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Explaining copyright broke the YouTube copyright system

653 points by pulisse 7y ago

mamborambo 7y ago
Reading through the article the appeal process was shown to be highly fuzzy and uncertain even for a group of highly trained legal experts. This Kafkaesque situation is similar to the way the legal process works inside a totalitarian state like China, where the citizen caught in a sticky legal situation, could not use the appeal and defence mechanisms, because nobody knows what is the actual mechanism. And similarly the Youtube user has no natural rights or protection, even if the entire misconduct lies with the Youtube copyright strike process. It is times like this that I start to agree with the way governments have begun to scrutinize Facebook and Google. Clearly they do have a responsibility beyond a commercial term of service, to provide not just a utility but also to ensure that some degree of fair play, truthfulness, and consistency is applied.
greendestiny_re 7y ago
YouPorn is a great Youtube alternative.
annadane 7y ago
But I thought all that was required is a cartoon video explaining copyright to YT's users because they're just stupid and don't understand?!
jhallenworld 7y ago
I remember when Youtube was created, and then bought by Google I thought how can these people make so much money on what is basically a file server. But this right here is it- they did not solve any kind of technical problem, they solved a legal one. The automated copyright system is the main value add of Youtube, do not doubt it. It allows Youtube to make more ad revenue than it loses from lawsuits or from having to hire an army of people to deal with copyright claims.
type0 7y ago
And, in the end NYU Law don't learn their lesson, at the very least they could've pointed their visitors to watch said videos somewhere else and not on yt. So long yt doesn't loose users this will just continue and likely will get much worse.
justlexi93 7y ago
And this is why humans can’t and won’t ever have anything nice
ikeboy 7y ago
>We discovered that if we continued to challenge the accusation of infringement and lost, our video would be subject to copyright strikes. If the account was subject to multiple strikes its ability to live stream could be restricted or the account could be terminated. While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet. To be clear, if you dispute and counternotice everything, then the only way this would happen is if the other side actually sues you, which is incredibly unlikely here.
- crescentfresh 7y ago
  That's not how I read that. "lost" in this context simply means the so-called copyright holder clicks the button that says "nah, still can't use my stuff" that's considered a strike.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    Right. The DMCA takedown process is more reasonable in this regard: if you post a counter-notice, the service provider puts your content back up and the party trying to make a copyright claim has to sue you. YouTube, on the other hand, makes purported copyright holders the absolute judge of their own cases.
    - ikeboy 7y ago
      This is incorrect. If a rights owner refuses to retract in the face of a dispute, YouTube will require them to convert it into a DMCA notice and will then honor any counternotice.
      - JoshTriplett 7y ago
        I've seen multiple reports from channel owners who have not been given any such option; the message saying that the supposed "rights owner" has confirmed the dispute is presented as "final" (along with the copyright strike). Unless this has changed recently, or there's some obscure link to switch to the DMCA process?
css 7y ago
The "solution" they arrived at boggles my mind: > We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed. We need competition in this space.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  It's going to be hard to get competition in a space that is unprofitable and requires huge infrastructure investment.
- doh 7y ago
  Agree. That's why we built our Attribution Engine [0]. It's much more advanced that YouTube's Content ID, it's free to all rightsholder, creators and platforms (we make money from taking % of monetized/licensed content) and it's completely transparent. [0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19eccd3441a9 https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...
- KCUOJJQJ 7y ago
  All companies should make their rules clear or be fined. And if a company has unclear rules, is asked to explain these rules, and still doesn't explain them, the company should pay an enormous fine. After all, the company must be acting in bad faith if they don't explain their rules when asked.
- crescentfresh 7y ago
  This is the most concerning part. What do "regular" content creators (read: no legal team) do to remove these kinds of invalid copyright strikes?
  - undreren 7y ago
    They give up. Literally. A lot of content creators even joke about it during their videos. “Gotta hurry past this café so the music won’t get my video copyright striked, lol!”
notRobot 7y ago
> While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet. The copyright system on YouTube is broken and stuff like this allows rightsholders to abuse the DMCA and bully small creators. It's a shame. > Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed. It is so with all Google products. Your content will be taken down or account will be randomly locked or your apps will be removed and unless you have lots of "clout" and/or can build up an outrage about the incident on Twitter/HN, you're screwed.
joelg 7y ago
I think a lots of people end up having a reaction like "well they're trying their best! what else are they going to do!? it's basically an impossible problem!" to things like this and other recent youtube headlines. That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. And I think that assumption is dead wrong: we're bumping up on all kinds of emergent phenomenon (conspiracies, runaway recommendations) and issues (copyright, borderline child porn) that cannot be solved, and we shouldn't let Google give us their best-effort compromise. If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.
- aabhay 7y ago
  There’s an interesting meta-phenomenon here. I call it automation handcuffs. A platform grows massively due to radically eliminating the policy and bureaucracy infrastructure that others have (YouTube vs typical content distro channels). That same platform is now so big that it has to add back in that bureaucracy and policy that it lacked. However, it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people. In the end, society gets a half-measure. The platform is too big to legalize. The existing players are too small to compete. Users are forced to accept substandard experiences.
  - jay_kyburz 7y ago
    If government wasn't broken, users would have have the power to say we don't want these substandard things in our society.
    - xyzzyz 7y ago
      Users are very happy with YouTube experience, and are unlikely to support new regulations which would degrade it: in fact, they'd rather support opposite. It's the small content creators that aren't happy with YouTube quasi-copyright private regulatory regime, but they don't have political power to do actually do anything about.
blunte 7y ago
Once again, this illustrates how modern tech companies (primarily Google) are failing in terms of overall correctness of following or apply rules - apparently primarily because they choose not to employ enough humans in the process. In most of these cases of unreasonable takedowns or account closures, there is no way to reach a human to have the case reviewed reasonably. It seems to (almost?) always depend on somehow finding an employee, such as often happens when someone posts their story here on HN. I haven't read the annual report of Alphabet lately, but I can safely assume they are making enough profit that they could afford to make improvements in these systems (by employing more humans in key positions and by slowing or limiting the chances of automated processes reaching terminal decisions).
lizhang 7y ago
Could anyone comment on copyright infringement and sampling? I recall reading that using short snippets of songs in your own music is considered sampling, but doing so on Youtube would incur a copyright strike?
bavell 7y ago
There are many potential technical solutions to solving the problems of identifying copyright infringement and mediating the dispute between parties in a way that is fair to all involved. But why is the current system a dumpster fire? It seems Google/YT doesn't care because the companies sending out fraudulent disputes are many times the the same companies spending $$$ on ads. Without any real penalties for fraudulent claims (correct me if I'm wrong) they have every incentive to send out disputes by the truckload just to see what sticks. The only real damage done to Google/YT as a result of fraudulent disputes like these are to it's reputation of not being friendly to creators - a view I think is already firmly rooted. We desperately need alternatives but it's an uphill battle the whole way with huge barriers to entry...
- clarry 7y ago
  > But why is the current system a dumpster fire? Lack of incentive to care. They're too big, and what can the small user or uploader do except whine? It's always the same problem with massive power asymmetry.
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    And very strong incentive (ie lots of expensive lawsuits) to care in the other direction. Create the same incentive in the direction that you care about (maybe also with lawsuits) and maybe something will change.
- bostik 7y ago
  The solution is to go nuclear and enshrine adversarial balance in law. If a company, or an agent acting in their name, makes a fraudulent copyright claim, then have the wronged party name one item in the offending company's catalog that becomes public domain. Any contractual losses for entities who were benefiting from royalties in the said work are the offender's problem. Not only do the copyfraudsters lose a (possibly much more valuable) item from their catalog, they'd also have to compensate those whose incomes they have affected with their fraudulent acts. Align the incentives and make the stick painful enough. People being people will take care of the rest.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
You know the law is broken when even legal experts can't exercise their right to the fair use of copyrighted works for the purpose of educating others about copyright litigation.
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  Ah, but they did exercise those rights. Oh, it was expensive; too expensive for the average creator to have exercised those rights. I think that's the message: the cost of making sure you and your content are treated correctly.
  - stubish 7y ago
    I don't think they got to exercise their rights. They only succeeded by using private back channels, and they only succeeded in making the problem disappear. If they had been able to exercise their rights, they would be able to sue for costs. They demonstrated that the processes provided by Youtube to exercise their rights do not work, and for people not in the inner circle your only recourse would be to sue for damages.
ineedasername 7y ago
TLDR: You need to be a world-class legal research center in order to ensure IP rights holders don't squash your right to free speech by overly aggressive flagging of fair use material. And even then, it's an uphill battle.
raverbashing 7y ago
Another recent copyright abuse was this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 and this was even manually stricken. Basically this was a critique of aggressive copyright lawsuits that was manually copyright claimed... for the wrong song.
zadokshi 7y ago
The problem is the legislative framework in the US. The definition of fair use is not clear enough. You need to get together and amend the laws to make it much clearer what is fair use. If the law stated (for example) "a song playing in the background in a coffee shop for less than 10 seconds is fair use" then youtubers wouldn't be joking "Better hurry past this coffee shop so I don't get a copyright strike". Less whining about the problem and more work on a legally helpful definition of Fair use would help everyone. (Consider other countries which have clearer fair use policies where they clearly indicate "how many pages of a book can be copied" etc. This needs to be updated to include video, i.e. "How many seconds of a video can be shown/sampled" with no subjective test of "if deemed in the public interest, or newsworthy etc". Just a simple blanket rule. "People can clip up to 10 seconds of video" or something like that.
- joelg 7y ago
  A simpler definition of fair use would definitely make automation easier! But is the simpler definition one we actually want or intend? Lots of laws are complicated because they’re the product of years and years of iteratively modeling a problem with lots of feedback and edge cases accounted for - why should we prioritize Google’s ease-of-enforcement over _the thing we actually want to be the law_?
- robbrown451 7y ago
  I don't see that sort of thing working. Too much relevant gray area. For one thing, something that is playing in the background, where it doesn't sound good as music and where there is talking over it, isn't the same as having music edited in with good quality. Using 10 seconds of a song, in high quality, for your opening title sequence is probably a lot more of an infringement than having 30 seconds of dialog, where there happened to be music from someone's car radio faintly audible in the background. I'm not arguing for the status quo (I think it is very broken), but I don't think such simplistic solutions would actually work.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Even with a clear definition, private entities don't have to honor fair use privileges. Their server, their rules.
partiallypro 7y ago
Slightly off topic...but I recently had a Facebook page removed from Facebook for copyright violations. Though I had an agreement with the copyright holder to use their content/logo, etc. I reached out to that copyright holder...and they didn't file the complaint. So I made an appeal to Facebook, with the paperwork showing I had an agreement (in this case with a German soccer club) to use their logo, etc and they (Facebook) didn't even reply to me at all. Incredibly frustrating experience. I've reached out multiple times, through the appeal process, and through emails. No one even cares, and worse I created a new page similar to that page...and Facebook unpublished it. So, now I am stuck in limbo or can likely never have that page back or similar pages...all because Facebook is black hole and doesn't care even slightly. I get that they have billions of users, but so do a lot of companies, and they will at least reach back out to you and give you a status...even if the answer is "too bad." This happened almost 3 weeks ago now. Nothing. BTW, the page is non-commercial and doesn't profit from anything.
- sleepytimetea 7y ago
  Thats not off topic, in fact it actually helps add depth to the original post that this is an automation problem common to Google and Facebook and potentially other mega cash-generating corporations who would rather err on the side of the copyright holders than risk getting themselves sued for not being strong enough with their automated protection.
- miohtama 7y ago
  Sounds like the EU bureaucrats should sharpen their knives again, otherwise there is no justice for the little guy.
  - sampo 7y ago
    > Sounds like the EU bureaucrats should sharpen their knives again, otherwise there is no justice for the little guy. Au contraire, the EU is demanding automatic copyright filters (also known as censorship machines). Don't mistake EU doing one good thing – GDPR – for EU always taking the side of the little guy. https://edri.org/censorship-machine-takes-over-eu-internet/ https://edri.org/censorship-machine-takes-over-eu-internet/
kensai 7y ago
This unfortunately is not the case for most poor users. No such muscle and resources. “This would have been a dead end for most users. Unable to understand how the already opaque dispute resolution process might impact the status of their account, they would have to decide if it was worth gambling their entire YouTube account on the chances that their some combination of YouTube and the rightsholder would recognize their fair use claim. Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.“
rickety-gherkin 7y ago
A couple things I'm confused about here. Was NYU monetizing this video? Is that where the grounds for dispute are? If that's true, would demonetizing the video clear out the disputes? Even though this clearly falls under fair use, it's still something that was unclear to me. I'm surprised there's not a serious case against Youtube/Google for denying people the right to Fair Use. Is this because people don't have to use Youtube? Is this in the Youtube contract somewhere? Is it because Fair Use doesn't work like that? If you provide a platform like Youtube for people to use, are you not held legally responsible for protecting Fair Use laws the same way you'd be held liable for copyright infringement if you didn't give corporations/people the ability to dispute? If Youtube allowed all videos to exist regardless of copyright infringement, and didn't lay out any paths for claims, would they be in legal trouble? Is this not the same as automatically removing obvious Fair Use content?
- deckar01 7y ago
  A copyright violation does not just remove your right to monetize the content, it also removes your right to determine if the content is monetized. The copyright holders who claimed infringement can decide to allow the content and force it to be monetized for their profit.
  - lathiat 7y ago
    It's worth noting that while this is the most common mechanism employed by youtube.. it is possible with the same system to just remove the right to have the video (or at least that segment) published at all. But the general business youtube has pursued, which in fairness, is partly to make it possible for people to publish videos with such works in the first place, is that most copyright holders will allow the work to be use but instead the entire video (regardless of how significant that small copyright portion was) is monetized to the 100% benefit of the copyright holder. There are some plusses to this, in that it's easy (and free) to actually publish a video containing copyrighted works. And that in general by working with all the publishers to do this, it has in theory prevented them from chasing YouTube harder to disallow any such content. The downside is the entire system is one sided and the review and oversight process is clearly lacking. I could understand a little how this happens with small channels... but I frequently see channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who are typically full time youtubers) and sometimes even millions.. get the same lack of oversight to their claims. To me it's crazy that the "3 strikes" rule applies just as equally to accidental and incorrect violations on an otherwise very active and largely original channel (that posts 1 video a day making it very easy to accidentally or incorrectly get recognised as having a violation) as it does to a 1 video channel with no subscribers that is actually violating copyright. It boggles the mind that there is no scale applied. And time and time again I witness channels I watch have this same process of having to somehow reach out to someone at youtube by yelling on twitter or hacker news and then problems just "go away". Even those with millions of subscribers that have internal youtube partner managers.. often those channels still can't solve these problems. It's madness.
korethr 7y ago
If current copyright laws and the processes built around enforcing them prevent educating people about those laws and processes, then, IMO, said laws have become overgrown, and need to be cut back.
thirteenfingers 7y ago
Classical pianist here. I've been through youtube's broken copyright enforcement system several times. I'll post a video of myself performing some composition that is in the public domain and it'll get "identified" as a copyrighted recording by someone else. Of course youtube doesn't give you an option for "mistaken claim", you have to choose between "this content is entirely my work" (which isn't quite true in my case, since I didn't write the music) or "this video counts as fair use". I typically select "this video counts as fair use" because it's the least untrue of the available options. Nineteen times out of twenty the claim disappears immediately. (I don't even monetize my videos. I just don't want ads on my videos at all, and I especially don't want ads on my videos if the revenue is going to some completely unrelated party.) There was, however, one time when I had to deal with an escalated claim. The piece in question was the slow movement of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. The Symphony has long been in the public domain. However, the slow movement was adapted into the song "Goin' Home", which is still under copyright, and there is a long-standing myth that the song was the inspiration for the Symphony rather than the other way around. Thus when I challenged the copyright claim on my New World video, the claimant came back and insisted their claim (on "Goin' Home") was valid. This notice was of course accompanied by the scary warnings about how if I persisted it could count as a strike against my youtube account. I called their bluff. I responded with links to every online source I could find showing that Dvorak's work came first and was in the public domain. I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels. Happily, they ended up releasing the claim - days before their claim would have expired anyway - with no elaboration. I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who stuck it through the scary youtube warnings and what the outcome was. [EDIT: thanks for the clarifications on "own content" and "fair use". I never thought of it that way, but now it seems obvious.]
- dublinben 7y ago
  You may also like to know that the composition of Goin' Home is now in the public domain as well, being published in 1922. https://imslp.org/wiki/Goin%27_Home_(Fisher,_William_Arms) https://imslp.org/wiki/Goin%27_Home_(Fisher,_William_Arms)
- true_religion 7y ago
  Actually a performance piece of a public domain work counts as its own copyrighted work. So the least true option would be claiming that the song is your work.
MikeGale 7y ago
Why isn't there a successful distributed alternative to YouTube and the like?
- krapp 7y ago
  They solve problems that the mainstream doesn't care about, are more complicated to use than Youtube, and hosted alternatives to Youtube already exist.
grecy 7y ago
There is a monetized YouTube video with thousands of views made entirely of my hi-res photos and the captions I wrote on those photos. I've tried to file a takedown request, and the process is so onerous, and they require all kinds of proof they're my photos I've never been able to actually complete it. <sigh>
- SpelingBeeChamp 7y ago
  That is not true. They have to honor a proper takedown request, which does not have to include any explanation of why you feel your takedown request is valid, Elise they risk their safe harbor. I don’t know what you tried to do, but it wasn’t ‘file a DMCA takedown request’.
xster 7y ago
Adam Neely (YouTube music educator) had an absolutely farcical run-in with this situation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8) where he made a video defending Warner Music and Katy Perry's Dark Horse against Flame's Joyful Noise plagiarism suit. He lost the claim from Warner Music even though: 1- he was defending Warner Music 2- he didn't play any recordings, he just played 3 notes on a synthesizer (which is his whole premise that it's un-copyrightable) 3- Warner Music lost the actual suit (which implies they don't have copyright on those 3 notes?) 4- someone at Warner Music manually tagged the "infringing" part of the video, except the person tagged not the Dark Horse part of the play through but the Joyful Noise part of the play through (*^∀^)ノ彡┻━┻ changelog: improved ascii art
- RandomTisk 7y ago
  It's pretty simple, Alphabet/Google make it far too easy for mistaken, false or frivolous claims. It's obvious why, usually the claimant has the heavy bags of money to use as a bludgeon, but it's not right.
  - jonathanstrange 7y ago
    IANAL but it seems to me Alphabet/Google can get in serious legal trouble for it if they continue the system. There are a number of companies who massively submit false copyright claims and YouTube let's them do their business, even though it's easy to check in particular cases that the claims are false. These bogus companies get at least part of the monetization from videos they falsely claim. Doesn't that mean that Youtube is knowingly facilitating fraud and in some cases - when legitimate content is taken over - even commercial copyright infringement? It seems to me that the only reason why Youtube has gotten away with it so far is that nobody has systematically collected the evidence and sued Youtube in a country like Germany, for instance. Edit: On a second thought, fraud seems irrelevant. It's about commercial copyright infringement.
  - mcv 7y ago
    There really needs to be a class action suit about this. Google allows Big Content to claim other people's content. Instead of fighting copyright violations, they assist in copyright violations on a massive scale, and deprive artists of income from their content.
norswap 7y ago
The situation is now so silly that some people are circumventing the system by copyright claiming their own videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo This enable them to at least get some of the revenue of their video (by sharing with other (often bogus) claimants), and to monetize re-uploads (something normally available only to big channels). Why Google doesn't do anything about this mess is beyond me.
chx 7y ago
The situation is all the more interesting because these are not DMCA claims. This is an internal YouTube system and you have zero neutral avenues to fight it.
user9429450 7y ago
I'm a hobbyist musician. I put some of my work on SoundCloud and license it CC no-commercial. A fan made a video to my work using public domain footage of various DNA processes. It happens to resemble the background of an old Bjork video. It was auto-striked as containing content belonging to her label due to the similarities in the video content. In reality they are violating MY copyright if the video happened to ever generate any revenue. I made an account just to post this. It's a sad situation.
- gnopgnip 7y ago
  Generating revenue alone does not make it commercial use in the context of copyright
  - user9429450 7y ago
    Correct, perhaps that is arguable, especially given the grey area this is all taking place in. I was speaking to the reality that if you're a popular YouTuber, and your content gets striked in this way, all revenues from that video go to them instead of you. This is especially terrible for music related content creators, fair use essentially does not exist for them.
masswerk 7y ago
A point could be made, given that a false claim is a vioalation of the DMCA, that an automatic system must recognize fair use context, erring in favor of the accused. If it fails to do so, it's not ready for production.* (A possible salvation by the party inflicting the harm onto the falsely accused by allowing a disfunctional system to raise these claims, may be providing funds required for taking the case to court. Else, the entire situation is essentially disproportionate, since, to all probability, the accused party may lack the means to rectify the situation.) * ) Read: I know, detecting this kind of context is prohibitively complex and probably not in the practical scope of the state of the art. Meaning, the technology is not ready for production.
moron4hire 7y ago
YouTube has a feature where you can add a soundtrack to a video from a list of free-to-use songs. These are supposed to be songs that are in the clear. I got a copyright infringement strike on my account from it.
- SpelingBeeChamp 7y ago
  Proof?
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    You're either going to have to take what I say for what it is, or call me a liar to my face.
bane 7y ago
The correct answer of course is for a mass protest where a great many people flag Google's own content as violating copyright...and keep doing it month after month after month until this nonsense ends. Here's the channel, get to flagging. https://www.youtube.com/user/Google https://www.youtube.com/user/Google
mullingitover 7y ago
Fun fact: Youtube's revenue in 2019[1] was just slightly less than the combined revenue of all box office ticket sales[2] for the same year. They should be under severe antitrust scrutiny. [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/alphabet-youtube-ad-revenue-first-time-15-billion-2019-1203491155/ https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/alphabet-youtube-ad-re... [2] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/ https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/
ehnto 7y ago
That was disappointing, I was expecting more insights into the law and YouTube's system, rather than someone at YouTube thought it pertinent not to help scam NYU Law school.
29athrowaway 7y ago
If you upload a white noise video you will get many random copyright claims.
lemax 7y ago
The automated copyright filter isn't going to pass revenue onto the artists YouTube and the rights holding giants want to claim that it will. This is a system that Youtube essentially poured $100M into building to keep the big licensors on its side (and avoid any surprise bills from them) and, with Article 13 in the EU under proposal, ensure any new entrants struggle to meet the technical demands and costs of more misguided regulation. Of course, Youtube would prefer to avoid the burden of this sort of moderation altogether, but it will be convenient when it costs around 9 figures to build anything close to what they have just to avoid the copyright regulation landmines. Pricing power will be further concentrated among the few big platforms and the share going to creators will continue to dwindle.
- garaetjjte 7y ago
  >with Article 13 in the EU under proposal It is not under proposal, it already passed :( (member states have 2 years to implement it in local regulations)
- doh 7y ago
  Well, not really. For instance our Attribution Engine [0], which is much more advanced than YouTube's Content ID is free to all rightsholders and platforms. We make money from taking % from all licensed content, but that also means both platforms and rightsholders generated revenue in the first place. [0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19eccd3441a9 https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...
xg15 7y ago
> After reviewing your dispute, IMG has decided their copyright claim is still valid (response to a dispute) > The claimant can request that your video be removed ... if they believe their claim is still valid (response to an appeal) Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims? This seems like a court in which the plaintiff is also the judge. How can this possibly work? If I were a troll and just wanted to make life for people needlessly hard, could I submit claims for random videos and simply reject all disputes and appeals - and if someone tried to sue me, say I was just playing by the Content ID rules and didn't invoke actual copyright law at all? What would happen?
- rurounijones 7y ago
  > Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims? From a very cynical perspective: Not really, it makes perfect sense as it is the cheapest option that also empowers the people who can make youtube's life a misery. (The big corporations that file these claims). Hiring third party people to decide these or whatever mechanism you can think of would be more expensive for youtube than what they have now.
- Yizahi 7y ago
  Then Google will ban you. And by "you" Google means a person, not and email account. So they will carpet bomb all your accounts what they think may belong to you, across all their services. Some people even report bans of work accounts where fallback linked emails were personal account which was the source of the ban.
jMyles 7y ago
Why hasn't anyone just started a YouTube competitor in a jurisdiction with no copyright law whatsoever? It seems like such jurisdictions can quickly become havens for innovation.
- jwilk 7y ago
  What are those jurisdictions?
  - jMyles 7y ago
    I don't know - do none exist? If not, why not? Can't some small state gain a huge advantage by adopting an IP-free legal framework?

653 points by pulisse 7y ago

Reading through the article the appeal process was shown to be highly fuzzy and uncertain even for a group of highly trained legal experts. This Kafkaesque situation is similar to the way the legal process works inside a totalitarian state like China, where the citizen caught in a sticky legal situation, could not use the appeal and defence mechanisms, because nobody knows what is the actual mechanism. And similarly the Youtube user has no natural rights or protection, even if the entire misconduct lies with the Youtube copyright strike process. It is times like this that I start to agree with the way governments have begun to scrutinize Facebook and Google. Clearly they do have a responsibility beyond a commercial term of service, to provide not just a utility but also to ensure that some degree of fair play, truthfulness, and consistency is applied.

greendestiny_re 7y ago

YouPorn is a great Youtube alternative.

annadane 7y ago

But I thought all that was required is a cartoon video explaining copyright to YT's users because they're just stupid and don't understand?!

jhallenworld 7y ago

I remember when Youtube was created, and then bought by Google I thought how can these people make so much money on what is basically a file server. But this right here is it- they did not solve any kind of technical problem, they solved a legal one. The automated copyright system is the main value add of Youtube, do not doubt it. It allows Youtube to make more ad revenue than it loses from lawsuits or from having to hire an army of people to deal with copyright claims.

type0 7y ago

And, in the end NYU Law don't learn their lesson, at the very least they could've pointed their visitors to watch said videos somewhere else and not on yt. So long yt doesn't loose users this will just continue and likely will get much worse.

justlexi93 7y ago

And this is why humans can’t and won’t ever have anything nice

ikeboy 7y ago

>We discovered that if we continued to challenge the accusation of infringement and lost, our video would be subject to copyright strikes. If the account was subject to multiple strikes its ability to live stream could be restricted or the account could be terminated. While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet. To be clear, if you dispute and counternotice everything, then the only way this would happen is if the other side actually sues you, which is incredibly unlikely here.

crescentfresh 7y ago
That's not how I read that. "lost" in this context simply means the so-called copyright holder clicks the button that says "nah, still can't use my stuff" that's considered a strike.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  Right. The DMCA takedown process is more reasonable in this regard: if you post a counter-notice, the service provider puts your content back up and the party trying to make a copyright claim has to sue you. YouTube, on the other hand, makes purported copyright holders the absolute judge of their own cases.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    This is incorrect. If a rights owner refuses to retract in the face of a dispute, YouTube will require them to convert it into a DMCA notice and will then honor any counternotice.
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      I've seen multiple reports from channel owners who have not been given any such option; the message saying that the supposed "rights owner" has confirmed the dispute is presented as "final" (along with the copyright strike). Unless this has changed recently, or there's some obscure link to switch to the DMCA process?

css 7y ago

The "solution" they arrived at boggles my mind: > We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed. We need competition in this space.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
It's going to be hard to get competition in a space that is unprofitable and requires huge infrastructure investment.
doh 7y ago
Agree. That's why we built our Attribution Engine [0]. It's much more advanced that YouTube's Content ID, it's free to all rightsholder, creators and platforms (we make money from taking % of monetized/licensed content) and it's completely transparent. [0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19eccd3441a9 https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...
KCUOJJQJ 7y ago
All companies should make their rules clear or be fined. And if a company has unclear rules, is asked to explain these rules, and still doesn't explain them, the company should pay an enormous fine. After all, the company must be acting in bad faith if they don't explain their rules when asked.
crescentfresh 7y ago
This is the most concerning part. What do "regular" content creators (read: no legal team) do to remove these kinds of invalid copyright strikes?
- undreren 7y ago
  They give up. Literally. A lot of content creators even joke about it during their videos. “Gotta hurry past this café so the music won’t get my video copyright striked, lol!”

notRobot 7y ago

> While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet. The copyright system on YouTube is broken and stuff like this allows rightsholders to abuse the DMCA and bully small creators. It's a shame. > Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed. It is so with all Google products. Your content will be taken down or account will be randomly locked or your apps will be removed and unless you have lots of "clout" and/or can build up an outrage about the incident on Twitter/HN, you're screwed.

joelg 7y ago

I think a lots of people end up having a reaction like "well they're trying their best! what else are they going to do!? it's basically an impossible problem!" to things like this and other recent youtube headlines. That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. And I think that assumption is dead wrong: we're bumping up on all kinds of emergent phenomenon (conspiracies, runaway recommendations) and issues (copyright, borderline child porn) that cannot be solved, and we shouldn't let Google give us their best-effort compromise. If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.

aabhay 7y ago
There’s an interesting meta-phenomenon here. I call it automation handcuffs. A platform grows massively due to radically eliminating the policy and bureaucracy infrastructure that others have (YouTube vs typical content distro channels). That same platform is now so big that it has to add back in that bureaucracy and policy that it lacked. However, it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people. In the end, society gets a half-measure. The platform is too big to legalize. The existing players are too small to compete. Users are forced to accept substandard experiences.
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  If government wasn't broken, users would have have the power to say we don't want these substandard things in our society.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Users are very happy with YouTube experience, and are unlikely to support new regulations which would degrade it: in fact, they'd rather support opposite. It's the small content creators that aren't happy with YouTube quasi-copyright private regulatory regime, but they don't have political power to do actually do anything about.

blunte 7y ago

Once again, this illustrates how modern tech companies (primarily Google) are failing in terms of overall correctness of following or apply rules - apparently primarily because they choose not to employ enough humans in the process. In most of these cases of unreasonable takedowns or account closures, there is no way to reach a human to have the case reviewed reasonably. It seems to (almost?) always depend on somehow finding an employee, such as often happens when someone posts their story here on HN. I haven't read the annual report of Alphabet lately, but I can safely assume they are making enough profit that they could afford to make improvements in these systems (by employing more humans in key positions and by slowing or limiting the chances of automated processes reaching terminal decisions).

lizhang 7y ago

Could anyone comment on copyright infringement and sampling? I recall reading that using short snippets of songs in your own music is considered sampling, but doing so on Youtube would incur a copyright strike?

bavell 7y ago

There are many potential technical solutions to solving the problems of identifying copyright infringement and mediating the dispute between parties in a way that is fair to all involved. But why is the current system a dumpster fire? It seems Google/YT doesn't care because the companies sending out fraudulent disputes are many times the the same companies spending $$$ on ads. Without any real penalties for fraudulent claims (correct me if I'm wrong) they have every incentive to send out disputes by the truckload just to see what sticks. The only real damage done to Google/YT as a result of fraudulent disputes like these are to it's reputation of not being friendly to creators - a view I think is already firmly rooted. We desperately need alternatives but it's an uphill battle the whole way with huge barriers to entry...

clarry 7y ago
> But why is the current system a dumpster fire? Lack of incentive to care. They're too big, and what can the small user or uploader do except whine? It's always the same problem with massive power asymmetry.
- d1zzy 7y ago
  And very strong incentive (ie lots of expensive lawsuits) to care in the other direction. Create the same incentive in the direction that you care about (maybe also with lawsuits) and maybe something will change.
bostik 7y ago
The solution is to go nuclear and enshrine adversarial balance in law. If a company, or an agent acting in their name, makes a fraudulent copyright claim, then have the wronged party name one item in the offending company's catalog that becomes public domain. Any contractual losses for entities who were benefiting from royalties in the said work are the offender's problem. Not only do the copyfraudsters lose a (possibly much more valuable) item from their catalog, they'd also have to compensate those whose incomes they have affected with their fraudulent acts. Align the incentives and make the stick painful enough. People being people will take care of the rest.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

You know the law is broken when even legal experts can't exercise their right to the fair use of copyrighted works for the purpose of educating others about copyright litigation.

jagged-chisel 7y ago
Ah, but they did exercise those rights. Oh, it was expensive; too expensive for the average creator to have exercised those rights. I think that's the message: the cost of making sure you and your content are treated correctly.
- stubish 7y ago
  I don't think they got to exercise their rights. They only succeeded by using private back channels, and they only succeeded in making the problem disappear. If they had been able to exercise their rights, they would be able to sue for costs. They demonstrated that the processes provided by Youtube to exercise their rights do not work, and for people not in the inner circle your only recourse would be to sue for damages.

ineedasername 7y ago

TLDR: You need to be a world-class legal research center in order to ensure IP rights holders don't squash your right to free speech by overly aggressive flagging of fair use material. And even then, it's an uphill battle.

raverbashing 7y ago

Another recent copyright abuse was this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 and this was even manually stricken. Basically this was a critique of aggressive copyright lawsuits that was manually copyright claimed... for the wrong song.

zadokshi 7y ago

The problem is the legislative framework in the US. The definition of fair use is not clear enough. You need to get together and amend the laws to make it much clearer what is fair use. If the law stated (for example) "a song playing in the background in a coffee shop for less than 10 seconds is fair use" then youtubers wouldn't be joking "Better hurry past this coffee shop so I don't get a copyright strike". Less whining about the problem and more work on a legally helpful definition of Fair use would help everyone. (Consider other countries which have clearer fair use policies where they clearly indicate "how many pages of a book can be copied" etc. This needs to be updated to include video, i.e. "How many seconds of a video can be shown/sampled" with no subjective test of "if deemed in the public interest, or newsworthy etc". Just a simple blanket rule. "People can clip up to 10 seconds of video" or something like that.

joelg 7y ago
A simpler definition of fair use would definitely make automation easier! But is the simpler definition one we actually want or intend? Lots of laws are complicated because they’re the product of years and years of iteratively modeling a problem with lots of feedback and edge cases accounted for - why should we prioritize Google’s ease-of-enforcement over _the thing we actually want to be the law_?
robbrown451 7y ago
I don't see that sort of thing working. Too much relevant gray area. For one thing, something that is playing in the background, where it doesn't sound good as music and where there is talking over it, isn't the same as having music edited in with good quality. Using 10 seconds of a song, in high quality, for your opening title sequence is probably a lot more of an infringement than having 30 seconds of dialog, where there happened to be music from someone's car radio faintly audible in the background. I'm not arguing for the status quo (I think it is very broken), but I don't think such simplistic solutions would actually work.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Even with a clear definition, private entities don't have to honor fair use privileges. Their server, their rules.

partiallypro 7y ago

Slightly off topic...but I recently had a Facebook page removed from Facebook for copyright violations. Though I had an agreement with the copyright holder to use their content/logo, etc. I reached out to that copyright holder...and they didn't file the complaint. So I made an appeal to Facebook, with the paperwork showing I had an agreement (in this case with a German soccer club) to use their logo, etc and they (Facebook) didn't even reply to me at all. Incredibly frustrating experience. I've reached out multiple times, through the appeal process, and through emails. No one even cares, and worse I created a new page similar to that page...and Facebook unpublished it. So, now I am stuck in limbo or can likely never have that page back or similar pages...all because Facebook is black hole and doesn't care even slightly. I get that they have billions of users, but so do a lot of companies, and they will at least reach back out to you and give you a status...even if the answer is "too bad." This happened almost 3 weeks ago now. Nothing. BTW, the page is non-commercial and doesn't profit from anything.

sleepytimetea 7y ago
Thats not off topic, in fact it actually helps add depth to the original post that this is an automation problem common to Google and Facebook and potentially other mega cash-generating corporations who would rather err on the side of the copyright holders than risk getting themselves sued for not being strong enough with their automated protection.
miohtama 7y ago
Sounds like the EU bureaucrats should sharpen their knives again, otherwise there is no justice for the little guy.
- sampo 7y ago
  > Sounds like the EU bureaucrats should sharpen their knives again, otherwise there is no justice for the little guy. Au contraire, the EU is demanding automatic copyright filters (also known as censorship machines). Don't mistake EU doing one good thing – GDPR – for EU always taking the side of the little guy. https://edri.org/censorship-machine-takes-over-eu-internet/ https://edri.org/censorship-machine-takes-over-eu-internet/

kensai 7y ago

This unfortunately is not the case for most poor users. No such muscle and resources. “This would have been a dead end for most users. Unable to understand how the already opaque dispute resolution process might impact the status of their account, they would have to decide if it was worth gambling their entire YouTube account on the chances that their some combination of YouTube and the rightsholder would recognize their fair use claim. Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.“

rickety-gherkin 7y ago

A couple things I'm confused about here. Was NYU monetizing this video? Is that where the grounds for dispute are? If that's true, would demonetizing the video clear out the disputes? Even though this clearly falls under fair use, it's still something that was unclear to me. I'm surprised there's not a serious case against Youtube/Google for denying people the right to Fair Use. Is this because people don't have to use Youtube? Is this in the Youtube contract somewhere? Is it because Fair Use doesn't work like that? If you provide a platform like Youtube for people to use, are you not held legally responsible for protecting Fair Use laws the same way you'd be held liable for copyright infringement if you didn't give corporations/people the ability to dispute? If Youtube allowed all videos to exist regardless of copyright infringement, and didn't lay out any paths for claims, would they be in legal trouble? Is this not the same as automatically removing obvious Fair Use content?

deckar01 7y ago
A copyright violation does not just remove your right to monetize the content, it also removes your right to determine if the content is monetized. The copyright holders who claimed infringement can decide to allow the content and force it to be monetized for their profit.
- lathiat 7y ago
  It's worth noting that while this is the most common mechanism employed by youtube.. it is possible with the same system to just remove the right to have the video (or at least that segment) published at all. But the general business youtube has pursued, which in fairness, is partly to make it possible for people to publish videos with such works in the first place, is that most copyright holders will allow the work to be use but instead the entire video (regardless of how significant that small copyright portion was) is monetized to the 100% benefit of the copyright holder. There are some plusses to this, in that it's easy (and free) to actually publish a video containing copyrighted works. And that in general by working with all the publishers to do this, it has in theory prevented them from chasing YouTube harder to disallow any such content. The downside is the entire system is one sided and the review and oversight process is clearly lacking. I could understand a little how this happens with small channels... but I frequently see channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who are typically full time youtubers) and sometimes even millions.. get the same lack of oversight to their claims. To me it's crazy that the "3 strikes" rule applies just as equally to accidental and incorrect violations on an otherwise very active and largely original channel (that posts 1 video a day making it very easy to accidentally or incorrectly get recognised as having a violation) as it does to a 1 video channel with no subscribers that is actually violating copyright. It boggles the mind that there is no scale applied. And time and time again I witness channels I watch have this same process of having to somehow reach out to someone at youtube by yelling on twitter or hacker news and then problems just "go away". Even those with millions of subscribers that have internal youtube partner managers.. often those channels still can't solve these problems. It's madness.

korethr 7y ago

If current copyright laws and the processes built around enforcing them prevent educating people about those laws and processes, then, IMO, said laws have become overgrown, and need to be cut back.

thirteenfingers 7y ago

Classical pianist here. I've been through youtube's broken copyright enforcement system several times. I'll post a video of myself performing some composition that is in the public domain and it'll get "identified" as a copyrighted recording by someone else. Of course youtube doesn't give you an option for "mistaken claim", you have to choose between "this content is entirely my work" (which isn't quite true in my case, since I didn't write the music) or "this video counts as fair use". I typically select "this video counts as fair use" because it's the least untrue of the available options. Nineteen times out of twenty the claim disappears immediately. (I don't even monetize my videos. I just don't want ads on my videos at all, and I especially don't want ads on my videos if the revenue is going to some completely unrelated party.) There was, however, one time when I had to deal with an escalated claim. The piece in question was the slow movement of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. The Symphony has long been in the public domain. However, the slow movement was adapted into the song "Goin' Home", which is still under copyright, and there is a long-standing myth that the song was the inspiration for the Symphony rather than the other way around. Thus when I challenged the copyright claim on my New World video, the claimant came back and insisted their claim (on "Goin' Home") was valid. This notice was of course accompanied by the scary warnings about how if I persisted it could count as a strike against my youtube account. I called their bluff. I responded with links to every online source I could find showing that Dvorak's work came first and was in the public domain. I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels. Happily, they ended up releasing the claim - days before their claim would have expired anyway - with no elaboration. I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who stuck it through the scary youtube warnings and what the outcome was. [EDIT: thanks for the clarifications on "own content" and "fair use". I never thought of it that way, but now it seems obvious.]

dublinben 7y ago
You may also like to know that the composition of Goin' Home is now in the public domain as well, being published in 1922. https://imslp.org/wiki/Goin%27_Home_(Fisher,_William_Arms) https://imslp.org/wiki/Goin%27_Home_(Fisher,_William_Arms)
true_religion 7y ago
Actually a performance piece of a public domain work counts as its own copyrighted work. So the least true option would be claiming that the song is your work.

MikeGale 7y ago

Why isn't there a successful distributed alternative to YouTube and the like?

krapp 7y ago
They solve problems that the mainstream doesn't care about, are more complicated to use than Youtube, and hosted alternatives to Youtube already exist.

grecy 7y ago

There is a monetized YouTube video with thousands of views made entirely of my hi-res photos and the captions I wrote on those photos. I've tried to file a takedown request, and the process is so onerous, and they require all kinds of proof they're my photos I've never been able to actually complete it. <sigh>

SpelingBeeChamp 7y ago
That is not true. They have to honor a proper takedown request, which does not have to include any explanation of why you feel your takedown request is valid, Elise they risk their safe harbor. I don’t know what you tried to do, but it wasn’t ‘file a DMCA takedown request’.

xster 7y ago

Adam Neely (YouTube music educator) had an absolutely farcical run-in with this situation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8) where he made a video defending Warner Music and Katy Perry's Dark Horse against Flame's Joyful Noise plagiarism suit. He lost the claim from Warner Music even though: 1- he was defending Warner Music 2- he didn't play any recordings, he just played 3 notes on a synthesizer (which is his whole premise that it's un-copyrightable) 3- Warner Music lost the actual suit (which implies they don't have copyright on those 3 notes?) 4- someone at Warner Music manually tagged the "infringing" part of the video, except the person tagged not the Dark Horse part of the play through but the Joyful Noise part of the play through (*^∀^)ノ彡┻━┻ changelog: improved ascii art

RandomTisk 7y ago
It's pretty simple, Alphabet/Google make it far too easy for mistaken, false or frivolous claims. It's obvious why, usually the claimant has the heavy bags of money to use as a bludgeon, but it's not right.
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  IANAL but it seems to me Alphabet/Google can get in serious legal trouble for it if they continue the system. There are a number of companies who massively submit false copyright claims and YouTube let's them do their business, even though it's easy to check in particular cases that the claims are false. These bogus companies get at least part of the monetization from videos they falsely claim. Doesn't that mean that Youtube is knowingly facilitating fraud and in some cases - when legitimate content is taken over - even commercial copyright infringement? It seems to me that the only reason why Youtube has gotten away with it so far is that nobody has systematically collected the evidence and sued Youtube in a country like Germany, for instance. Edit: On a second thought, fraud seems irrelevant. It's about commercial copyright infringement.
- mcv 7y ago
  There really needs to be a class action suit about this. Google allows Big Content to claim other people's content. Instead of fighting copyright violations, they assist in copyright violations on a massive scale, and deprive artists of income from their content.

norswap 7y ago

The situation is now so silly that some people are circumventing the system by copyright claiming their own videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo This enable them to at least get some of the revenue of their video (by sharing with other (often bogus) claimants), and to monetize re-uploads (something normally available only to big channels). Why Google doesn't do anything about this mess is beyond me.

chx 7y ago

The situation is all the more interesting because these are not DMCA claims. This is an internal YouTube system and you have zero neutral avenues to fight it.

user9429450 7y ago

I'm a hobbyist musician. I put some of my work on SoundCloud and license it CC no-commercial. A fan made a video to my work using public domain footage of various DNA processes. It happens to resemble the background of an old Bjork video. It was auto-striked as containing content belonging to her label due to the similarities in the video content. In reality they are violating MY copyright if the video happened to ever generate any revenue. I made an account just to post this. It's a sad situation.

gnopgnip 7y ago
Generating revenue alone does not make it commercial use in the context of copyright
- user9429450 7y ago
  Correct, perhaps that is arguable, especially given the grey area this is all taking place in. I was speaking to the reality that if you're a popular YouTuber, and your content gets striked in this way, all revenues from that video go to them instead of you. This is especially terrible for music related content creators, fair use essentially does not exist for them.

masswerk 7y ago

A point could be made, given that a false claim is a vioalation of the DMCA, that an automatic system must recognize fair use context, erring in favor of the accused. If it fails to do so, it's not ready for production.* (A possible salvation by the party inflicting the harm onto the falsely accused by allowing a disfunctional system to raise these claims, may be providing funds required for taking the case to court. Else, the entire situation is essentially disproportionate, since, to all probability, the accused party may lack the means to rectify the situation.) * ) Read: I know, detecting this kind of context is prohibitively complex and probably not in the practical scope of the state of the art. Meaning, the technology is not ready for production.

moron4hire 7y ago

YouTube has a feature where you can add a soundtrack to a video from a list of free-to-use songs. These are supposed to be songs that are in the clear. I got a copyright infringement strike on my account from it.

SpelingBeeChamp 7y ago
Proof?
- moron4hire 7y ago
  You're either going to have to take what I say for what it is, or call me a liar to my face.

bane 7y ago

The correct answer of course is for a mass protest where a great many people flag Google's own content as violating copyright...and keep doing it month after month after month until this nonsense ends. Here's the channel, get to flagging. https://www.youtube.com/user/Google https://www.youtube.com/user/Google

mullingitover 7y ago

Fun fact: Youtube's revenue in 2019[1] was just slightly less than the combined revenue of all box office ticket sales[2] for the same year. They should be under severe antitrust scrutiny. [1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/alphabet-youtube-ad-revenue-first-time-15-billion-2019-1203491155/ https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/alphabet-youtube-ad-re... [2] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/ https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/

ehnto 7y ago

That was disappointing, I was expecting more insights into the law and YouTube's system, rather than someone at YouTube thought it pertinent not to help scam NYU Law school.

29athrowaway 7y ago

If you upload a white noise video you will get many random copyright claims.

lemax 7y ago

The automated copyright filter isn't going to pass revenue onto the artists YouTube and the rights holding giants want to claim that it will. This is a system that Youtube essentially poured $100M into building to keep the big licensors on its side (and avoid any surprise bills from them) and, with Article 13 in the EU under proposal, ensure any new entrants struggle to meet the technical demands and costs of more misguided regulation. Of course, Youtube would prefer to avoid the burden of this sort of moderation altogether, but it will be convenient when it costs around 9 figures to build anything close to what they have just to avoid the copyright regulation landmines. Pricing power will be further concentrated among the few big platforms and the share going to creators will continue to dwindle.

garaetjjte 7y ago
>with Article 13 in the EU under proposal It is not under proposal, it already passed :( (member states have 2 years to implement it in local regulations)
doh 7y ago
Well, not really. For instance our Attribution Engine [0], which is much more advanced than YouTube's Content ID is free to all rightsholders and platforms. We make money from taking % from all licensed content, but that also means both platforms and rightsholders generated revenue in the first place. [0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19eccd3441a9 https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...

xg15 7y ago

> After reviewing your dispute, IMG has decided their copyright claim is still valid (response to a dispute) > The claimant can request that your video be removed ... if they believe their claim is still valid (response to an appeal) Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims? This seems like a court in which the plaintiff is also the judge. How can this possibly work? If I were a troll and just wanted to make life for people needlessly hard, could I submit claims for random videos and simply reject all disputes and appeals - and if someone tried to sue me, say I was just playing by the Content ID rules and didn't invoke actual copyright law at all? What would happen?

rurounijones 7y ago
> Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims? From a very cynical perspective: Not really, it makes perfect sense as it is the cheapest option that also empowers the people who can make youtube's life a misery. (The big corporations that file these claims). Hiring third party people to decide these or whatever mechanism you can think of would be more expensive for youtube than what they have now.
Yizahi 7y ago
Then Google will ban you. And by "you" Google means a person, not and email account. So they will carpet bomb all your accounts what they think may belong to you, across all their services. Some people even report bans of work accounts where fallback linked emails were personal account which was the source of the ban.

jMyles 7y ago

Why hasn't anyone just started a YouTube competitor in a jurisdiction with no copyright law whatsoever? It seems like such jurisdictions can quickly become havens for innovation.

jwilk 7y ago
What are those jurisdictions?
- jMyles 7y ago
  I don't know - do none exist? If not, why not? Can't some small state gain a huge advantage by adopting an IP-free legal framework?