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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.

by 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!”
  - geerlingguy 7y ago
    This morning I got a copyright claim for a video I published in 2015 which had a brief bit of background music, using a royalty-free song I got as a perk for being an iTools user from FreePlay in _2003_. I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims. To me that's $1/year lost revenue (no big deal, right?) but that company now gets the revenue from this video—and millions of other videos... so they're making mint and gambling that most users won't even try to appeal.
    - Muuuchem 7y ago
      I am sick of this and thinking about canceling youtube premium...
    - hinkley 7y ago
      Doesn't that mean they need to be sending a hundred of these out per hour, 40 hours a week, just to make payroll?
      - imtringued 7y ago
        It's fully automated.
      - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        A machine (script) can send out a lot more than a hundred/hr. Remember, they don't have to be true.
        velosol 7y ago
        The person clicking the button just needs to think it's true.
      - lozenge 7y ago
        They upload the sound clips, YouTube finds the matching videos and sends them a list, then a human reviews the list(haha just kidding) and activates the revenue stealing. I'm sure some of those videos are earning a lot more than $1/year.
- hnick 7y ago
  It's not even just copyright strikes. Sometimes they worry about being demonetised over swearing or other minor indecencies so they self-censor more than they should to be safe. I saw one video where they spent some time up front saying how great Stadia is so the algorithm treats them nicely before spending the next 10 minutes saying how bad it is. They were clearly joking, but it does make me think about the type of control the system has and what messages get promoted. Who knows?
- stale2002 7y ago
  There actually is a process. You send an official copywrite counterclaim. Not through their fake on platform system, but instead through their "official" counter claim contact info email. They would then be required by law to reinstate the content. The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    They can't file a DMCA counterclaim because they never received a DMCA claim in the first place. Youtube simply blocks the content, you don't even get a proper claim with the contact info. "They would then be required by law to reinstate the content. The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content." is the followup process for a DMCA claim - but that's not what's happening here. Youtube is not requiring claimants to submit a DMCA claim (with all the associated process) and they are not submitting DMCA claims. Youtube could make their copyright claim process following these rules if they wanted to be on the side of users, but they have not. They can also choose to have a process where any complaint simply causes content to get removed with no recourse, and this is pretty much what they have done.
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    If it’s this easy, why don’t people just do it? And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics?
    - stale2002 7y ago
      > why don’t people just do it? Because people don't know about it. Also, for many people, even doing something like "sending an email to counter claim" is too much work for them to bother doing it. You'd be surprised how many people won't follow through on something when there is even the smallest barrier to them doing so. > And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics? Things can get to be pretty technical, when people are talking about the minutia of a counter claim to DMCA. It does not surprise me that info like this is not well known.
- NorthOf33rd 7y ago
  I work for a rather large consumer goods company. We had a video taken down during a really important product launch. We had absolutely no idea why for three days. It cost us maybe two full days of development resources + consultants + throwing money at different consultants to get an "in" to youtube to figure out why our video was taken down. About a week later we received official word from the artist and then we figured out that our consultants who made the video messed up and forgot the critical step of securing permission. It was an expensive blunder, both from a media standpoint but also in the amount of resources we burned trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. I'm not mad at youtube for taking the video down, but it's absurd that there's nothing in the system that would tell me why, and absolutely zero hope of figuring it out.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    FYI: I've seen screenshots of takedown complaints in the Youtube mgmt. UI. So login to your control panel and look around for that. It says who did it, what they object to and gives you the choice of fixing it or filing a complaint. But if you lose the complaint, you get a copyright strike and can lose your channel.
vkou 7y ago
What makes you think that a competing hosting service is going to result in competition that benefits the users, and not the rights-holders? The rights holders may end up playing the two services against eachother, and use the more draconian policy of one as arguments for making the other more friendly to their interests. They have a lot more skin in the game than users do.
- lgats 7y ago
  The problem doesn't exist to such an extent in the web-hosting world. (where there is much competition) DMCA requests usually don't result in a website shutting down unless the webmaster is non-responsive and the claimant makes further moves beyond the first request.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    It should be noted that YouTube's copyright strikes are not DMCA violations, for the reason that the DMCA has penalties for making false claims. The media cartels claim that this is an onerous burden for their enforcement division which is why they worked with Google to make sure they wouldn't be subject to legal action for taking down legitimate content. The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content, but this would likely just result in Google being sued for trillions of dollars by the media cartels to remove such restrictions under the argument that Google is aiding in piracy.
    - jagged-chisel 7y ago
      > The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content ... You hit on this in your first sentence. And this whole arrangement with Google is specifically to side-step those penalties. Your 'easiest solution' is for Google to return to DMCA takedown requests. I agree. I want that. I think most consumers and content creators would. But Big Media doesn't.
      - jasonjayr 7y ago
bavell 7y ago
Completely agree with you. To be fair to the authors, they did address this in their conclusion: > This is not a reasonable expectation to place on average users.
munk-a 7y ago
We do - or we need to start declaring services like Youtube/Facebook platforms with the necessary requirements for public access that common platforms have under other circumstances.
- hmage 7y ago
  About that -- https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/google-has-right-to-censor-conservative-nonprofit-on-youtube/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/google-has-right... >> a Seattle appeals court said on Wednesday. It’s neither a public forum nor a “state actor”, and it can’t be held to First Amendment court oversight as if it were a government body. >> »violation of First Amendment protection of free speech. That argument doesn’t fly, the appeals court said on Wednesday, given that YouTube isn’t a public forum The big mistake people make is that youtube is a public platform/forum. It is not, it's a privilege that their server accepts your browser's request, not a right. They have every right to refuse for any reason they want. Same for videos you upload there, them holding it is a privelege, not a right. It's in company's best interest to make people believe that it's a public forum, because people will start using it every day. In case of google, people use their browser to visit their website, sometimes using their ISP (google fiber), and log in using their account. As soon as you do something google doesn't like, you risk losing access to one of those, because it's not actually yours, it's a service provided as a privelege, unfortunately.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Aye, and that's my problem, social networks promote themselves as "open forums" when it's convenient for them and note that they were technically lying when they said it when it's inconvenient. I'd really love it if that public deception could be disarmed. Maybe we just need better advertising standards enforcement to fine these guys into the ground whenever they talk about how their platform "enables open communication on a global scale" and other marketing BS.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
I'd settle for a business-law-mandated access to legal recourse, and forced accountability of platforms (any platform, not just Youtube. If a US platform bans your content, you should have legal recourse in the US, not "a black hole unless you know someone on the inside", and not "a web form no human ever reads"), instead of competition. After all, you can't compete on "we have a better legal process": if your selling point is is "once things have gone wrong, and we already ruined your day, at least your recourse is better than at Youtube", you don't have a selling point.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I would like to settle for both as Google does remove or demonetize unwanted content without valid justifications while still showing ads. I think youtube developed in a significantly worse direction for both content creators and users. It isn't the groundbreaking new platform for alternative content where the user decides what he wants to see. Copyright law still needs a reformation. The incentive to allow preferential monetization of orginal content in exchange for making it public is probably more of a hindrance for digital content. In reality it serves large publishers that technically should play a smaller role by now, since content logistics are cheaper now. At least for the vast majority of creators.
philsnow 7y ago
They probably could have pursued it further. Presumably their time is valuable (and that value is easily quantifiable) and they had to spend some of it defending this spurious claim. It feels very much like patent trolling but it's copyright trolling. Cloudflare famously stood up to a patent troll and prevailed. In their first blog post about it [0], they wrote, > This claim is a nuisance for us. The lawsuit will take our time, distract us from our work, and it will cost us money to fight. Patent trolls like Blackbird Technologies (@bbird_tech) exist to create these headaches so companies will play along and give them money to go away. The only difference I can see is that patent trolls like Blackbird use the courts whereas copyright trolls use YouTube. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/standing-up-to-a-dangerous-new-breed-of-patent-troll/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/standing-up-to-a-dangerous-new-b...
voicedYoda 7y ago
There are plenty of other options. Try Vimeo...
judge2020 7y ago
> We need competition in this space. Hard to compete against a free service like YouTube. You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively, you'll have to build your own ad network to make any revenue, and even then you'll need some way to draw both content creators and users to your service to have any chance. We had some competitors, but Vimeo effectively gave up and is marketing for B2B, and Twitch's video upload feature doesn't work since they haven't pushed hard enough for it (a huge marketing push, some UI work, and exclusivity deals on Twitch's side would go a long way if it can get any initial momentum).
- rabuse 7y ago
  One way, is to start something up, and then get acquired by Amazon, Netflix, or any other larger player that has the infrastructure for it.
  - MattSayar 7y ago
    Netflix's infrastructure IS Amazon
    - redis_mlc 7y ago
      No, Netflix has their own CDN. The servers running in AWS are mostly metadata.
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  > You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively. For non-streaming video web-torrent is probably the best attempt I've seen as it offloads bandwidth to the viewers. However the real problem that is impossible to get around is storage. To run a moderately large site the largest cost is storage as you will be seeding a copy of the video. The few competitors (which are about <1% of youtube's views) are built quite poorly IMO. You won't beat youtube by copying it. You need to build something new that addresses many of the short comings.
takeda 7y ago
Yeah, most people don't have this option. I'm not a content creator, but I run into it myself, when I wanted to upload a dashcam recording of an accident to share with my insurance company. It was tagged, because radio was playing a song and of course after my appeal they insisted the copyright was theirs. I gave up after getting the page which threatened me with the possibility of terminating my account. The thing is that if I could I would actually prefer to remove the music from the video, I was interested in the other sounds.

by css 7y ago

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!”
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  This morning I got a copyright claim for a video I published in 2015 which had a brief bit of background music, using a royalty-free song I got as a perk for being an iTools user from FreePlay in _2003_. I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims. To me that's $1/year lost revenue (no big deal, right?) but that company now gets the revenue from this video—and millions of other videos... so they're making mint and gambling that most users won't even try to appeal.
  - Muuuchem 7y ago
    I am sick of this and thinking about canceling youtube premium...
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Doesn't that mean they need to be sending a hundred of these out per hour, 40 hours a week, just to make payroll?
    - imtringued 7y ago
      It's fully automated.
    - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      A machine (script) can send out a lot more than a hundred/hr. Remember, they don't have to be true.
      - velosol 7y ago
        The person clicking the button just needs to think it's true.
    - lozenge 7y ago
      They upload the sound clips, YouTube finds the matching videos and sends them a list, then a human reviews the list(haha just kidding) and activates the revenue stealing. I'm sure some of those videos are earning a lot more than $1/year.
hnick 7y ago
It's not even just copyright strikes. Sometimes they worry about being demonetised over swearing or other minor indecencies so they self-censor more than they should to be safe. I saw one video where they spent some time up front saying how great Stadia is so the algorithm treats them nicely before spending the next 10 minutes saying how bad it is. They were clearly joking, but it does make me think about the type of control the system has and what messages get promoted. Who knows?
stale2002 7y ago
There actually is a process. You send an official copywrite counterclaim. Not through their fake on platform system, but instead through their "official" counter claim contact info email. They would then be required by law to reinstate the content. The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  They can't file a DMCA counterclaim because they never received a DMCA claim in the first place. Youtube simply blocks the content, you don't even get a proper claim with the contact info. "They would then be required by law to reinstate the content. The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content." is the followup process for a DMCA claim - but that's not what's happening here. Youtube is not requiring claimants to submit a DMCA claim (with all the associated process) and they are not submitting DMCA claims. Youtube could make their copyright claim process following these rules if they wanted to be on the side of users, but they have not. They can also choose to have a process where any complaint simply causes content to get removed with no recourse, and this is pretty much what they have done.
- jtbayly 7y ago
  If it’s this easy, why don’t people just do it? And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics?
  - stale2002 7y ago
    > why don’t people just do it? Because people don't know about it. Also, for many people, even doing something like "sending an email to counter claim" is too much work for them to bother doing it. You'd be surprised how many people won't follow through on something when there is even the smallest barrier to them doing so. > And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics? Things can get to be pretty technical, when people are talking about the minutia of a counter claim to DMCA. It does not surprise me that info like this is not well known.
NorthOf33rd 7y ago
I work for a rather large consumer goods company. We had a video taken down during a really important product launch. We had absolutely no idea why for three days. It cost us maybe two full days of development resources + consultants + throwing money at different consultants to get an "in" to youtube to figure out why our video was taken down. About a week later we received official word from the artist and then we figured out that our consultants who made the video messed up and forgot the critical step of securing permission. It was an expensive blunder, both from a media standpoint but also in the amount of resources we burned trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. I'm not mad at youtube for taking the video down, but it's absurd that there's nothing in the system that would tell me why, and absolutely zero hope of figuring it out.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  FYI: I've seen screenshots of takedown complaints in the Youtube mgmt. UI. So login to your control panel and look around for that. It says who did it, what they object to and gives you the choice of fixing it or filing a complaint. But if you lose the complaint, you get a copyright strike and can lose your channel.

vkou 7y ago

What makes you think that a competing hosting service is going to result in competition that benefits the users, and not the rights-holders? The rights holders may end up playing the two services against eachother, and use the more draconian policy of one as arguments for making the other more friendly to their interests. They have a lot more skin in the game than users do.

lgats 7y ago
The problem doesn't exist to such an extent in the web-hosting world. (where there is much competition) DMCA requests usually don't result in a website shutting down unless the webmaster is non-responsive and the claimant makes further moves beyond the first request.
- jandrese 7y ago
  It should be noted that YouTube's copyright strikes are not DMCA violations, for the reason that the DMCA has penalties for making false claims. The media cartels claim that this is an onerous burden for their enforcement division which is why they worked with Google to make sure they wouldn't be subject to legal action for taking down legitimate content. The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content, but this would likely just result in Google being sued for trillions of dollars by the media cartels to remove such restrictions under the argument that Google is aiding in piracy.
  - jagged-chisel 7y ago
    > The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content ... You hit on this in your first sentence. And this whole arrangement with Google is specifically to side-step those penalties. Your 'easiest solution' is for Google to return to DMCA takedown requests. I agree. I want that. I think most consumers and content creators would. But Big Media doesn't.
    - jasonjayr 7y ago

bavell 7y ago

Completely agree with you. To be fair to the authors, they did address this in their conclusion: > This is not a reasonable expectation to place on average users.

munk-a 7y ago

We do - or we need to start declaring services like Youtube/Facebook platforms with the necessary requirements for public access that common platforms have under other circumstances.

hmage 7y ago
About that -- https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/google-has-right-to-censor-conservative-nonprofit-on-youtube/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/google-has-right... >> a Seattle appeals court said on Wednesday. It’s neither a public forum nor a “state actor”, and it can’t be held to First Amendment court oversight as if it were a government body. >> »violation of First Amendment protection of free speech. That argument doesn’t fly, the appeals court said on Wednesday, given that YouTube isn’t a public forum The big mistake people make is that youtube is a public platform/forum. It is not, it's a privilege that their server accepts your browser's request, not a right. They have every right to refuse for any reason they want. Same for videos you upload there, them holding it is a privelege, not a right. It's in company's best interest to make people believe that it's a public forum, because people will start using it every day. In case of google, people use their browser to visit their website, sometimes using their ISP (google fiber), and log in using their account. As soon as you do something google doesn't like, you risk losing access to one of those, because it's not actually yours, it's a service provided as a privelege, unfortunately.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Aye, and that's my problem, social networks promote themselves as "open forums" when it's convenient for them and note that they were technically lying when they said it when it's inconvenient. I'd really love it if that public deception could be disarmed. Maybe we just need better advertising standards enforcement to fine these guys into the ground whenever they talk about how their platform "enables open communication on a global scale" and other marketing BS.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

I'd settle for a business-law-mandated access to legal recourse, and forced accountability of platforms (any platform, not just Youtube. If a US platform bans your content, you should have legal recourse in the US, not "a black hole unless you know someone on the inside", and not "a web form no human ever reads"), instead of competition. After all, you can't compete on "we have a better legal process": if your selling point is is "once things have gone wrong, and we already ruined your day, at least your recourse is better than at Youtube", you don't have a selling point.

raxxorrax 7y ago
I would like to settle for both as Google does remove or demonetize unwanted content without valid justifications while still showing ads. I think youtube developed in a significantly worse direction for both content creators and users. It isn't the groundbreaking new platform for alternative content where the user decides what he wants to see. Copyright law still needs a reformation. The incentive to allow preferential monetization of orginal content in exchange for making it public is probably more of a hindrance for digital content. In reality it serves large publishers that technically should play a smaller role by now, since content logistics are cheaper now. At least for the vast majority of creators.

philsnow 7y ago

They probably could have pursued it further. Presumably their time is valuable (and that value is easily quantifiable) and they had to spend some of it defending this spurious claim. It feels very much like patent trolling but it's copyright trolling. Cloudflare famously stood up to a patent troll and prevailed. In their first blog post about it [0], they wrote, > This claim is a nuisance for us. The lawsuit will take our time, distract us from our work, and it will cost us money to fight. Patent trolls like Blackbird Technologies (@bbird_tech) exist to create these headaches so companies will play along and give them money to go away. The only difference I can see is that patent trolls like Blackbird use the courts whereas copyright trolls use YouTube. [0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/standing-up-to-a-dangerous-new-breed-of-patent-troll/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/standing-up-to-a-dangerous-new-b...

voicedYoda 7y ago

There are plenty of other options. Try Vimeo...

judge2020 7y ago

> We need competition in this space. Hard to compete against a free service like YouTube. You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively, you'll have to build your own ad network to make any revenue, and even then you'll need some way to draw both content creators and users to your service to have any chance. We had some competitors, but Vimeo effectively gave up and is marketing for B2B, and Twitch's video upload feature doesn't work since they haven't pushed hard enough for it (a huge marketing push, some UI work, and exclusivity deals on Twitch's side would go a long way if it can get any initial momentum).

rabuse 7y ago
One way, is to start something up, and then get acquired by Amazon, Netflix, or any other larger player that has the infrastructure for it.
- MattSayar 7y ago
  Netflix's infrastructure IS Amazon
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    No, Netflix has their own CDN. The servers running in AWS are mostly metadata.
uk_programmer 7y ago
> You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively. For non-streaming video web-torrent is probably the best attempt I've seen as it offloads bandwidth to the viewers. However the real problem that is impossible to get around is storage. To run a moderately large site the largest cost is storage as you will be seeding a copy of the video. The few competitors (which are about <1% of youtube's views) are built quite poorly IMO. You won't beat youtube by copying it. You need to build something new that addresses many of the short comings.

takeda 7y ago

Yeah, most people don't have this option. I'm not a content creator, but I run into it myself, when I wanted to upload a dashcam recording of an accident to share with my insurance company. It was tagged, because radio was playing a song and of course after my appeal they insisted the copyright was theirs. I gave up after getting the page which threatened me with the possibility of terminating my account. The thing is that if I could I would actually prefer to remove the music from the video, I was interested in the other sounds.