
caycep 9y ago
I wonder if this can be considered the precursor to adversarial attacks on neural networks?
odabaxok 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325
gxs 9y ago
My favorite recent copyright story is the Happy Birthday song. It may be common knowledge by now, but Warner copyrighted this song from the 1800s and profited for years until someone challenged it in court. I've been waiting for someone to post one of those "this was way more complicated than that and this is why it wasn't as outrageous as people make it seem", but nothing yet. This in a addition to the Micky Mouse laws really makes the system feel flawed, even though it has its clear benefits. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthday-copyright-suit-settled-n477671 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...
SCAQTony 9y ago
How do you copyright leftover radiation from the big bang (since that is how white noise is generated) when the "static" is 13.8-billion years old?
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
So original creator posts videos of static. Then another company says, wait, we have a copyright on that and so they start getting revenue from the videos. The original creator now looses revenue while they go through a process to counter the notice. This is fair, how? Why should the other party automatically start getting revenue? Why can't that money go into escrow and whichever party prevails gets that money? The problem is Google has no incentive to make this better.

336 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Ygg2 9y ago

Didn't people discover sound of rain is copyrighted as well? Along with bird song, <s>children smiles, and joy?</s>

sharemywin 9y ago
http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-face/ http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-face/ I'm just sayin'...

manmal 9y ago

Do the authors mean that the claimant had uploaded their static noise video before 2015? Or were the videos matched after the fact?

shaki-dora 9y ago
It doesn’t matter. You can’t copyright white noise. Unless you’re John Cage, or possibly Donald Trump.
- andai 9y ago
  We have the best noise.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  I can't see any reason that a work comprising primarily of white noise couldn't be copyrighted. What you can't do is stop others copying your idea (as long as they don't copy your implementation), nor stop others implementing the same thing who don't copy you. Now, a work needs in most jurisdictions to be distinctive, but IMO the length of the work would inter alia be enough to make it distinctive, or perhaps use of a specially designed noise generator. But when you release "10 hours of noise" and I copy your idea and make "9 hours of noise" there will be no tort there.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    In the US, the threshold of originality seems to be a bit higher than that. E.g. this logo was denied copyright registration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/media/File:Best_Western_logo.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/medi... Refusal letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightAppeals/2006/Best%20Western%20Logo.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.inf...
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      It's not that simple though, Cage's piece -- Silence 4'44" -- I don't think was tested, but taken as a whole I'd grant it copyright. It was art that caused reflection on the nature of a "work", it was designed to be "played" by a musician with any instrument, it was 273s long presumably to reflect on whether silence could ever be absolute. I suspect it was also intended to encourage the listener to observe ambient sounds as if they had meaning. That makes it distinct as a performance piece. That logo is, within the field of logos, indistinct, boring if you will, if you sat down 100 logo designers I bet you'd get a few that look very like it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it but having copyright but for a logo RTM is probably a stronger right anyway. In short I don't think just being white noise is sufficient, but I don't think it excluded a piece of itself.
      - EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
        Importantly, if I sit down at a piano for a few minutes, stare at the keys, and don't play, I have not performed Cage's work. There is a subtle nuance here.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        Exactly, you have only performed Cage's work if you set out with the intent to play Cage's work. This obviously makes it impossible to determine if a particular performance of silence is a performance of Cage's work without reading someone's mind, but that same issue of determining intent comes up a lot in legal matters.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mindvirus 9y ago

For the sake of argument, assume that we want to protect copyright on sites like YouTube. What is a good, fair solution here? Given the scale, I think that automated solutions are required to have any reasonable enforcement. However automated (and non-automated) solutions will have false positives. Right now it seems like there is no cost to a false positive (claiming that a video is copyrighted when it is not), and so systems are happy to be aggressive with these notices. Likewise, the cost of a false negative (missing a copyrighted video) is high to the rights holder, as they are losing revenue. Since these systems use machine learning, it seems that it’s easy to add noise and fool them. I’ve seen videos that are flipped, slightly skewed, and have audio sped up or slowed down, presumably to get around the system. So I would assume that the system would have to be a bit aggressive to catch added noise. I think it’s ultimately an economics problem though. Since there’s basically no cost to the person making the claim when there’s a false positive, there’s less incentive to avoid false positives. However, it seems hard to charge fees here - if you’re charging people to take down content that they hold the rights to, that’s basically extortion. Any thoughts on what could be done to improve it? I think long term, we have to evolve our understanding of copyright and licensing, but given the current regime, is there even a solution?

millisecond 9y ago
There doesn’t need to be a charge to remove legit content violations but if the removal is contested and found to be false the original claimant should pay up. I’d like the penalty to be steep enough that if you’re using machine learning to flag content a human should still be incentivized to take a look before the claim is submitted.
emsy 9y ago
The problem with the current system is that it‘s the opposite of due process. Instead of letting some copyright violations slip as the cost of freedom of expression, the current system restricts freedom as the cost for minimizing copyright violations.
gridaphobe 9y ago
Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth the time/effort. This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.

peteretep 9y ago

Surprised Google don't detect white noise, and stop if being copyrighted, if for no other reason than the bad publicity this generates.

ianai 9y ago
From their perspective, the purpose of the platform is not to host white noise. I could see them seeing white noise itself as such an extreme corner case as to be not defendable from their content identification. One could imagine a ddos of white noise in an attempt to overwhelm their system. (Devils advocate.)
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  They let people upload video/audio, I'm sure their definition of corner case[0] is very narrow and I'm not sure this would qualify. It's really no different than computer generated music. [0] I don't think corner case is appropriate terminology in this discussion. I think it should be edge case. But even still, I don't think Google would think this is an edge case.
- peteretep 9y ago
  Sure, but from a PR perspective, it should be easy enough to check for, and then this never happens again.

appleflaxen 9y ago

Since you have to attest in a legal document that you are the copyright holder in order to file a DMCA, then you are guilty of a crime (would it be perjury?) if you provide such an attestation under false pretenses. If we don't punish these false claims when they happen, then they will continue. An alternative approach based on civil disobedience would be in the form of a large group of individuals filing claims against large swaths of content (basically using the same broken rules of DMCA against the people who advocate them).

wlesieutre 9y ago
That's why the article says "Copyright Notices" and not DMCA takedown requests. Youtube has a not-legally-binding made-it-up-ourselves copyright notice system where you're allowed to file as many false claims as you want without breaking any laws. No need for an actual DMCA request.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Has this changed at some point? Many years ago I had a takedown request on one of my videos. It was me showing a musical composition I made in some sequencing software and the claim appeared to be from the published of that software. I don't know why that company would have done that but I wondered if just anyone could have filed it claiming to be that company. They told me that to contest I had to provide loads of legal documentation and essentially escalate it to a serious claim. It wasn't worth my time or worth risking actual legal trouble. I decided to just never upload a video to Youtube again and felt like it was a case of guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure it mentioned the DMCA in the request, though.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    They still respond to real takedown requests (it'd be illegal not to), so you may have gotten an actual DMCA takedown. But the term "copyright notice" as I understand it applies to less serious flagging, mostly done automatically by some kind of content fingerprinting system.
- 9y ago

raverbashing 9y ago

Sounds like an opportunity for copyright "trolling": upload videos, wait for the strikes and removals, sue.

ouid 9y ago
Right, but what's wrong with that? you can't win the suit if the people who issued the request are acting in good faith, so you can't trick them into issuing a takedown if they are not acting maliciously. in the early days of the do not call list, you could make quite a lot of money off of bad actors who ignored it. there was incentive to get your number on both the do not call list, and cold calling registries, and very quickly made malicious telemarketing untenable.
icebraining 9y ago
On what grounds would you sue?

coldcode 9y ago

I sleep with a powered air filter running (HEPA and charcoal) every night and its a perfect noise (maybe not exactly white but minor variance) to sleep by. I should upload a recording and see if anything complains.

icebraining 9y ago
They don't complain, they just insert ads and gain money from your recording.

aheppy 9y ago

There have been similar experiments & results posted before. Seems like a consistent issue with the platform: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325

ouid 9y ago

When the "copyright holder" decides to monetize a video, google gets a cut, right? Doesn't this create an incentive for google to prefer false positives?

gizmo385 9y ago
Google already takes a cut of ad revenue regardless.

Asdfbla 9y ago

This seems to be one of the less surprising false-positives of Youtube's copyright detection algorithm. You match millions of hours of copyrighted material vs. noise, seems like you have a multiple testing problem and at least one thing will inadvertently match somewhere in the 10 hours noise video Wonder what Youtube can do here, except speed up dispute resolution. With datasets of their size, false-positives seem inevitable. Do copyright-owners just set the system to auto-monetization or -takedown? If so, maybe Youtube should change their policy to require more manual action from copyright owners.

inertiatic 9y ago

Probably by 65daysofstatic, I mean it's part of their work!

amelius 9y ago

If you watch static long enough, then at some point you will be able to read the collected works of Shakespeare. So this probably also holds for copyrighted works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Panino 9y ago

Bogus claims are an ongoing issue and this same basic article (about static videos in particular!) has been posted before -- which is not to say it shouldn't be posted, but rather that Youtube hasn't fixed this known, albeit difficult, problem. Is it considered WONTFIX? It's one of the reasons that makes me self-host videos, which is actually very easy to do with HTML5. Check the examples section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video It's just a few lines of HTML and you're done. Try it with a test video -- it's surprisingly easy.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
What if one of your videos goes viral? Would that not get very expensive?
- Panino 9y ago
  The videos are only of interest to family and friends. That said, I've seen a few stats of top-page HN links generating 10,000 or more unexpected visitors, and a 1TB cap with a 20MB video would easily handle that. But if that weren't the case, if I were making professional videos intended for a mass audience, then I would just add more servers with appropriate bandwidth. Scaling for your own content is vastly different and easier than scaling for everyone's a la Youtube or imgur.

caycep 9y ago

I wonder if this can be considered the precursor to adversarial attacks on neural networks?

odabaxok 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325

gxs 9y ago

My favorite recent copyright story is the Happy Birthday song. It may be common knowledge by now, but Warner copyrighted this song from the 1800s and profited for years until someone challenged it in court. I've been waiting for someone to post one of those "this was way more complicated than that and this is why it wasn't as outrageous as people make it seem", but nothing yet. This in a addition to the Micky Mouse laws really makes the system feel flawed, even though it has its clear benefits. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthday-copyright-suit-settled-n477671 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...

SCAQTony 9y ago

How do you copyright leftover radiation from the big bang (since that is how white noise is generated) when the "static" is 13.8-billion years old?

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

So original creator posts videos of static. Then another company says, wait, we have a copyright on that and so they start getting revenue from the videos. The original creator now looses revenue while they go through a process to counter the notice. This is fair, how? Why should the other party automatically start getting revenue? Why can't that money go into escrow and whichever party prevails gets that money? The problem is Google has no incentive to make this better.