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Ironically, in the US pressure is mounting for content platforms to police "fake news" which is a moralistic mission, rather than enforce something fairly obvio

Ironically, in the US pressure is mounting for content platforms to police "fake news" which is a moralistic mission, rather than enforce something fairly obvious like massive content piracy and systemic copyright violation as a service. Even in 2018 it seems that Youtube is being funded by the "Napster model" of allowing de facto circumvention of copyright law. Or, put another way, Youtube is profitable mainly because of vastly imperfect enforcement of laws.

naravara 8y ago
I feel like this criticism of YouTube is about 5 years out of date. At this point most of their traffic is original content by content creators. It's not the Napster model so much as hoodwinking young creatives into shouldering all the risks of producing a service for YouTube's users and using their monopoly power to freeze them out of being able to make anything resembling a decent cut of the revenues for their efforts. Call it the "Uber" model.
- will_brown 8y ago
  >At this point most of their traffic is original content by content creators. That’s not my experience. Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Except of course YouTube’s paid content...good luck finding a pirate version of say YouTube original series Kobra Kai, They seemed to have figured out a way to police their own content without issue.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. With songs, at least, most of the time it's posted there by Vevo, so the recording industry put it there themselves. It's unlikely to be a big driver of their traffic or revenue. The incentives aren't even there, they're so quick to demonetize or send DMCA takedowns that anything people are likely to search for are at high risk of being taken down. You really only see the flowering of pirated content in the early days after live events, like when a new movie trailer drops.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    > Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Heavily distorted to the point that you wouldn't really want to watch it in that format if you had any alternative.
  - why_only_15 8y ago
    I can't find most Beatles songs nowadays. A few years ago I was able to, but now it seems to be close to impossible.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Sure: Kill Bill (vol 1).
    - lovich 8y ago
      https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9D10D8B604D6B7EC https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9D10D8B604D6B7EC Not quite the full movie, but a substantial portion and its certainly not being used under fair use doctrine like using these clips as examples to discuss film techniques or a parody. This took all of 5 seconds to find copyrighted content on youtube
      - realusername 8y ago
        It's just extracts of 3min, you cannot compare that to a full movie.
        lovich 8y ago
        I'm not comparing it to a full movie. I am demonstrating that it is trivially easy to find copyrighted content on YouTube's platform. A list of clips like this is something that other industries/companies get sued over. If I steal your money 2% at a time, I don't get to claim that it doesn't count because each chunk wasn't the whole thing. Personally I wouldn't actually care about stuff like this, and accept the DMCA safe harbor as a valid argument to protect YouTube and similar sites. However, all of them have started to, or already been deep into, do content curation. Once you take an active role in the content available on your service I dont think you should be able to argue that you can't help what users upload. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too
        realusername 8y ago
        > I'm not comparing it to a full movie. I am demonstrating that it is trivially easy to find copyrighted content on YouTube's platform. A list of clips like this is something that other industries/companies get sued over. If I steal your money 2% at a time, I don't get to claim that it doesn't count because each chunk wasn't the whole thing. And how do you know exactly these short clips aren't just allowed and monetized by the copyright owners? > Personally I wouldn't actually care about stuff like this, and accept the DMCA safe harbor as a valid argument to protect YouTube and similar sites. However, all of them have started to, or already been deep into, do content curation. Once you take an active role in the content available on your service I dont think you should be able to argue that you can't help what users upload. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too It's exactly what they are doing now, it's called ContentID and it sucks (as expected).
  - MrEldritch 8y ago
    >Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. I agree that this criticism is about five years out of date. When I was younger, I used to happily go to Youtube to watch free versions of TV shows and cartoons. However, they've gradually become good enough at enforcing copyright that while you can absolutely still find anything you like on there, the degree to which it must be munged to escape the copyright filters means it's utterly unwatchable. It's actually really annoying, because you can no longer even find short clips of particular moments reliably, as they've often been taken down.
  - happycube 8y ago
    Actually I find it's the obscure movies that stay up. ;)
- darawk 8y ago
  You think Uber is not giving the drivers a decent cut of the revenue?
- esturk 8y ago
  If you search sports highlight such as NBA or NFL, you'll find plenty of copyrighted videos.
davidcbc 8y ago
You really think the main way YouTube profits is from illegally posted material? That doesn't seem likely to me.
- resters 8y ago
  If that weren't the case, not sure why it would be so costly to comply with the EU laws. Doubly true because of ContentID.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Because the compliance cost is not caused by losing revenue from having to remove infringing content. And ContentID is useless because it's full of false positives and false negatives, so it only creates problems for honest customers without even removing all of the infringing material.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > If that weren't the case, not sure why it would be so costly to comply with the EU laws. Doubly true because of ContentID. Because the costs are determined not by the number of true positives, but by the degree of difficulty in identifying those true positives with both high precision and high recall, and by the level of risk that false negatives provide. This is why SESTA forced Craigslist to shut down their personals section in the US. No, the overwhelming majority of posts were not by sex workers, but the liability that SESTA imposed was so high that there was no way for them to operate it in a manner that wouldn't expose them to massive legal risk.
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    The article and the comments here make it clear YouTube is saying the cost of following the law, not the cost of breaking it, is the thing that would be too expensive. Following the law being the cost of following up on the copyright owners of every piece of content before allowing it to be viewed, unlike now where they let it upload and only take action if there is an infringement reported.
manigandham 8y ago
That might have been true in the beginning but not anymore. Youtube's Content ID system is the best of its kind, and very effective at taking down copyrighted material. Most of the content at this point is original videos or protected by fair use.
- resters 8y ago
  If ContentID works so well, why would it be costly for Youtube to comply with the EU laws?
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Because this is about liability, not tech. Nothing is 100% perfect.
  - ggggtez 8y ago
    The issue is it can only identify things it already knows are copyrighted. What happens when a new song comes out? Does the uploader actually own it or not? It's impossible to say until after someone claims a copyright violation, at which point it might already be too late.
- bjourne 8y ago
  Most of the videos perhaps. But I bet most of the views are for copyrighted material. For example, this supposedly pirated video of the Wilder vs Ortiz fight has garnered 3.5 million views in eight months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IaBL_pmG_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IaBL_pmG_A The original content usually doesn't attract that kind of viewership.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    Where are you watching that link from? It says it is blocked in the US on copyright grounds, which makes me think that if you are watching it from outside the US, it's because the copyright holder is explicitly allowing it.
andybak 8y ago
And yet rights holders have made no effort to adjust their content offerings to take into account the obvious deficiencies in their own offerings. To put it another way - why aren't the rights holders even attempting to provide their content in the way their audience wants it? Even if they were failing to compete it would go a long way to strengthening their claims that YouTube is abusing the system. If enforcement became perfect overnight I don't doubt there would be nothing learnt and nothing would change.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  They do, that's what VEVO is for the music industry. The problem is copyright law allows for copyright of every different aspect of a performance, recording, composition, rendition, video, audio, translation, etc, all to be owned by different people/groups/organizations (and it's different for TV/Radio, even for the same audio recording too). The glaring deficiency is the copyright system is held together by ducttape and gum, and was never built for a system that allowed perfect reproductions to be transmitted instantaneously. It was designed for selling sheet music to 18th century orchestras.
- mrep 8y ago
  > why aren't the rights holders even attempting to provide their content in the way their audience wants it? Define that because I feel like everyone who complains about this is just mad they cannot pay netflix prices and get ad-free content to everything everyone has ever produced. News flash: that content costs a lot of money to product and at least in the US, I don't know of any content I have ever been interested in consuming that wasn't available for rent/buying on places like itunes. Is it more expensive than netflix, yes, but that's because it costs a lot to make. I bet I could make and license a streaming service that had all content ever produced but you would then complain about how it would cost like $200 a month to afford all of those licenses.
buboard 8y ago
Probably because piracy is not an issue in the USA, due to strict enforcement/good alternatives. Piracy is rampant in Europe. Ironic, considering that EU seems to be up in arms about it: https://torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-piracy-rates-by-far-160801/ https://torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-pirac... (anecdotally, none of the videos i watched last month had anything to do with pirated content. those days gone)
- unilynx 8y ago
  I wonder how much of the higher piracy outside the USA is being caused by a lot of USA content being desirable, but not being released (or much later) on broadcast TV outside the USA. Sitcoms like Big Bang theory... I'm not sure if they're worth paying for for a lot of people, but it'll take a long time before you can watch it for free (well, except for the advertisements) outside the USA.
  - realusername 8y ago
    And also Netflix only really exist in terms of content in the US/UK, outside of that their library drops so much it's basically useless. Why would anyone pay for Netflix if they also have to torrent as well anyway?

naravara 8y ago

I feel like this criticism of YouTube is about 5 years out of date. At this point most of their traffic is original content by content creators. It's not the Napster model so much as hoodwinking young creatives into shouldering all the risks of producing a service for YouTube's users and using their monopoly power to freeze them out of being able to make anything resembling a decent cut of the revenues for their efforts. Call it the "Uber" model.

will_brown 8y ago
>At this point most of their traffic is original content by content creators. That’s not my experience. Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Except of course YouTube’s paid content...good luck finding a pirate version of say YouTube original series Kobra Kai, They seemed to have figured out a way to police their own content without issue.
- naravara 8y ago
  >Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. With songs, at least, most of the time it's posted there by Vevo, so the recording industry put it there themselves. It's unlikely to be a big driver of their traffic or revenue. The incentives aren't even there, they're so quick to demonetize or send DMCA takedowns that anything people are likely to search for are at high risk of being taken down. You really only see the flowering of pirated content in the early days after live events, like when a new movie trailer drops.
- wvenable 8y ago
  > Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Heavily distorted to the point that you wouldn't really want to watch it in that format if you had any alternative.
- why_only_15 8y ago
  I can't find most Beatles songs nowadays. A few years ago I was able to, but now it seems to be close to impossible.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Sure: Kill Bill (vol 1).
  - lovich 8y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9D10D8B604D6B7EC https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9D10D8B604D6B7EC Not quite the full movie, but a substantial portion and its certainly not being used under fair use doctrine like using these clips as examples to discuss film techniques or a parody. This took all of 5 seconds to find copyrighted content on youtube
    - realusername 8y ago
      It's just extracts of 3min, you cannot compare that to a full movie.
      - lovich 8y ago
        I'm not comparing it to a full movie. I am demonstrating that it is trivially easy to find copyrighted content on YouTube's platform. A list of clips like this is something that other industries/companies get sued over. If I steal your money 2% at a time, I don't get to claim that it doesn't count because each chunk wasn't the whole thing. Personally I wouldn't actually care about stuff like this, and accept the DMCA safe harbor as a valid argument to protect YouTube and similar sites. However, all of them have started to, or already been deep into, do content curation. Once you take an active role in the content available on your service I dont think you should be able to argue that you can't help what users upload. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too
        realusername 8y ago
        > I'm not comparing it to a full movie. I am demonstrating that it is trivially easy to find copyrighted content on YouTube's platform. A list of clips like this is something that other industries/companies get sued over. If I steal your money 2% at a time, I don't get to claim that it doesn't count because each chunk wasn't the whole thing. And how do you know exactly these short clips aren't just allowed and monetized by the copyright owners? > Personally I wouldn't actually care about stuff like this, and accept the DMCA safe harbor as a valid argument to protect YouTube and similar sites. However, all of them have started to, or already been deep into, do content curation. Once you take an active role in the content available on your service I dont think you should be able to argue that you can't help what users upload. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too It's exactly what they are doing now, it's called ContentID and it sucks (as expected).
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  >Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. I agree that this criticism is about five years out of date. When I was younger, I used to happily go to Youtube to watch free versions of TV shows and cartoons. However, they've gradually become good enough at enforcing copyright that while you can absolutely still find anything you like on there, the degree to which it must be munged to escape the copyright filters means it's utterly unwatchable. It's actually really annoying, because you can no longer even find short clips of particular moments reliably, as they've often been taken down.
- happycube 8y ago
  Actually I find it's the obscure movies that stay up. ;)
darawk 8y ago
You think Uber is not giving the drivers a decent cut of the revenue?
esturk 8y ago
If you search sports highlight such as NBA or NFL, you'll find plenty of copyrighted videos.

davidcbc 8y ago

You really think the main way YouTube profits is from illegally posted material? That doesn't seem likely to me.

resters 8y ago
If that weren't the case, not sure why it would be so costly to comply with the EU laws. Doubly true because of ContentID.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  Because the compliance cost is not caused by losing revenue from having to remove infringing content. And ContentID is useless because it's full of false positives and false negatives, so it only creates problems for honest customers without even removing all of the infringing material.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > If that weren't the case, not sure why it would be so costly to comply with the EU laws. Doubly true because of ContentID. Because the costs are determined not by the number of true positives, but by the degree of difficulty in identifying those true positives with both high precision and high recall, and by the level of risk that false negatives provide. This is why SESTA forced Craigslist to shut down their personals section in the US. No, the overwhelming majority of posts were not by sex workers, but the liability that SESTA imposed was so high that there was no way for them to operate it in a manner that wouldn't expose them to massive legal risk.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  The article and the comments here make it clear YouTube is saying the cost of following the law, not the cost of breaking it, is the thing that would be too expensive. Following the law being the cost of following up on the copyright owners of every piece of content before allowing it to be viewed, unlike now where they let it upload and only take action if there is an infringement reported.

manigandham 8y ago

That might have been true in the beginning but not anymore. Youtube's Content ID system is the best of its kind, and very effective at taking down copyrighted material. Most of the content at this point is original videos or protected by fair use.

resters 8y ago
If ContentID works so well, why would it be costly for Youtube to comply with the EU laws?
- manigandham 8y ago
  Because this is about liability, not tech. Nothing is 100% perfect.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  The issue is it can only identify things it already knows are copyrighted. What happens when a new song comes out? Does the uploader actually own it or not? It's impossible to say until after someone claims a copyright violation, at which point it might already be too late.
bjourne 8y ago
Most of the videos perhaps. But I bet most of the views are for copyrighted material. For example, this supposedly pirated video of the Wilder vs Ortiz fight has garnered 3.5 million views in eight months. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IaBL_pmG_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IaBL_pmG_A The original content usually doesn't attract that kind of viewership.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Where are you watching that link from? It says it is blocked in the US on copyright grounds, which makes me think that if you are watching it from outside the US, it's because the copyright holder is explicitly allowing it.

andybak 8y ago

And yet rights holders have made no effort to adjust their content offerings to take into account the obvious deficiencies in their own offerings. To put it another way - why aren't the rights holders even attempting to provide their content in the way their audience wants it? Even if they were failing to compete it would go a long way to strengthening their claims that YouTube is abusing the system. If enforcement became perfect overnight I don't doubt there would be nothing learnt and nothing would change.

ggggtez 8y ago
They do, that's what VEVO is for the music industry. The problem is copyright law allows for copyright of every different aspect of a performance, recording, composition, rendition, video, audio, translation, etc, all to be owned by different people/groups/organizations (and it's different for TV/Radio, even for the same audio recording too). The glaring deficiency is the copyright system is held together by ducttape and gum, and was never built for a system that allowed perfect reproductions to be transmitted instantaneously. It was designed for selling sheet music to 18th century orchestras.
mrep 8y ago
> why aren't the rights holders even attempting to provide their content in the way their audience wants it? Define that because I feel like everyone who complains about this is just mad they cannot pay netflix prices and get ad-free content to everything everyone has ever produced. News flash: that content costs a lot of money to product and at least in the US, I don't know of any content I have ever been interested in consuming that wasn't available for rent/buying on places like itunes. Is it more expensive than netflix, yes, but that's because it costs a lot to make. I bet I could make and license a streaming service that had all content ever produced but you would then complain about how it would cost like $200 a month to afford all of those licenses.

buboard 8y ago

Probably because piracy is not an issue in the USA, due to strict enforcement/good alternatives. Piracy is rampant in Europe. Ironic, considering that EU seems to be up in arms about it: https://torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-piracy-rates-by-far-160801/ https://torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-pirac... (anecdotally, none of the videos i watched last month had anything to do with pirated content. those days gone)

unilynx 8y ago
I wonder how much of the higher piracy outside the USA is being caused by a lot of USA content being desirable, but not being released (or much later) on broadcast TV outside the USA. Sitcoms like Big Bang theory... I'm not sure if they're worth paying for for a lot of people, but it'll take a long time before you can watch it for free (well, except for the advertisements) outside the USA.
- realusername 8y ago
  And also Netflix only really exist in terms of content in the US/UK, outside of that their library drops so much it's basically useless. Why would anyone pay for Netflix if they also have to torrent as well anyway?