16 ms·

Can Beethoven send takedown requests?

530 points by janoszen 8y ago

kuroguro 8y ago
Had exactly the same problem after uploading some newer recordings of Beethoven's work that was purposely placed in the public domain by the authors (or it might have been some loose license, can't remember).
mirimir 8y ago
There's really only one viable solution. If you want stuff to stay up, put it somewhere that won't let anyone take it down. No matter what. And isn't vulnerable to coercion. YouTube is not such a place, of course. For most purposes, torrents are good enough. Maybe BitChute. Or for sensitive stuff, sites on Tor .onion servers. Not Freenet, though, because that is a trip to jail, just waiting to happen. Edit: OK, about Freenet. Yes, it is uncensorable distributed storage. And yes, it is arguably impossible to prove which nodes are storing what, and which nodes are accessing what. But it is possible to establish what a given node is sending and receiving, based on hashes. And if you get busted, you will be faced with the prospect of paying an expert to explain some seriously complicated stuff to a jury. And you will likely end up making a plea bargain. Even if you were entirely innocent. If you're curious about Freenet's opennet content, there's only one "safe" way to access it. Do everything via Tor, and access Tor via nested VPN chains. Get yourself some Bitcoin, and mix it very well. Then use it to anonymously lease a VPS. Install Freenet on the VPS in headless mode, with its webGUIs as Tor .onion services. Now you can safely access whatever you like. Maybe the VPS will get busted, but tracking that back to you will be very hard. Also, to be safe, use Tor via Whonix. Work in a clone of the workstation VM, and nuke the clone after each use. And of course, have LUKS on the host machine. Maybe use a dedicated host machine, and wipe it when you're done, just in case. Seriously, Freenet is that radioactive.
- executesorder66 8y ago
  Why is uploading to Freenet illegal? And where?
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Sorry, I updated with a much longer explantion about Freenet. It's not that using Freenet is illegal per se. It's that Freenet is loaded with child porn, and worse. And that investigators have tweaked Freenet software that logs content moving through all peers that they connect to. And there are databases with hashes of illicit content. So they see that your node is handling illicit content, contact your ISP to get your identity, and then SWAT you. That's how that ex cop in Philadelphia, who's still sitting in jail, after "forgetting" his FDE passphrase, got busted.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades (I'm being kinda generous, some songs are old after a few months / one to five years). I hate the state of copyrighted works. Movies can stay copyrighted for a good 40 to 50 years, anything else is crazy. Books maybe 50 years too, but again, it's just crazy and clear that the extended years of copyright only benefit record labels and other publishing corporations, and not truly the artists / authors who get decent money, but it's mostly chump change.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  > Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades You say that but the Beatles, Elvis, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson are all artists that had their heyday 30-60 years ago and are still the top selling artists. A lot of them are dead now because of varying reasons, but some are still alive and kicking and giving new performances of their 40 year old music. Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    If anything I'm more for stripping record labels of their copyright, an artist can keep their copyright till they die for all I care. Their families shouldn't depend solely on one artist's income. There's many angles to copyright, it's a complicated subject cause of it, but we need to take away all the noise of it, this legalized censorship against allegedly copyrighted works doesn't actually work is the main issue. Most artists don't even care that their fans download their music until their record labels have them say otherwise. Artists from what I recall make more money selling merchandise and doing concerts...
    - icebraining 8y ago
      In fact, that right already exists (in the US), it's Section 203 - artists can terminate their copyright grants after 35 years after the publishing date.
DarkContinent 8y ago
Would human monitors work better than ContentID in this situation?
- LeonM 8y ago
  Even if we disregard the obvious costs of having thousands of people screening uploads all day long, I don't think it would work better. The humans will need to identify the content, and decide if it's public domain or not. This requires an infinite amount of knowledge, or a lot of googling. I think a hybrid sollution (computer identifies the content, and if it is not sure about it being public domain or not, a human is used to give the final verdict) is probably the best compromise. But I expect that YT is already doing this.
  - tumetab1 8y ago
    AFAIK the first copy right takedown noticed is received without review by Youtube, they only review after being contested. From my perspective, people are just too used tolerating the bad things of ContentId which in part is the result of bad legislation. In this case I bet that no human would be able to make a confident call because of multiple jurisdictions. On Germany it's public domain but on France maybe it's still copyrighted so you need an international copyright law master degree to figure that out.
maaaats 8y ago
> “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” Google's support in a nutshell.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  It’s worse than that: the phrasing is entirely deceptive and misleading. “Thank you for contacting Google”? But the remainder of the message is denying that you actually did contact Google. You tried, but you failed.
  - K2L8M11N2 8y ago
    You contacted Google's bots, while failing to actually reach any human. In a way you succeeded while also failing.
- amelius 8y ago
  The FTC should monitor their quality of support, and throttle Google's bandwidth accordingly.
- zaarn 8y ago
  It's funny because that the email in their imprint and you're technically supposed to put contact data in there where you can be immediately contacted. Sadly not outright illegal to just spam filter this inbox.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
laumars 8y ago
This reminds me a lot of the experiment someone did uploading white noise: “My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims”[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325
tallanvor 8y ago
It seems to me that a big part of the problem is that Google is focusing on this the wrong way. Rather than automatically assume that ContentID is correct and notifying the user, it should instead notify the supposed owner of the music, and let them decide whether or not to make a claim. If the "owner" makes too many false claims then they should be banned form the service.
- toong 8y ago
  I thought that was the way it works ? But they just hit the (virtual) "claim everything" button as fast as they can. Maybe the problem is that Google can't ban them from the service legally ?
  - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    The problem is that by the time the victim has fought to have their video re-monetised or reinstated, it's "old". You have a very short time to make money on videos these days. Yes there's rare videos that gain longer term success or get dug up and go viral, but for the most part those first couple days are vital.
  - tallanvor 8y ago
    I'm not sure. I thought companies uploaded their work and then the claims were basically automated. But admittedly I don't have experience in this area. Regardless, we need to start seeing punishment for false claims. Under DMCA, wrongful claims could result in the claimants being charged with perjury, but obviously nobody is enforcing this part of it.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  This is how fighting patent trolls works too IIRC, companies can countersue for false litigation, increasing the risk of DMCA trolls
  - monetus 8y ago
    To make it equitable in this situation would seem to require allowing those initiating the counter suit to do so with zero risk. And as another poster pointed out, the value of the upload is significantly diminished after it had become "old", so this would all have to be handled before the post was even made public.
sklivvz1971 8y ago
YouTube sent me a takedown request for publishing a video to my own song (which is published on CD only). They took down the song because I could not "prove" I was the owner. I guess my name being on the cover and my picture was not enough... I.e. - they don't check even if you point out it's a mistake - they always side with the copyright owner by default
- kartan 8y ago
  > They took down the song because I could not "prove" I was the owner. Because it is not about rights, it is about power.
kachurovskiy 8y ago
If only there was a way for regular people to unite their resources and push back against corporations lobbying their copyrights into eternity.
ddtaylor 8y ago
YouTube gave me a copyright strike because I posted video of a broken NES emulator I was developing.
yeloboy 8y ago
Copyright should only have a term of life (with a minimum duration of 50 years in case the artist dies at 20-30) and that's all. Tell me one reason this shouldn't be the case. By then, the studios will have taken a profit (or been a commercial failure but that's not on us) and so will have the artist. After the artist dies, there's no reason to "support the artist" anymore and while there is the effect of post-mortem sales spike, a celebration of now freely available music for all to enjoy would be a much better hommage. As for the family, there really isn't any reason they should obtain that copyright. If they wanna earn money with art, they have to create art on their own. What the current laws create in most cases are lazy rich children who spend the rest of their lives managing the copyright legacy of their parent. That doesn't benefit society in any way. Either they work like normal people or they make their own art but they're not entitled to the copyright of their parents. If the parents don't want to leave them in poverty, they can still leave the money they earned with this copyright over the years for their children. Also, with the minimum 50 years duration, they could still inherit the copyright if their parent dies at an early age. However, a term of life PLUS a ludicrous amount of years is a really bad idea for the cultural development of our society.
- jpttsn 8y ago
  A longer exclusivity term makes it possible to recoup more investment costs, for those who invest in artists. This theoretically enables larger investments that can support the artist further up front.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    if we're talking about the music industry, sure, more investment enables the machine to make bigger stars and more money. but if we're talking about music as a cultural good, how much money is really needed to make a top notch studio album? no more than a million dollars in most cases. maybe you need to multiply that by a small integer to make a really good music video for a couple of the singles. is the purpose of copyright law to enable billion dollar stars, or million dollar albums?
  - Arnt 8y ago
    This would be a good point, if either a) if were backed up by data or b) data weren't available yet. I wish people would stop posting these "could be" arguments when real data is already available and either supports an "is" or doesn't.
Jerry2 8y ago
I used to have a Youtube channel where I posted videos of me playing the piano. I played mostly Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff compositions. I had around 40 videos in total. Sometime around 2014, I started getting DMCA takedown notices from various companies claiming copyright. I was getting one or two per week and I contested them and things were ruled into my favor. But then it started getting harder and harder to contest them and I even lost the ability to upload. It got so bad that one day several (3 or 4, don't remember anymore) notices were filed and Google didn't rule on them fast enough. I had to close the channel because my account was locked for one full day and I couldn't do a thing. I had too many emails inside of Gmail and didn't want to lose them so I gave up. I'm still pissed about it and how Youtube and Google run things. I always found it interesting that under YT rules content creators have the "3 strikes and you're banned" rule hanging over their heads but those who falsely claim copyright can do so with impunity. I still remember one company that ended up falsely claiming copyright over 10+ of my videos and they did so against one or two videos per week. Nothing was ever done about them.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Who was sending these notices? Sounds like perjury to me.
  - Jerry2 8y ago
    >Who was sending these notices? There's lots of them. The most notorious one I had to deal with was Adrev. There are reports of people getting notices from AdRev for videos that don't even have any music in them. [1] [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/42xLenp36Co https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/42xLe...
    - yomly 8y ago
      Is this a new evolution of patent trolling? Except you don't even need a patent anymore...?
      - 8y ago
zaarn 8y ago
Easy and stupid solution: Make it illegal to falsely claim copyright on a piece of media and additionally make transparent and fair processes around Notice&Takedown required for all larger platforms. Youtube's DMCA mechanism is a black box, you get told you did some bad and you can say "no I didn't do bad" at which point the black box will do things and after a few days agree or not. If someone files a copyright claim on my video I want to know who did it, why they did it, what they expect as a resolution and if the claims turn out to be false more than three times, ban them from claiming already uploaded videos of mine or even future videos. There needs to be hurtful punishment for abusing these processes but there isn't so lots of media corporations abuse it without end.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Powerful entities are getting less and less liable to the public every day. And it's mostly because of us: we don't make them pay any mistake, so they carry on as long as it profit them. Google is not your friend. It's a for profit company that protect its interests. Basically, they won't do anything because: - they don't care. They never did. They used to pretend they did when they were not the leader. Now they are. - they won't gain anything from changing the status quo. - they won't lose anything because of it. You content is just a tiny small drop in the sea, and they own the biggest and most popular ocean. And the fish never rebels.
  - wilsonnb3 8y ago
    Why can't a for profit company that protects its interests be my friend?
    - sametmax 8y ago
      It can. It's just not the case with google, as they proved again and again in the last 5 years.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  > Make it illegal to falsely claim copyright on a piece of media and additionally make transparent and fair processes around Notice&Takedown required for all larger platforms. I wouldn't be surprised if those things are already illegal, but enforcing them turns out to be too hard. Laws you can't enforce are meaningless.
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Things are seriously whack in regards to posting anything regarding classical music online. I had a short 1-minute video that I made last year to demo a product. I used the intro to Beethoven's Ninth, second movement, from a recording made in the 50s as background music. Nobody would post it due to copyright issues. Heck if I could figure it out, and like all things fucked up about having algorithms tell me what I can and can't do online, I ignored it and moved on. Not worth fighting over something I shouldn't have to fight about. I wonder, however, how many other people do the same thing that I do -- and how that's all going to end up over the long term. Not good, I expect.
astura 8y ago
Copyright claims have become out of control! Someone uploaded white noise they recorded to YouTube and got five copyright claims. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523
- tim333 8y ago
  From that: >Google automatically makes claims on behalf of content creators if its algorithms find a close match between the content of two videos. That seems to the the root cause of a lot of these problems - Google's software being dumb.
arh68 8y ago
Devil's advocate here: why give welfare to artists (really, the labels they sign their rights over to) when so many great pieces of art actually exist that were made by artists who died penniless? Van Gogh, Gauguin, I just don't buy the notion that extending copyrights way, way past death help the artist in any way. Why fight for labels' rights, when they largely amount to copyright trolls? Their artificial fears have made their way into YouTube, which just has to take those legal recordings down (they don't), because they're just so scared (they should not be) that this might be something that belongs to a troll. When the real musicians get their content taken down after Big Label overtly steals it, we're getting trolled.
phkahler 8y ago
One solution would be to host videos on your own site. It's another argument for decentralization. Of course it's not simple. We need a decentralized platform for this and social media, but the questions on how to achieve that are many.
- r3bl 8y ago
  > We need a decentralized platform for this and social media PeerTube (YouTube lookalike), Mastodon (Twitter lookalike), and PixelFed (Instagram lookalike) are already that[0]. On top of that, they all follow the same federation standard (ActivityPub), meaning that you can follow and comment on a PeerTube channel or a PixelFed feed from within Mastodon. You don't really need three separate accounts, you can just have one. They are practical on some levels, impractical on others, and they definitely do require some tweaking of how you use social media. But they do exist, they are decentralized (as in, anyone can run their own instance), they are in active development, and they even have some fair amount of users. If I remember correctly, Mastodon boasts with around 1.5 million users at the moment. IMO, minuscule number for something that's considered a social network, but a gigantic number for something that's a decentralized social network. [0] There are way more clients than the three I've mentioned. I chose to mention these three because they're lookalikes, meaning that you already kind of have the idea of what they are for.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    Can you regulate who sees what? For example, I want the FB capability of sharing stuff with friends only in addition to having some public.
fogetti 8y ago
Well this is what the tech giants brought to us. The middle finger and an automated 'Up your ###' message. Not a far fetch to assume that soon similar technologies will judge your work resumes and credit worthiness too. With a similar up your ### message of course.
rbrtdrmpc- 8y ago
I personally work with music copyright claims for an internet company and as i see a lot of folks here (including the author) are missing the copyright thing. They are not claiming for the fingerprinted music, they are claiming for what the big publishing companies are saying, and they are the ones making the rules. This is how it works more or less, YT fingerprints a piece, they run their algorithms on new content and if they match the fingerprint, also using metadata, if its right and guess what, most of the time its not, they look at what the MULTIPLE publishers claims on the same stuff. Publishers can claim whatever they want, they need just to face other publishers if they abuse their power (and bare with me, this is mad because there is no central authority!), there is no such way as YouTube able to rule on copyrighted content. So as an example, if i upload a video with the 5th of Beethoven, the algorithm can fingerprint it correctly, next YT looks at what publishers are claiming and if there is someone with a valid recording of that piece at a "performance" level, they need to pay for the content otherwise stated. And just to add something more, there are three different type of "claims" in the music industry, mechanical, synchronization and performance share, more about the aforementioned here http://www.copyright.com/blog/music-licensing-public-performance-license-synchronization/ http://www.copyright.com/blog/music-licensing-public-perform...
sunsetMurk 8y ago
listen while you read: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVKiYw5hVuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVKiYw5hVuM Dalia Lazar playing a Beethoven concert on piano.
jellicle 8y ago
Copyright should probably be about 5 years long, total, non-extendable. This achieves 95% of the asserted benefits of the existing copyright system and gets rid of 99% of the problems. The boost to national innovation would be tremendous. But of course it's about money (copyright is a just a privatized tax) and anyone advocating this would find themselves marked for death by the copyright industry.
JackFr 8y ago
The solution, of course, is to make legal arguments a class of intellectual property. If a lawyer wants to cite a precedent, he's got to pay. Using a parallel argument without explicitly citing the precedent is a tort, and may be subject to lawsuit. This will tie up all the intellectual property lawyers who will start suing each other. At that point the rest of us can go on with our lives. (At least in countries with a common law based legal system...)
jrochkind1 8y ago
> However, I intended to release all of my videos under a free license, so that they could be used in the future for others to educate and inform students about these beautiful works. Even in cases where my defense to the ContentID claims were successful, the videos were not reverted to this free license, making it much more difficult for others to use and share these digitized works in the way I originally had intended. If you don't own the copyright of the thing or have a license to it, how can you "release it under a license" any license at all? Is the OP just not saying it clearly, and what they really wanted to do was to mark it as in the public domain? Or does Youtube actually have no way to do this? Our entire cultural practices, corporate policies, and software feature lists, are set up ignoring public domain use cases. People don't even realize how this stuff works legally, which doesn't help. But you can't release something under a license if you don't own it (or have a license to re/sub-license it).
- jwilk 8y ago
  The music is not copyrightable, but presumably the videos are.
beshrkayali 8y ago
> lawful free expression online What's the point of using the word "lawful" here? Free expression is free expression, conforming to a law or not is subject to the country and time. I think it somehow dilutes the absolute nature in the meaning of: free expression.
- mLuby 8y ago
  You're technically correct but in a meaningless way. One is "free" to do basically anything they have the power to do, but nobody acts that way (they'd be jailed or dead) so when we say "free" we mean within reasonable bounds, which usually includes the law.
  - beshrkayali 8y ago
    I'm not sure how it's meaningless. When we're talking about a concept such is free speech, there is no point of "within reasonable bounds... the law", at least in an ideological frame. The only bounds are those of any greater freedom, meaning do as you like as long as you're not transgressing on someone else's. Freedom of expression using ones own means is an absolute freedom that should be self-evident and self-defined.
jwilk 8y ago
> the videos were not reverted to this free license What does that mean?
qubax 8y ago
Firstly, the assumption by google should be innocence rather than the guilt of the youtube creator. The burden should be on the accuser and not the accused. Secondly, if 3 copyright violations gets the accused banned, then 3 false copyright accusations should get the accuser banned. Under youtube's current model, it actually incentivizes companies to claim everything since there are no consequences. Thirdly, with what youtube is doing, it seems like they just want to be a platform for corporate media. It seems like they are heavily pushing established media like CNN, Late Night Shows, SNL and celebrities like ( Kevin Hart, Will Smith, etc ). I'm seeing so many more corporate media recommendations on youtube than ever before. If that's the case, what's the point of youtube? If all they want is for me to see CNN or Kimmel clips, what do I need youtube for? I can just go watch CNN and Kimmel on TV. Youtube's selling point was that it wasn't TV. It was different. That's the case less and less now. I still have hope for youtube and I still like a lot of the non-corporate content there, but I hope youtube really reassesses their handling of claims. Edit: And as for copyright, there should be less, not more of it and it should be for limited time. It stifles creativity and it pretty much enriches the few ( most of whom had nothing to do with the creation of art ).
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  Copyright as it exists today definitely favored the rich in recent history, because you had to sell out just to get your creation in front of an audience. The Internet changed all that, but it seems like companies like Google are working hard to get things back the way they used to be by becoming the gateway to the audience.
shdon 8y ago
Got hit with several ContentID claims on videos that I posted in 2013 with the work I was supposedly infringing on being created in 2014. My appeal was denied. Moronic algorithms.
PerilousD 8y ago
There were file sharing sites before Youtube came along and there are still file sharing sites other than Youtube now. SO - stop enabling Google-Youtube to pull this stuff and go somewhere else - its called using the Internet?
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  That's fine. I agree with you. Now, how are people going to find it? That may work if you have an established presence, but even then you will likely lose a lot of your audience.
Rotdhizon 8y ago
Never forget when that on guy uploaded a video of random white noise and he got several automatic copyright strikes
mar77i 8y ago
In case you missed the Blender Foundation debacle... https://www.blendernation.com/2018/06/19/blender-foundation-youtube-update/ https://www.blendernation.com/2018/06/19/blender-foundation-... Another piece in the puzzle that is Youtube's copyright compliance. You'd consider it good enough, until you realize how broken it is.
nerdnumerouno 8y ago
I'm amazed at the amount of comments that say music, should for some reason, be less protected than other forms of media and created works. Your precious books and movies are no different than a song someone wrote and/or performed. Get your heads out of your asses.
dessant 8y ago
Jim Sterling has done a brilliant job at explaining how broken the YouTube Content ID system is, and how to prevent these companies from monetizing your work (though you don't get to run ads on the videos either). Possibly NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM&t=20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM&t=20s
starsinspace 8y ago
So, does anyone have experience with other video websites, like Vimeo?
- phyzome 8y ago
  You can also just stick video on your own blog using <video> tags. It's super easy these days! No Javascript libraries or Flash required. Here's an example on my own site: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/23/oxalis-leaf-opening-time-lapse/ https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/23/oxalis-leaf-open... And here's the source code: <video src="https://www.brainonfire.net/hotlink/20180323-oxalis-timelapse/oxalis-160x.mp4" poster="https://www.brainonfire.net/hotlink/20180323-oxalis-timelapse/oxalis-poster.jpg" width="640" height="360" controls muted="true" preload="metadata"> Video element not supported in your browser. Try this link! <a href="https://www.brainonfire.net/hotlink/20180323-oxalis-timelapse/oxalis-160x.mp4">oxalis-160x.mp4</a> </video> (The fallback content is totally optional, but a nice touch for curmudgeons like me who don't have A/V enabled in their main browser.)
gumby 8y ago
Seems like anybody who receives a serious number (say, 5) of bogus TD requests from one entity could sue them for restitution for time spent. Of course the counterparty (bogus filer) won't show up so the plaintiff will get a default judgment. You could ask for an injunction and court costs or reimbursement and court costs. Sounds like a lot of work and of course it would be (though you do get your costs back) but if a few people do this and win, and then go seize assets with the sheriff (like a guy in Florida did to Bank of America in the housing crisis) it would get public attention. I wonder if small claims can issue an injunction or only cash awards. I don't know if the system in Germany can support this kind of thing. The German right agency (GEMA) is particularly bad.
User23 8y ago
No, he's dead.
coreyp_1 8y ago
Question: Would filing a false DMCA request count as libel? After all, it is an accusation that you are using someone else's property without permission, in a written format.
CM30 8y ago
This is why left wing political parties should make copyright and IP law reform a major part of their platform, and be willing to kick out the corporations and 'donors' in exchange to going back to basics. All it takes is one political leader and party with the guts to tell the likes of the MPAA/RIAA/Disney/whatever to stick it and change the laws. What can they do if they don't like it? Go to China where IP laws are basically not enforced at all? And I'm pretty sure most of the population would be on their side if they did that.
phobosdeimos 8y ago
Seems to me anyone can send a takedown request, or rather program a bot to do it. There seems to be no cost or due diligence involved. People want to blame Google but they have no choice but to comply with current copyright laws. YT is investing a lot of money in monitoring its content. The internet isn't cool anymore.

530 points by janoszen 8y ago

Had exactly the same problem after uploading some newer recordings of Beethoven's work that was purposely placed in the public domain by the authors (or it might have been some loose license, can't remember).

mirimir 8y ago

There's really only one viable solution. If you want stuff to stay up, put it somewhere that won't let anyone take it down. No matter what. And isn't vulnerable to coercion. YouTube is not such a place, of course. For most purposes, torrents are good enough. Maybe BitChute. Or for sensitive stuff, sites on Tor .onion servers. Not Freenet, though, because that is a trip to jail, just waiting to happen. Edit: OK, about Freenet. Yes, it is uncensorable distributed storage. And yes, it is arguably impossible to prove which nodes are storing what, and which nodes are accessing what. But it is possible to establish what a given node is sending and receiving, based on hashes. And if you get busted, you will be faced with the prospect of paying an expert to explain some seriously complicated stuff to a jury. And you will likely end up making a plea bargain. Even if you were entirely innocent. If you're curious about Freenet's opennet content, there's only one "safe" way to access it. Do everything via Tor, and access Tor via nested VPN chains. Get yourself some Bitcoin, and mix it very well. Then use it to anonymously lease a VPS. Install Freenet on the VPS in headless mode, with its webGUIs as Tor .onion services. Now you can safely access whatever you like. Maybe the VPS will get busted, but tracking that back to you will be very hard. Also, to be safe, use Tor via Whonix. Work in a clone of the workstation VM, and nuke the clone after each use. And of course, have LUKS on the host machine. Maybe use a dedicated host machine, and wipe it when you're done, just in case. Seriously, Freenet is that radioactive.

executesorder66 8y ago
Why is uploading to Freenet illegal? And where?
- mirimir 8y ago
  Sorry, I updated with a much longer explantion about Freenet. It's not that using Freenet is illegal per se. It's that Freenet is loaded with child porn, and worse. And that investigators have tweaked Freenet software that logs content moving through all peers that they connect to. And there are databases with hashes of illicit content. So they see that your node is handling illicit content, contact your ISP to get your identity, and then SWAT you. That's how that ex cop in Philadelphia, who's still sitting in jail, after "forgetting" his FDE passphrase, got busted.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades (I'm being kinda generous, some songs are old after a few months / one to five years). I hate the state of copyrighted works. Movies can stay copyrighted for a good 40 to 50 years, anything else is crazy. Books maybe 50 years too, but again, it's just crazy and clear that the extended years of copyright only benefit record labels and other publishing corporations, and not truly the artists / authors who get decent money, but it's mostly chump change.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades You say that but the Beatles, Elvis, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson are all artists that had their heyday 30-60 years ago and are still the top selling artists. A lot of them are dead now because of varying reasons, but some are still alive and kicking and giving new performances of their 40 year old music. Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  If anything I'm more for stripping record labels of their copyright, an artist can keep their copyright till they die for all I care. Their families shouldn't depend solely on one artist's income. There's many angles to copyright, it's a complicated subject cause of it, but we need to take away all the noise of it, this legalized censorship against allegedly copyrighted works doesn't actually work is the main issue. Most artists don't even care that their fans download their music until their record labels have them say otherwise. Artists from what I recall make more money selling merchandise and doing concerts...
  - icebraining 8y ago
    In fact, that right already exists (in the US), it's Section 203 - artists can terminate their copyright grants after 35 years after the publishing date.

DarkContinent 8y ago

Would human monitors work better than ContentID in this situation?

LeonM 8y ago
Even if we disregard the obvious costs of having thousands of people screening uploads all day long, I don't think it would work better. The humans will need to identify the content, and decide if it's public domain or not. This requires an infinite amount of knowledge, or a lot of googling. I think a hybrid sollution (computer identifies the content, and if it is not sure about it being public domain or not, a human is used to give the final verdict) is probably the best compromise. But I expect that YT is already doing this.
- tumetab1 8y ago
  AFAIK the first copy right takedown noticed is received without review by Youtube, they only review after being contested. From my perspective, people are just too used tolerating the bad things of ContentId which in part is the result of bad legislation. In this case I bet that no human would be able to make a confident call because of multiple jurisdictions. On Germany it's public domain but on France maybe it's still copyrighted so you need an international copyright law master degree to figure that out.

maaaats 8y ago

> “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” Google's support in a nutshell.

chrismorgan 8y ago
It’s worse than that: the phrasing is entirely deceptive and misleading. “Thank you for contacting Google”? But the remainder of the message is denying that you actually did contact Google. You tried, but you failed.
- K2L8M11N2 8y ago
  You contacted Google's bots, while failing to actually reach any human. In a way you succeeded while also failing.
amelius 8y ago
The FTC should monitor their quality of support, and throttle Google's bandwidth accordingly.
zaarn 8y ago
It's funny because that the email in their imprint and you're technically supposed to put contact data in there where you can be immediately contacted. Sadly not outright illegal to just spam filter this inbox.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

laumars 8y ago

This reminds me a lot of the experiment someone did uploading white noise: “My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims”[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325

tallanvor 8y ago

It seems to me that a big part of the problem is that Google is focusing on this the wrong way. Rather than automatically assume that ContentID is correct and notifying the user, it should instead notify the supposed owner of the music, and let them decide whether or not to make a claim. If the "owner" makes too many false claims then they should be banned form the service.

toong 8y ago
I thought that was the way it works ? But they just hit the (virtual) "claim everything" button as fast as they can. Maybe the problem is that Google can't ban them from the service legally ?
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  The problem is that by the time the victim has fought to have their video re-monetised or reinstated, it's "old". You have a very short time to make money on videos these days. Yes there's rare videos that gain longer term success or get dug up and go viral, but for the most part those first couple days are vital.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  I'm not sure. I thought companies uploaded their work and then the claims were basically automated. But admittedly I don't have experience in this area. Regardless, we need to start seeing punishment for false claims. Under DMCA, wrongful claims could result in the claimants being charged with perjury, but obviously nobody is enforcing this part of it.
Kagerjay 8y ago
This is how fighting patent trolls works too IIRC, companies can countersue for false litigation, increasing the risk of DMCA trolls
- monetus 8y ago
  To make it equitable in this situation would seem to require allowing those initiating the counter suit to do so with zero risk. And as another poster pointed out, the value of the upload is significantly diminished after it had become "old", so this would all have to be handled before the post was even made public.

sklivvz1971 8y ago

YouTube sent me a takedown request for publishing a video to my own song (which is published on CD only). They took down the song because I could not "prove" I was the owner. I guess my name being on the cover and my picture was not enough... I.e. - they don't check even if you point out it's a mistake - they always side with the copyright owner by default

kartan 8y ago
> They took down the song because I could not "prove" I was the owner. Because it is not about rights, it is about power.

kachurovskiy 8y ago

If only there was a way for regular people to unite their resources and push back against corporations lobbying their copyrights into eternity.

ddtaylor 8y ago

YouTube gave me a copyright strike because I posted video of a broken NES emulator I was developing.

yeloboy 8y ago

Copyright should only have a term of life (with a minimum duration of 50 years in case the artist dies at 20-30) and that's all. Tell me one reason this shouldn't be the case. By then, the studios will have taken a profit (or been a commercial failure but that's not on us) and so will have the artist. After the artist dies, there's no reason to "support the artist" anymore and while there is the effect of post-mortem sales spike, a celebration of now freely available music for all to enjoy would be a much better hommage. As for the family, there really isn't any reason they should obtain that copyright. If they wanna earn money with art, they have to create art on their own. What the current laws create in most cases are lazy rich children who spend the rest of their lives managing the copyright legacy of their parent. That doesn't benefit society in any way. Either they work like normal people or they make their own art but they're not entitled to the copyright of their parents. If the parents don't want to leave them in poverty, they can still leave the money they earned with this copyright over the years for their children. Also, with the minimum 50 years duration, they could still inherit the copyright if their parent dies at an early age. However, a term of life PLUS a ludicrous amount of years is a really bad idea for the cultural development of our society.

jpttsn 8y ago
A longer exclusivity term makes it possible to recoup more investment costs, for those who invest in artists. This theoretically enables larger investments that can support the artist further up front.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  if we're talking about the music industry, sure, more investment enables the machine to make bigger stars and more money. but if we're talking about music as a cultural good, how much money is really needed to make a top notch studio album? no more than a million dollars in most cases. maybe you need to multiply that by a small integer to make a really good music video for a couple of the singles. is the purpose of copyright law to enable billion dollar stars, or million dollar albums?
- Arnt 8y ago
  This would be a good point, if either a) if were backed up by data or b) data weren't available yet. I wish people would stop posting these "could be" arguments when real data is already available and either supports an "is" or doesn't.

Jerry2 8y ago

I used to have a Youtube channel where I posted videos of me playing the piano. I played mostly Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff compositions. I had around 40 videos in total. Sometime around 2014, I started getting DMCA takedown notices from various companies claiming copyright. I was getting one or two per week and I contested them and things were ruled into my favor. But then it started getting harder and harder to contest them and I even lost the ability to upload. It got so bad that one day several (3 or 4, don't remember anymore) notices were filed and Google didn't rule on them fast enough. I had to close the channel because my account was locked for one full day and I couldn't do a thing. I had too many emails inside of Gmail and didn't want to lose them so I gave up. I'm still pissed about it and how Youtube and Google run things. I always found it interesting that under YT rules content creators have the "3 strikes and you're banned" rule hanging over their heads but those who falsely claim copyright can do so with impunity. I still remember one company that ended up falsely claiming copyright over 10+ of my videos and they did so against one or two videos per week. Nothing was ever done about them.

dotancohen 8y ago
Who was sending these notices? Sounds like perjury to me.
- Jerry2 8y ago
  >Who was sending these notices? There's lots of them. The most notorious one I had to deal with was Adrev. There are reports of people getting notices from AdRev for videos that don't even have any music in them. [1] [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/42xLenp36Co https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/42xLe...
  - yomly 8y ago
    Is this a new evolution of patent trolling? Except you don't even need a patent anymore...?
    - 8y ago

zaarn 8y ago

Easy and stupid solution: Make it illegal to falsely claim copyright on a piece of media and additionally make transparent and fair processes around Notice&Takedown required for all larger platforms. Youtube's DMCA mechanism is a black box, you get told you did some bad and you can say "no I didn't do bad" at which point the black box will do things and after a few days agree or not. If someone files a copyright claim on my video I want to know who did it, why they did it, what they expect as a resolution and if the claims turn out to be false more than three times, ban them from claiming already uploaded videos of mine or even future videos. There needs to be hurtful punishment for abusing these processes but there isn't so lots of media corporations abuse it without end.

sametmax 8y ago
Powerful entities are getting less and less liable to the public every day. And it's mostly because of us: we don't make them pay any mistake, so they carry on as long as it profit them. Google is not your friend. It's a for profit company that protect its interests. Basically, they won't do anything because: - they don't care. They never did. They used to pretend they did when they were not the leader. Now they are. - they won't gain anything from changing the status quo. - they won't lose anything because of it. You content is just a tiny small drop in the sea, and they own the biggest and most popular ocean. And the fish never rebels.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  Why can't a for profit company that protects its interests be my friend?
  - sametmax 8y ago
    It can. It's just not the case with google, as they proved again and again in the last 5 years.
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
> Make it illegal to falsely claim copyright on a piece of media and additionally make transparent and fair processes around Notice&Takedown required for all larger platforms. I wouldn't be surprised if those things are already illegal, but enforcing them turns out to be too hard. Laws you can't enforce are meaningless.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

Things are seriously whack in regards to posting anything regarding classical music online. I had a short 1-minute video that I made last year to demo a product. I used the intro to Beethoven's Ninth, second movement, from a recording made in the 50s as background music. Nobody would post it due to copyright issues. Heck if I could figure it out, and like all things fucked up about having algorithms tell me what I can and can't do online, I ignored it and moved on. Not worth fighting over something I shouldn't have to fight about. I wonder, however, how many other people do the same thing that I do -- and how that's all going to end up over the long term. Not good, I expect.

astura 8y ago

Copyright claims have become out of control! Someone uploaded white noise they recorded to YouTube and got five copyright claims. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523

tim333 8y ago
From that: >Google automatically makes claims on behalf of content creators if its algorithms find a close match between the content of two videos. That seems to the the root cause of a lot of these problems - Google's software being dumb.

arh68 8y ago

Devil's advocate here: why give welfare to artists (really, the labels they sign their rights over to) when so many great pieces of art actually exist that were made by artists who died penniless? Van Gogh, Gauguin, I just don't buy the notion that extending copyrights way, way past death help the artist in any way. Why fight for labels' rights, when they largely amount to copyright trolls? Their artificial fears have made their way into YouTube, which just has to take those legal recordings down (they don't), because they're just so scared (they should not be) that this might be something that belongs to a troll. When the real musicians get their content taken down after Big Label overtly steals it, we're getting trolled.

phkahler 8y ago

One solution would be to host videos on your own site. It's another argument for decentralization. Of course it's not simple. We need a decentralized platform for this and social media, but the questions on how to achieve that are many.

r3bl 8y ago
> We need a decentralized platform for this and social media PeerTube (YouTube lookalike), Mastodon (Twitter lookalike), and PixelFed (Instagram lookalike) are already that[0]. On top of that, they all follow the same federation standard (ActivityPub), meaning that you can follow and comment on a PeerTube channel or a PixelFed feed from within Mastodon. You don't really need three separate accounts, you can just have one. They are practical on some levels, impractical on others, and they definitely do require some tweaking of how you use social media. But they do exist, they are decentralized (as in, anyone can run their own instance), they are in active development, and they even have some fair amount of users. If I remember correctly, Mastodon boasts with around 1.5 million users at the moment. IMO, minuscule number for something that's considered a social network, but a gigantic number for something that's a decentralized social network. [0] There are way more clients than the three I've mentioned. I chose to mention these three because they're lookalikes, meaning that you already kind of have the idea of what they are for.
- phkahler 8y ago
  Can you regulate who sees what? For example, I want the FB capability of sharing stuff with friends only in addition to having some public.

fogetti 8y ago

Well this is what the tech giants brought to us. The middle finger and an automated 'Up your ###' message. Not a far fetch to assume that soon similar technologies will judge your work resumes and credit worthiness too. With a similar up your ### message of course.

rbrtdrmpc- 8y ago

I personally work with music copyright claims for an internet company and as i see a lot of folks here (including the author) are missing the copyright thing. They are not claiming for the fingerprinted music, they are claiming for what the big publishing companies are saying, and they are the ones making the rules. This is how it works more or less, YT fingerprints a piece, they run their algorithms on new content and if they match the fingerprint, also using metadata, if its right and guess what, most of the time its not, they look at what the MULTIPLE publishers claims on the same stuff. Publishers can claim whatever they want, they need just to face other publishers if they abuse their power (and bare with me, this is mad because there is no central authority!), there is no such way as YouTube able to rule on copyrighted content. So as an example, if i upload a video with the 5th of Beethoven, the algorithm can fingerprint it correctly, next YT looks at what publishers are claiming and if there is someone with a valid recording of that piece at a "performance" level, they need to pay for the content otherwise stated. And just to add something more, there are three different type of "claims" in the music industry, mechanical, synchronization and performance share, more about the aforementioned here http://www.copyright.com/blog/music-licensing-public-performance-license-synchronization/ http://www.copyright.com/blog/music-licensing-public-perform...

sunsetMurk 8y ago

listen while you read: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVKiYw5hVuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVKiYw5hVuM Dalia Lazar playing a Beethoven concert on piano.

jellicle 8y ago

Copyright should probably be about 5 years long, total, non-extendable. This achieves 95% of the asserted benefits of the existing copyright system and gets rid of 99% of the problems. The boost to national innovation would be tremendous. But of course it's about money (copyright is a just a privatized tax) and anyone advocating this would find themselves marked for death by the copyright industry.

JackFr 8y ago

The solution, of course, is to make legal arguments a class of intellectual property. If a lawyer wants to cite a precedent, he's got to pay. Using a parallel argument without explicitly citing the precedent is a tort, and may be subject to lawsuit. This will tie up all the intellectual property lawyers who will start suing each other. At that point the rest of us can go on with our lives. (At least in countries with a common law based legal system...)

jrochkind1 8y ago

> However, I intended to release all of my videos under a free license, so that they could be used in the future for others to educate and inform students about these beautiful works. Even in cases where my defense to the ContentID claims were successful, the videos were not reverted to this free license, making it much more difficult for others to use and share these digitized works in the way I originally had intended. If you don't own the copyright of the thing or have a license to it, how can you "release it under a license" any license at all? Is the OP just not saying it clearly, and what they really wanted to do was to mark it as in the public domain? Or does Youtube actually have no way to do this? Our entire cultural practices, corporate policies, and software feature lists, are set up ignoring public domain use cases. People don't even realize how this stuff works legally, which doesn't help. But you can't release something under a license if you don't own it (or have a license to re/sub-license it).

jwilk 8y ago
The music is not copyrightable, but presumably the videos are.

beshrkayali 8y ago

> lawful free expression online What's the point of using the word "lawful" here? Free expression is free expression, conforming to a law or not is subject to the country and time. I think it somehow dilutes the absolute nature in the meaning of: free expression.

mLuby 8y ago
You're technically correct but in a meaningless way. One is "free" to do basically anything they have the power to do, but nobody acts that way (they'd be jailed or dead) so when we say "free" we mean within reasonable bounds, which usually includes the law.
- beshrkayali 8y ago
  I'm not sure how it's meaningless. When we're talking about a concept such is free speech, there is no point of "within reasonable bounds... the law", at least in an ideological frame. The only bounds are those of any greater freedom, meaning do as you like as long as you're not transgressing on someone else's. Freedom of expression using ones own means is an absolute freedom that should be self-evident and self-defined.

jwilk 8y ago

> the videos were not reverted to this free license What does that mean?

qubax 8y ago

Firstly, the assumption by google should be innocence rather than the guilt of the youtube creator. The burden should be on the accuser and not the accused. Secondly, if 3 copyright violations gets the accused banned, then 3 false copyright accusations should get the accuser banned. Under youtube's current model, it actually incentivizes companies to claim everything since there are no consequences. Thirdly, with what youtube is doing, it seems like they just want to be a platform for corporate media. It seems like they are heavily pushing established media like CNN, Late Night Shows, SNL and celebrities like ( Kevin Hart, Will Smith, etc ). I'm seeing so many more corporate media recommendations on youtube than ever before. If that's the case, what's the point of youtube? If all they want is for me to see CNN or Kimmel clips, what do I need youtube for? I can just go watch CNN and Kimmel on TV. Youtube's selling point was that it wasn't TV. It was different. That's the case less and less now. I still have hope for youtube and I still like a lot of the non-corporate content there, but I hope youtube really reassesses their handling of claims. Edit: And as for copyright, there should be less, not more of it and it should be for limited time. It stifles creativity and it pretty much enriches the few ( most of whom had nothing to do with the creation of art ).

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
Copyright as it exists today definitely favored the rich in recent history, because you had to sell out just to get your creation in front of an audience. The Internet changed all that, but it seems like companies like Google are working hard to get things back the way they used to be by becoming the gateway to the audience.

shdon 8y ago

Got hit with several ContentID claims on videos that I posted in 2013 with the work I was supposedly infringing on being created in 2014. My appeal was denied. Moronic algorithms.

PerilousD 8y ago

There were file sharing sites before Youtube came along and there are still file sharing sites other than Youtube now. SO - stop enabling Google-Youtube to pull this stuff and go somewhere else - its called using the Internet?

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
That's fine. I agree with you. Now, how are people going to find it? That may work if you have an established presence, but even then you will likely lose a lot of your audience.

Rotdhizon 8y ago

Never forget when that on guy uploaded a video of random white noise and he got several automatic copyright strikes

mar77i 8y ago

In case you missed the Blender Foundation debacle... https://www.blendernation.com/2018/06/19/blender-foundation-youtube-update/ https://www.blendernation.com/2018/06/19/blender-foundation-... Another piece in the puzzle that is Youtube's copyright compliance. You'd consider it good enough, until you realize how broken it is.

nerdnumerouno 8y ago

I'm amazed at the amount of comments that say music, should for some reason, be less protected than other forms of media and created works. Your precious books and movies are no different than a song someone wrote and/or performed. Get your heads out of your asses.

dessant 8y ago

Jim Sterling has done a brilliant job at explaining how broken the YouTube Content ID system is, and how to prevent these companies from monetizing your work (though you don't get to run ads on the videos either). Possibly NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM&t=20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK8i6aMG9VM&t=20s

starsinspace 8y ago

So, does anyone have experience with other video websites, like Vimeo?

phyzome 8y ago
You can also just stick video on your own blog using <video> tags. It's super easy these days! No Javascript libraries or Flash required. Here's an example on my own site: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/23/oxalis-leaf-opening-time-lapse/ https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2018/03/23/oxalis-leaf-open... And here's the source code: <video src="https://www.brainonfire.net/hotlink/20180323-oxalis-timelapse/oxalis-160x.mp4" poster="https://www.brainonfire.net/hotlink/20180323-oxalis-timelapse/oxalis-poster.jpg" width="640" height="360" controls muted="true" preload="metadata"> Video element not supported in your browser. Try this link! <a href="https://www.brainonfire.net/hotlink/20180323-oxalis-timelapse/oxalis-160x.mp4">oxalis-160x.mp4</a> </video> (The fallback content is totally optional, but a nice touch for curmudgeons like me who don't have A/V enabled in their main browser.)

gumby 8y ago

Seems like anybody who receives a serious number (say, 5) of bogus TD requests from one entity could sue them for restitution for time spent. Of course the counterparty (bogus filer) won't show up so the plaintiff will get a default judgment. You could ask for an injunction and court costs or reimbursement and court costs. Sounds like a lot of work and of course it would be (though you do get your costs back) but if a few people do this and win, and then go seize assets with the sheriff (like a guy in Florida did to Bank of America in the housing crisis) it would get public attention. I wonder if small claims can issue an injunction or only cash awards. I don't know if the system in Germany can support this kind of thing. The German right agency (GEMA) is particularly bad.

User23 8y ago

No, he's dead.

coreyp_1 8y ago

Question: Would filing a false DMCA request count as libel? After all, it is an accusation that you are using someone else's property without permission, in a written format.

CM30 8y ago

This is why left wing political parties should make copyright and IP law reform a major part of their platform, and be willing to kick out the corporations and 'donors' in exchange to going back to basics. All it takes is one political leader and party with the guts to tell the likes of the MPAA/RIAA/Disney/whatever to stick it and change the laws. What can they do if they don't like it? Go to China where IP laws are basically not enforced at all? And I'm pretty sure most of the population would be on their side if they did that.

phobosdeimos 8y ago

Seems to me anyone can send a takedown request, or rather program a bot to do it. There seems to be no cost or due diligence involved. People want to blame Google but they have no choice but to comply with current copyright laws. YT is investing a lot of money in monitoring its content. The internet isn't cool anymore.