6 ms·

I'm not demonizing the people making it, or even necessarily the people demanding it be made. The DMCA was the beginning of the end of a free and open internet

I'm not demonizing the people making it, or even necessarily the people demanding it be made. The DMCA was the beginning of the end of a free and open internet, and now it's accelerating. I just hope the next generation understands what they're missing under the spectre of copyright law.

simion314 8y ago
Humans are to blame for using horrible AI/software. At least if you know your AI is that broken then have some human supervision.
- quikoa 8y ago
  Google prefers to automate everything. Having human supervision would affect the bottomline so is out of the question.
  - Asooka 8y ago
    Well, let's say it takes 30 minutes to fully check for copyright compliance 10 minutes of video. This means that the speed of one person checking videos is 1/3 unchecked-minutes per minute, or 1/3upm. 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute to youtube, which makes for 24000upm. You will need to employ 96000 people 24/7 to check all videos. Of course, they can't work 24/7, so a more realistic figure is 150000 people. This isn't menial work, it requires legal knowledge and familiarity with copyright law, so you're looking at hiring entry-level law clerks, which is about 16$/hr or about 33k$/yr. It will cost Google about 5bln$/yr to check all uploaded content manually. Which seems like a lot but is like 10-20% of Alphabet Inc.'s gross profit, so not actually impossible.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      Are the only 2 choices (1) no human in the loop and (2) only humans in the loop?
    - earenndil 8y ago
      Why not simply have humans review the videos that are automatically flagged? That would be a significant improvement over the current state of affairs, and would command a significantly more reasonable price.
      - simion314 8y ago
        Exactly, have the code extract the exact section of video that it considers problematic on left side and on the right side put the copyrighted work, the human will lose a few seconds to have a look. Also I do not understand why Google does not use a reputation system, if a channel has a good reputation then take this in consideration in the automatic detection.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        At the very least do it for major accounts (4k hours a year). It's pretty ridiculous that pulling in hundreds of dollars won't get you even a 30 second review.
    - tomhallett 8y ago
      The question is whether you are more worried about false positives or false negatives. If you are only worried about false positives, then the humans only need to review the content flagged by the AI. This has 2 benefits: 1) the "starting number" would be much much lower than 400 hours of content per minute. 2) If a 10 minute video is obviously pirated, you don't need to watch the entire video to decide that.
    - IncRnd 8y ago
      There are some strong corrections that need to be made to your math. 1. Only a subset of uploaded videos need to be checked by humans, those that were flagged by the automated system. 2. Only a subset of the runtime of each flagged video needs to be checked. In other words, if a human decides within 12 seconds of a video that it is infringing, there is no reason to check the remaining portion of the video.
- mygo 8y ago
  today in order to do a Google search I had to prove to Google that I wasn’t a robot. And even though I did it right the second time, they still made me do it a third time. I just remember sitting there going, Google, I actually am a human and your AI sucks so if I have to tap on storefronts and cars one more time to do a freaking Google search then I’m just using Bing.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    It's partly checking that you're a human. It's partly using you for free labour to train their next generation of SkyNet. We've reached a point with CAPTCHAs (originally conceived as a way for humans to exert their will over machines) where the machines are now setting tasks for the humans, and the humans are carrying out the tasks without putting up too much of a fight.
    - eftychis 8y ago
      That. CAPTCHAs are used as free labour. The only reason you don't see them everywhere is because people would stop using Google.
      - reificator 8y ago
        We've done it. We've cracked the code. This thread is complaining about the fully automated process used by Google to check for copyright violations, and how infeasible it is to hire someone to check each video. You're talking about how CAPTCHAs are now being used to get free labour. > Prove you're human: Does the following video contain Beat It by Michael Jackson?
        eftychis 8y ago
        I am pretty sure they have considered it. Probably there is a legal hiccup laying here -- you either have reasonable suspicion that the material you show is copyrighted, or you acknowledge your algorithms and AI suck and you require crowd-sourcing. Kind of a lose-lose legally, and they would possibly introduce liability. Recall the goal of Google is to avoid liability via the statement "we are pretty good and have really low false negatives", and have as few false positives as not to make the platform unusable. Google does not care about content creators or propagation of knowledge (instructive videos) and ideas. Simple statement here. Google engineers might (at least the friends I have), but not as a whole organization. But yeah crowd-sourcing is a good way to do a second sifting through results. I know it is being used, by Google and others, already to classify video sources.
- narrator 8y ago
  The real problem is when the task is no longer doable by Humans. Then the AIs have taken over and we can't turn them off. Imagine what happens when the AIs run our cars and food production, security, etc. We will be unable to turn them off and they will be unaccountable except to the people who set their policy which will be mired no doubt in layers of deep obscurity.
  - simion314 8y ago
    Or the problem where the developers will not know why the AI did something, say an AI decides to do some bad thing, the judge will ask the developer why and the dev will say: -I don't know, we feed them a ton of input and it worked fine on my machine and without test data so we shipped it
dangrossman 8y ago
Prior to the DMCA, ISPs had full liability for copyright infringement committed by their customers online. Small ISPs were being sued out of existence, and it was only a matter of time before nobody would be willing to run an ISP at all. The DMCA (specifically Section 512) was the thing that saved the free and open internet by introducing limited liability for ISPs.
- reificator 8y ago
  That's fair and I don't want to downplay that aspect. But that's not the only thing the DMCA does.
  - jimbo999 8y ago
    for balance https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/ https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/
jimbo999 8y ago
well yes and no https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/ https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/
amyjess 8y ago
While the DMCA has been abused by large corporations, it has been invaluable in helping protect the little guy. It's been a huge boon to independent content creators that you can just send somebody a DMCA takedown notice and they'll comply. Before the DMCA, you had to pay out the nose for a lawyer, and you'd be in for a long and very, very expensive legal process. Your average photographer can't afford that, so copyright enforcement was solely a privilege of the rich prior to the DMCA. Here's an example. I know someone who shared pictures of herself in a private women-only group. Someone who ran a really disgusting cyberbullying page on Facebook had a mole in the group and posted the pictures publicly while making fun of her appearance and calling her slurs. Since the photographer was a friend of hers, the photographer simply sent Facebook a bunch of DMCA notices telling the cyberbullying page to take down the pictures. Facebook complied in under an hour. The cyberbullying page tried to post the pictures again; more DMCA notices were sent, and the whole page was unpublished.

simion314 8y ago

Humans are to blame for using horrible AI/software. At least if you know your AI is that broken then have some human supervision.

quikoa 8y ago
Google prefers to automate everything. Having human supervision would affect the bottomline so is out of the question.
- Asooka 8y ago
  Well, let's say it takes 30 minutes to fully check for copyright compliance 10 minutes of video. This means that the speed of one person checking videos is 1/3 unchecked-minutes per minute, or 1/3upm. 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute to youtube, which makes for 24000upm. You will need to employ 96000 people 24/7 to check all videos. Of course, they can't work 24/7, so a more realistic figure is 150000 people. This isn't menial work, it requires legal knowledge and familiarity with copyright law, so you're looking at hiring entry-level law clerks, which is about 16$/hr or about 33k$/yr. It will cost Google about 5bln$/yr to check all uploaded content manually. Which seems like a lot but is like 10-20% of Alphabet Inc.'s gross profit, so not actually impossible.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Are the only 2 choices (1) no human in the loop and (2) only humans in the loop?
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Why not simply have humans review the videos that are automatically flagged? That would be a significant improvement over the current state of affairs, and would command a significantly more reasonable price.
    - simion314 8y ago
      Exactly, have the code extract the exact section of video that it considers problematic on left side and on the right side put the copyrighted work, the human will lose a few seconds to have a look. Also I do not understand why Google does not use a reputation system, if a channel has a good reputation then take this in consideration in the automatic detection.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      At the very least do it for major accounts (4k hours a year). It's pretty ridiculous that pulling in hundreds of dollars won't get you even a 30 second review.
  - tomhallett 8y ago
    The question is whether you are more worried about false positives or false negatives. If you are only worried about false positives, then the humans only need to review the content flagged by the AI. This has 2 benefits: 1) the "starting number" would be much much lower than 400 hours of content per minute. 2) If a 10 minute video is obviously pirated, you don't need to watch the entire video to decide that.
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    There are some strong corrections that need to be made to your math. 1. Only a subset of uploaded videos need to be checked by humans, those that were flagged by the automated system. 2. Only a subset of the runtime of each flagged video needs to be checked. In other words, if a human decides within 12 seconds of a video that it is infringing, there is no reason to check the remaining portion of the video.
mygo 8y ago
today in order to do a Google search I had to prove to Google that I wasn’t a robot. And even though I did it right the second time, they still made me do it a third time. I just remember sitting there going, Google, I actually am a human and your AI sucks so if I have to tap on storefronts and cars one more time to do a freaking Google search then I’m just using Bing.
- jstanley 8y ago
  It's partly checking that you're a human. It's partly using you for free labour to train their next generation of SkyNet. We've reached a point with CAPTCHAs (originally conceived as a way for humans to exert their will over machines) where the machines are now setting tasks for the humans, and the humans are carrying out the tasks without putting up too much of a fight.
  - eftychis 8y ago
    That. CAPTCHAs are used as free labour. The only reason you don't see them everywhere is because people would stop using Google.
    - reificator 8y ago
      We've done it. We've cracked the code. This thread is complaining about the fully automated process used by Google to check for copyright violations, and how infeasible it is to hire someone to check each video. You're talking about how CAPTCHAs are now being used to get free labour. > Prove you're human: Does the following video contain Beat It by Michael Jackson?
      - eftychis 8y ago
        I am pretty sure they have considered it. Probably there is a legal hiccup laying here -- you either have reasonable suspicion that the material you show is copyrighted, or you acknowledge your algorithms and AI suck and you require crowd-sourcing. Kind of a lose-lose legally, and they would possibly introduce liability. Recall the goal of Google is to avoid liability via the statement "we are pretty good and have really low false negatives", and have as few false positives as not to make the platform unusable. Google does not care about content creators or propagation of knowledge (instructive videos) and ideas. Simple statement here. Google engineers might (at least the friends I have), but not as a whole organization. But yeah crowd-sourcing is a good way to do a second sifting through results. I know it is being used, by Google and others, already to classify video sources.
narrator 8y ago
The real problem is when the task is no longer doable by Humans. Then the AIs have taken over and we can't turn them off. Imagine what happens when the AIs run our cars and food production, security, etc. We will be unable to turn them off and they will be unaccountable except to the people who set their policy which will be mired no doubt in layers of deep obscurity.
- simion314 8y ago
  Or the problem where the developers will not know why the AI did something, say an AI decides to do some bad thing, the judge will ask the developer why and the dev will say: -I don't know, we feed them a ton of input and it worked fine on my machine and without test data so we shipped it

dangrossman 8y ago

Prior to the DMCA, ISPs had full liability for copyright infringement committed by their customers online. Small ISPs were being sued out of existence, and it was only a matter of time before nobody would be willing to run an ISP at all. The DMCA (specifically Section 512) was the thing that saved the free and open internet by introducing limited liability for ISPs.

reificator 8y ago
That's fair and I don't want to downplay that aspect. But that's not the only thing the DMCA does.
- jimbo999 8y ago
  for balance https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/ https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/

jimbo999 8y ago

well yes and no https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/ https://www.wired.com/2008/10/ten-years-later/

amyjess 8y ago

While the DMCA has been abused by large corporations, it has been invaluable in helping protect the little guy. It's been a huge boon to independent content creators that you can just send somebody a DMCA takedown notice and they'll comply. Before the DMCA, you had to pay out the nose for a lawyer, and you'd be in for a long and very, very expensive legal process. Your average photographer can't afford that, so copyright enforcement was solely a privilege of the rich prior to the DMCA. Here's an example. I know someone who shared pictures of herself in a private women-only group. Someone who ran a really disgusting cyberbullying page on Facebook had a mole in the group and posted the pictures publicly while making fun of her appearance and calling her slurs. Since the photographer was a friend of hers, the photographer simply sent Facebook a bunch of DMCA notices telling the cyberbullying page to take down the pictures. Facebook complied in under an hour. The cyberbullying page tried to post the pictures again; more DMCA notices were sent, and the whole page was unpublished.