6 ms·
YouTube shuts down music companies’ use of manual copyright claims
- waitwhatwhere 7y agoFor those that prefer to avoid TC spam/spin (there are dozens of us!): https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to-manual-claiming-policies.html https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to-m...
- saagarjha 7y ago> Claims created by the Content ID match system, which are the vast majority, are not impacted by this policy. Will this end up having an impact?
- ravenstine 7y agoMaybe not in the grand scheme of things, but it might help with the draconian banning of things like covers of game music, fair use of audio and video clips, instrumentals, etc. I've seen that stuff taken down, and maybe it was due to Content ID, but I question that when the composition of the content is original. I may be in the minority, but I would be glad to have niche fan-created content stick around without seeing messages like "This video was deleted because of a claim by Universal/Nintendo/Disney/Viacom".
- grawprog 7y agoI've never understood why companies choose to delete videos rather than just monetize them. I've uploaded videos with copyrighted music, rather than get deleted the owners chose to have ads shown in my video(my channel is unmonetized) and I'm assuming they make money from it.
- jonas21 7y agoThere are certainly some cases where this makes sense. In the extreme case, suppose someone uploads a full copy of a new movie. It seems unlikely the studio would make up for the revenue from lost ticket sales with just ads. They might be violating contracts with their distributors as well.
- grawprog 7y agoYeah I wasn't necessarily thinking full movies or things like that. More like things that maybe skirt the line for fair use.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- btown 7y agoRemoving adverse incentives is a step in the right direction! Now, any employee at a copyright holder assigned to send out manual copyright claims will become a cost center. No longer will copyright holders be able to justify such assignments via captured revenue from creators - instead, they will legitimately need to value the cost of the claiming against the actual damages done to the copyright holder made by the sharing of copyrighted music. On the other hand, there are a lot of music videos on YouTube that copyright holders might have been fine allowing to exist, and now their only option is to nuke them from orbit. Mashups, etc. may suffer. Essentially, this is a move that may reduce spurious claims, but may come at the expense of certain grey-zone expressions.
- judge2020 7y agoContent ID content owners have a lot of options when dealing with their content appearing in videos. For one[0], they can choose "block" - prevents it from showing in some/all countries, "monetize" - takes the videos's revenue (note that there is now revenue sharing so that claims don't always take 100% of the revenue[1]), or "track" - just track the video analytics. It might be worth it to set up "if 2 minutes or less of my 4 minute song appear in a video, monetize", "if 30 seconds or less is used, just track it", and finally "if the entire video is my song or uses my song in its entirety, block it". Not sure how advanced the Content ID system really is since it's easier to get the Copyright Match Tool than Content ID, but I wouldn't doubt Google's ML had something like "match certainty" copyright holders can use to filter content like mashups and remixes. It's most likely up to the content owners to use this to filter, though, since the entire purpose of Content ID is to help both YouTube and Copyright holders avoid DMCA lawsuits. 0: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9245819?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9245819?hl=en ("Content ID" wrapper) 1: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3301938 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3301938
- sucrose 7y agoThey didn't shut it down completely. They only removed the ability to profit from your copyright claims. You're still able to have videos removed or blacklisted for copyright infringement.
- iscrewyou 7y agoThey did remove a predatory practice which should help the content creators. The monetary incentive to block is gone.
- Circuits 7y agoNot positive but there use of this "manual copyright claims" nomenclature leads me to believe that there is still a non-manual version of copyright claiming that will be doing most of the heavy lifting for them.
- sansnomme 7y agoConsidering how advanced GOOG is at ML, instead of blocking they should just filter out the music instead. You don't even need ML for this if you have the original music piece. This way they can insert themselves as a middleman and act as a marketplace. If the video creator wants to pay for music and music companies wants to profit from it, they can go through Google directly. The two parties don't ever have to even meet each other or know who each other is.
- chrisseaton 7y agoGOOG?
- krastanov 7y agoThis is Hacker News's fashionable way to refer to companies: not by their actual name but by their NASDAQ ticker name.
- toxican 7y agoSeems pretentious as hell, to be honest.
- derefr 7y agoIt's what business newspapers do, especially online, as the name serves as a microformat causing the newspaper's CMS to automatically inject ticker information either on-hover or as an embedded aside.
- chrisseaton 7y agoSome ticker names have no relation to the company name though! You often have to go and look them up.
- smallbigfish 7y ago
- Someone1234 7y agoStill seems like YT's version of "Fair Use" is significantly more constrained than the legal definition. This is a step in the right direction, but YT's system is extra-judicial in nature, and they've decided to be more copyright holder friendly than the law itself requires (likely so the law isn't used, which is cheaper for YT). I suspect in my lifetime governments will need to create better frameworks for content networks. The whole "they're a private company, they can do anything!" argument is growing weaker by the day as these companies have more influence in our lives (with both good (e.g. anti-hate content) and bad (e.g. copyright holders stepping on small creators) consequences).
- koboll 7y agoThe fact that creators are still required to edit out sound from audio from passing cars is insane. It's a system designed to be a money grab for the music industry, not follow any sort of legal definition of copyright. The idea that a music company could sue someone over a copyright claim for posting a video in which part of a song is fuzzily heard for a few brief moments as a car passes is risible.
- CamperBob2 7y agoAlong the same lines, if music from passing cars could be heard in the video, how was it not an unauthorized public performance when it occurred in the first place? Why doesn't the music industry go after people who unlawfully distribute their copyrighted material up and down the street at 100 dB? This sort of event is either strictly incidental, or it's not. Which is it? The copyright industry can't have it both ways, or at least shouldn't be allowed to.
- compiler-guy 7y agoBecause the people distributing their copyrighted material up and down the street at 100db don’t have a monetization plan, and, even if they did, don’t have a convenient platform to target.
- basch 7y ago
- doh 7y agoFor the curious ones, this policy change impacts slightly less than 10% of all potential claims (not claims that were made, but could've been made). Quite large portion of these potential claims are short videos that are being re-uploaded from other platforms, like TikTok and Instagram. Disclaimer: I run a company that monitors YouTube and other platforms for analytical purposes, some related to copyright. Our system is able to identify segments as short as 0.5 second which allows us to produce this kind of information.
- rhacker 7y agoMaybe the fix is to require the submission to include the timestamp start and end. And if there is also copyrighted imagery, that the submission include black boxes around the restricted imagery (for video imagery the would include the timstamp start and end). Then, the resolution would be to wipe out the original audio and black out any imagery similarly. Thus if a car drives by playing something copyrighted, it would simply cut the audio for a few seconds. No loss of revenue to the original poster. And beyond that, provide the video poster a chance to edit the video without the original sound/images. If they re-upload it with the sound/images still included, then they can have negative consequences for their account. If they re-upload with everything "fixed" then they shall have no negative marks on their permanent record.
- doh 7y ago> Maybe the fix is to require the submission to include the timestamp start and end. This is already a requirement [0] that was introduced couple of weeks back. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/9566717?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/9566717?hl=en
- Circuits 7y agoI really just don't see how YouTube can support this argument. A car passing buy is playing a song and that sound bite ends up in a creators video and therefor what exactly? What exactly are they claiming that means? That it was the song bite and not the content of the video that's earning the creator money? Aside from polling every person who watched the video how could they possibly justify that conclusion?
- ben7799 7y agoThis part is a great step for some of the people uploading videos. Content ID will not catch stuff like a guitar teacher teaching a 30 minute lesson on soloing in E minor Pentatonic and playing 5 notes of a copyrighted song with a totally different tone than the original song. Manual ID was causing the record company to be able to claim all the revenue for the whole 3 minute lesson as if the whole video was a performance of their whole song.
- jotjotzzz 7y agoI feel the music companies would have been making more if people can use samples of songs in the first place -- as most would promote the music and people would buy or listen to them if they really love them. But since they take down everything, no would dare to use music due to fear. It's ridiculous.
- golemotron 7y agoIt would be great to see a technology that did _audio subtraction_ of the offending snippets of sound rather than blocking the entire video.
- dafty4 7y ago"However, YouTube expects that by removing the option to monetize these sorts of videos themselves, some copyright holders will instead just leave them alone." Uh, no. Why would copyright holders do that?
- jaggirs 7y agoThere is no incentive to block an infringing video. The presence of the sound is accidental anyways and does not damage the claimants revenue (it is not a replacement good). So the claimant wont directly (video revenue) or indirectly earn money from these claims.
- pxia 7y agoWhen the gain is smaller than the cost of hiring people to do the claim.
- Applejinx 7y agoI've had multiple videos ContentIDed for years now, off and on, by certain 'copyright holders'. The infringing 'works' are white noise. Literally. I make open source software plugins and use Logic's signal generator sometimes to demonstrate the spectral content of these plugins. I'll get copyright strikes specifically for the purpose of hijacking the ad revenue of these videos, specifying that it's the noise (or filtered noise) content of the video. They don't try to knock the video off YouTube, they are trying to mass claim all white noise on the platform to get whatever revenue they can until the real creator reassert their rights to their original content (at some risk: you are saying 'no, that is original content' to the YouTube machine and depending on the adversary to withdraw their claim in hopes of finding someone who is paying less attention) This would directly affect those trolls, and those guys would indeed skulk away: it's what they do when you challenge them, because they want to operate without calling attention to themselves.