13 ms·

YouTube can now warn creators about copyright issues before videos are posted

151 points by finphil 6y ago

BitwiseFool 6y ago
It's baffling that this feature wasn't already available to content creators.
- SirFatty 6y ago
  Agreed... and it makes you wonder why Google held back on this.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  It would have been baffling to me in the past, but I've felt it's pretty clear that YouTube is more interested in catering to mainstream entertainment giants rather than individual content creators. It's baffling they'd even bother with this now. The only reason I can think of why they would introduce this feature is that their algorithm has been backfiring on content creators they are politically aligned with.
- post_break 6y ago
  I’m pretty sure it was in a backhanded way. I would upload a video and keep it private. Then you could wait and see if any part got flagged. If it didn’t then you could publish.
- hntrader 6y ago
  What if they didn't want to give users a way to iterate quickly through various attempts at obfuscating copyright content by just the right amount in order to bypass the copyright screening? Not saying that was the reason but it's not implausible.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    I could think that they also wanted to increase engagement on the site. People better respond to music they know, so they were milking sweet ad commissions as long as they could. Maybe labels realised YT is taking a mickey and had a strong conversation with the execs.
- malikNF 6y ago
  I am guessing, because of the complexity of the problem. With the previous way of doing things I am guessing youtube either push all the videos that get uploaded in to some queue to detect copyright violations, or once a video reaches a certain number of views the copyright algorithm gets triggered. With the new system I am guessing they have to do this thing in real time and almost anything real-time is a complex problem to deal with right?
mikece 6y ago
"If YouTube’s copyright identification system finds a violation after a video is scanned, the rights holder’s policy will be automatically applied to the video, according to the company." During the height of the quarantine last year I managed the live-streaming of the traditional form of the Catholic Mass (1962 Missal, substantially the same ruberics and ceremonials from the fifth century until the 1960s) at a local parish and on EVERY Sung High Mass there were multiple copyright flags applied because the liturgical hymns sung by the choir, the "newest" of which averaged 250 years in age and some of which were over a thousand years old, were part of a commercial recording by some professional choral ensemble. Had someone played a CD of that professional recording in the chapel then this would have been a copyright violation, but it's OBVIOUS to any human who listens to the sound on those videos that this was a live performance -- by volunteer, part-time singers who make lots of mistakes -- of works that have been in the public domain for centuries. This system is clearly a CYA for Google: they would rather flag videos and PERMANENTLY demonetize content creators based on repeated false positives (but still show advertisements on the videos anyway!) than to risk even the remotest chance that a content creator might sue YouTube for enabling copyright infringement.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  ...even the remotest chance that a content creator might sue YouTube for enabling copyright infringement. Does this happen often? Ever? How does one sue a firm that never has humans available for interaction with the public? One suspects this is the motivation they'd like us to credit, because they have other, less defensible, motivations.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Fwiw, you sue in public courts where Google loses by default if they don't appear. Google does not yet run its own parallel court system and star chamber. EDIT: On second thought, if their services require binding arbitration, they do. Arbitration in contracts of adhesion should be flatly illegal.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
nicofcurti 6y ago
Honestly this was too obvious to not do anything until now. Next thing is fixing the demonetisation bs
- doh 6y ago
  The only reason why they done is because it's mandatory under the impending legislation in EU [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
  - varispeed 6y ago
    So it is the might filter and pre-cursor of preventive censorship in the EU. Marvellous.
    - doh 6y ago
      Not sure what are you trying to say, but no law gets anything right. That said, the current market is very one-sided where platforms abuse both sides (creators and rightsholders) while nobody can do nothing about it. So I welcome the governments trying to find balance, even if it’s not perfect. I think the law is cutting way too far in one direction, but I believe this is the first time the market has an opportunity to work together to find some form of balance.
      - varispeed 6y ago
        Everyone has different standards. To me this is unacceptable - we used to pay so much money to all those unelected people and their duty was to get things right for citizens, not for big corporations (who likely also pay them through unofficial channels). I am glad that my country decided to not implement that in full once we have left the bloc.
        doh 6y ago
        I’m very biased here, but I think the law is going to eventually be net positive not because is so good, but because there is another (DMCA in US and E-commerce directive in EU) that allow platforms to use content without compensation. This is unsubstantiated in increasingly connected world where digital content (and rights) are structural to its operations and business. This law is far from perfect, but it’s seeking to remedy this imbalance. I agree that this could’ve done better, but we live in imperfect world with lobbing being part of the process. So my hope and believe, one I built my company around, is that this law will allow to create balanced marketplace (similar to VISA) that allows all 3 sides (creators, platforms and rightsholders) to participate in the upside rather than focus on a zero-sum outcomes as it’s today. I might be naive and completely wrong, but this is what I’m personally working towards.
duxup 6y ago
A hell of a lot more cooperative approach to help everyone avoid unintentional messes is long overdue. The folks who get their content taken down I'm sure would be happy to cooperate most of the time ... Really sad that it comes this late / after this much hassle.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
I can't imagine the incredible amount of man-hours that were wasted on detecting if your video has fucking copyrighted material in it. Absolute shame.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  The technology has existed for a nearly 20 years. Shazam [0] existed long before smartphones and could identify songs based on 10 second samples. YouTube can easily leverage this song-identifying technology to detect copyrighted material. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application)
  - georgebarnett 6y ago
    Recognising a song is not the same as recognising copyright.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      Of course not, but if it can recognize the song, and the record labels have given YouTube a list of copyrighted songs, it's not too hard to put the two together.
      - spacemanmatt 6y ago
        If you accept the false positives that impact lots of us, then sure, it's not too hard. This is one of those cases where 99% is easy but society needs 100% and that's not as easy.
- politician 6y ago
  I'd like to see a total energy comparison between Content ID and Bitcoin PoW.
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  Not just them. There are companies that exist primarily to help content creators manage this stuff. It's insane.
standardUser 6y ago
I've always despised how YouTube removes videos with no trace of what was once there. I have dozens of videos saved to playlists that I will never be able to recover because there is no identifying information. Why not take down the file but leave the title for reference?
- ssalka 6y ago
  This is why I youtube-dl everything
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
  I YouTube-dl anything/everything I think I might like to watch again. Tutorials, reference videos, music videos, you name it. Storage is cheap and YouTube has proven they’re not a place for long term storage.
  - president 6y ago
    Might be a good opportunity for someone to create a browser plugin to just download all Youtube videos that they watch.
- neilparikh 6y ago
  Doesn't always work, but try using the Wayback Machine for the titles.
sorenjan 6y ago
Did you see how Twitch handles copyright issues? They're latest solution is to make it easier for streamers to mass delete all their saved streams ("VODs") to not get DMCA strikes. Compared to Twitch Youtube seem much more competent and professional. https://www.esportstalk.com/news/after-a-year-twitchs-dmca-update-is-to-delete-vods/ https://www.esportstalk.com/news/after-a-year-twitchs-dmca-u...
- ronsor 6y ago
  Every company looks more competent and professional compared to Twitch as of late. The latter seems to be involved in at least one controversy a month.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  What's weird about the Twitch situation is that they already had a system to solve this. If you had a VOD that flagged their Content ID, the offending part would get muted. Why not do the same thing for manual takedown requests?
AlexandrB 6y ago
What if the video is using copyrighted material on fair use grounds? I guess you're still screwed then?
- doh 6y ago
  They were forced to this because of the impending legislation in EU [0] which forces them to do so. Germany is toying with what they call pre-filtering, which would allow creator/user to state fair use/exception prior identification. Essentially one could claim fair use before a rightsholder can make their claim. So far it's part of the draft but we don't know if it will make it to the final legislation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
shmerl 6y ago
Sounds almost like Sheckley's Watchbird already :)
varispeed 6y ago
I believe that artists should be reimbursed, but how YouTube does it does not look just at all. It is a simple money grab by fat major label execs who were able to cut deals with YT at the expense of regular people. Yes, if someone uses a copyrighted song, they should either be asked to use something else, provide proof of a deal or agree to send a split to an artist. I understand currently it is that the label takes all. I wonder why there isn't any lawsuit around this?
- mywittyname 6y ago
  > I wonder why there isn't any lawsuit around this? There's been a ton of action around this, including an active class action lawsuit. Congress was hearing testimony on this exact subject back last year and there's legislative action going on in the EU. I suspect this move was in direct response to those hearings.
Kaze404 6y ago
Meanwhile, in the real world, Jim Sterling is facing their channel being taken down because a random game developer didn't like their review and decided to copyright flag a bunch of different videos. They're at 2 strikes now, which means one more and the channel goes down. Fantastic system. https://twitter.com/JimSterling/status/1372585399667806211 https://twitter.com/JimSterling/status/1372585399667806211
- peterlk 6y ago
  Huh... This actually seems like not a bad way to ensure that Google is aware of the problem. A sufficiently large reddit community could probably knock a lot of big fish off of youtube with this approach
  - ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
    The fish big enough for google to care about are all protected from this stuff. YouTube is completely and utterly broken for anyone smaller than “I make tens/hundreds of thousands for google and have a management team to handle my YouTube issues”
    - tadfisher 6y ago
      Sterling does not monetize their videos, instead relying on Patreon support, so even fewer shits will be given.
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    This has been happening for years. A friend of mine lost their channel twice because, somehow, his channel got hit by a ban wave of channels that were uploading specific Japanese adult videos with a very specific title. It took him weeks of messaging YouTube to even get to a human being, and even then it was another month for his channel to come back. They know the system is bad, they just don't care.
mrkramer 6y ago
This should've been implemented earlier it would save a lot of users time and hassle. Google has enormous engineering manpower and computing resources they can do pretty much anything.
vallas 6y ago
Are there any copyright on watchers comments?
villgax 6y ago
This should have been the norm & if someone else copyrights an older content then the new video is to be scrutinised not the creators content & otherwise a notice needs to be shown instead of a strike outright for valid claims
airhead969 6y ago
Will YouTube also warn creators when Telemundo or extortion trolls try to claim original works as their own?
_nalply 6y ago
A problem about copyright I encountered: I don't hear and need captions for videos. Sometimes material I have is not captioned. But when I resubmit them I can get a copyright warning. I stopped resubmitting to avoid Youtube blocking me. I could create throwaway accounts, but this is a hassle, and it's only me who benefits from captions. This is a case were indiscriminate enforcing of copyright is hurting people with disabilities.
intricatedetail 6y ago
Big labels are churning music at an unprecedented rate as if they wanted to copyright all possible combinations of chords / melodies (that universally sound good). At one point in the future it won't be possible to upload any new music without having to pay those label or just being outright censored. This is going to be a disaster for culture in few years and winners will be big corporations.
- agilob 6y ago
  > This is going to be a disaster for culture in few years and winners will be big corporations. Yes, that's the point. Can you even comprehend how much money two corporations will make off governments and individuals?
kevincox 6y ago
This is a huge improvement because very often by the time ContentID claims are resolved most of the subscribers and other early-serge viewers have seen the video so that money has basically been stolen from the creator and that video will not bring in much profit after that initial surge. It obviously isn't perfect but at least this lets the creator appeal/update the video before effectively cutting a large check to companies who very often don't deserve it.

151 points by finphil 6y ago

BitwiseFool 6y ago

It's baffling that this feature wasn't already available to content creators.

SirFatty 6y ago
Agreed... and it makes you wonder why Google held back on this.
ravenstine 6y ago
It would have been baffling to me in the past, but I've felt it's pretty clear that YouTube is more interested in catering to mainstream entertainment giants rather than individual content creators. It's baffling they'd even bother with this now. The only reason I can think of why they would introduce this feature is that their algorithm has been backfiring on content creators they are politically aligned with.
post_break 6y ago
I’m pretty sure it was in a backhanded way. I would upload a video and keep it private. Then you could wait and see if any part got flagged. If it didn’t then you could publish.
hntrader 6y ago
What if they didn't want to give users a way to iterate quickly through various attempts at obfuscating copyright content by just the right amount in order to bypass the copyright screening? Not saying that was the reason but it's not implausible.
- varispeed 6y ago
  I could think that they also wanted to increase engagement on the site. People better respond to music they know, so they were milking sweet ad commissions as long as they could. Maybe labels realised YT is taking a mickey and had a strong conversation with the execs.
malikNF 6y ago
I am guessing, because of the complexity of the problem. With the previous way of doing things I am guessing youtube either push all the videos that get uploaded in to some queue to detect copyright violations, or once a video reaches a certain number of views the copyright algorithm gets triggered. With the new system I am guessing they have to do this thing in real time and almost anything real-time is a complex problem to deal with right?

mikece 6y ago

"If YouTube’s copyright identification system finds a violation after a video is scanned, the rights holder’s policy will be automatically applied to the video, according to the company." During the height of the quarantine last year I managed the live-streaming of the traditional form of the Catholic Mass (1962 Missal, substantially the same ruberics and ceremonials from the fifth century until the 1960s) at a local parish and on EVERY Sung High Mass there were multiple copyright flags applied because the liturgical hymns sung by the choir, the "newest" of which averaged 250 years in age and some of which were over a thousand years old, were part of a commercial recording by some professional choral ensemble. Had someone played a CD of that professional recording in the chapel then this would have been a copyright violation, but it's OBVIOUS to any human who listens to the sound on those videos that this was a live performance -- by volunteer, part-time singers who make lots of mistakes -- of works that have been in the public domain for centuries. This system is clearly a CYA for Google: they would rather flag videos and PERMANENTLY demonetize content creators based on repeated false positives (but still show advertisements on the videos anyway!) than to risk even the remotest chance that a content creator might sue YouTube for enabling copyright infringement.

jessaustin 6y ago
...even the remotest chance that a content creator might sue YouTube for enabling copyright infringement. Does this happen often? Ever? How does one sue a firm that never has humans available for interaction with the public? One suspects this is the motivation they'd like us to credit, because they have other, less defensible, motivations.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Fwiw, you sue in public courts where Google loses by default if they don't appear. Google does not yet run its own parallel court system and star chamber. EDIT: On second thought, if their services require binding arbitration, they do. Arbitration in contracts of adhesion should be flatly illegal.
  - jessaustin 6y ago

nicofcurti 6y ago

Honestly this was too obvious to not do anything until now. Next thing is fixing the demonetisation bs

doh 6y ago
The only reason why they done is because it's mandatory under the impending legislation in EU [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
- varispeed 6y ago
  So it is the might filter and pre-cursor of preventive censorship in the EU. Marvellous.
  - doh 6y ago
    Not sure what are you trying to say, but no law gets anything right. That said, the current market is very one-sided where platforms abuse both sides (creators and rightsholders) while nobody can do nothing about it. So I welcome the governments trying to find balance, even if it’s not perfect. I think the law is cutting way too far in one direction, but I believe this is the first time the market has an opportunity to work together to find some form of balance.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Everyone has different standards. To me this is unacceptable - we used to pay so much money to all those unelected people and their duty was to get things right for citizens, not for big corporations (who likely also pay them through unofficial channels). I am glad that my country decided to not implement that in full once we have left the bloc.
      - doh 6y ago
        I’m very biased here, but I think the law is going to eventually be net positive not because is so good, but because there is another (DMCA in US and E-commerce directive in EU) that allow platforms to use content without compensation. This is unsubstantiated in increasingly connected world where digital content (and rights) are structural to its operations and business. This law is far from perfect, but it’s seeking to remedy this imbalance. I agree that this could’ve done better, but we live in imperfect world with lobbing being part of the process. So my hope and believe, one I built my company around, is that this law will allow to create balanced marketplace (similar to VISA) that allows all 3 sides (creators, platforms and rightsholders) to participate in the upside rather than focus on a zero-sum outcomes as it’s today. I might be naive and completely wrong, but this is what I’m personally working towards.

duxup 6y ago

A hell of a lot more cooperative approach to help everyone avoid unintentional messes is long overdue. The folks who get their content taken down I'm sure would be happy to cooperate most of the time ... Really sad that it comes this late / after this much hassle.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

I can't imagine the incredible amount of man-hours that were wasted on detecting if your video has fucking copyrighted material in it. Absolute shame.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
The technology has existed for a nearly 20 years. Shazam [0] existed long before smartphones and could identify songs based on 10 second samples. YouTube can easily leverage this song-identifying technology to detect copyrighted material. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(application)
- georgebarnett 6y ago
  Recognising a song is not the same as recognising copyright.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    Of course not, but if it can recognize the song, and the record labels have given YouTube a list of copyrighted songs, it's not too hard to put the two together.
    - spacemanmatt 6y ago
      If you accept the false positives that impact lots of us, then sure, it's not too hard. This is one of those cases where 99% is easy but society needs 100% and that's not as easy.
politician 6y ago
I'd like to see a total energy comparison between Content ID and Bitcoin PoW.
banana_giraffe 6y ago
Not just them. There are companies that exist primarily to help content creators manage this stuff. It's insane.

standardUser 6y ago

I've always despised how YouTube removes videos with no trace of what was once there. I have dozens of videos saved to playlists that I will never be able to recover because there is no identifying information. Why not take down the file but leave the title for reference?

ssalka 6y ago
This is why I youtube-dl everything
ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
I YouTube-dl anything/everything I think I might like to watch again. Tutorials, reference videos, music videos, you name it. Storage is cheap and YouTube has proven they’re not a place for long term storage.
- president 6y ago
  Might be a good opportunity for someone to create a browser plugin to just download all Youtube videos that they watch.
neilparikh 6y ago
Doesn't always work, but try using the Wayback Machine for the titles.

sorenjan 6y ago

Did you see how Twitch handles copyright issues? They're latest solution is to make it easier for streamers to mass delete all their saved streams ("VODs") to not get DMCA strikes. Compared to Twitch Youtube seem much more competent and professional. https://www.esportstalk.com/news/after-a-year-twitchs-dmca-update-is-to-delete-vods/ https://www.esportstalk.com/news/after-a-year-twitchs-dmca-u...

ronsor 6y ago
Every company looks more competent and professional compared to Twitch as of late. The latter seems to be involved in at least one controversy a month.
Kaze404 6y ago
What's weird about the Twitch situation is that they already had a system to solve this. If you had a VOD that flagged their Content ID, the offending part would get muted. Why not do the same thing for manual takedown requests?

AlexandrB 6y ago

What if the video is using copyrighted material on fair use grounds? I guess you're still screwed then?

doh 6y ago
They were forced to this because of the impending legislation in EU [0] which forces them to do so. Germany is toying with what they call pre-filtering, which would allow creator/user to state fair use/exception prior identification. Essentially one could claim fair use before a rightsholder can make their claim. So far it's part of the draft but we don't know if it will make it to the final legislation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...

shmerl 6y ago

Sounds almost like Sheckley's Watchbird already :)

varispeed 6y ago

I believe that artists should be reimbursed, but how YouTube does it does not look just at all. It is a simple money grab by fat major label execs who were able to cut deals with YT at the expense of regular people. Yes, if someone uses a copyrighted song, they should either be asked to use something else, provide proof of a deal or agree to send a split to an artist. I understand currently it is that the label takes all. I wonder why there isn't any lawsuit around this?

mywittyname 6y ago
> I wonder why there isn't any lawsuit around this? There's been a ton of action around this, including an active class action lawsuit. Congress was hearing testimony on this exact subject back last year and there's legislative action going on in the EU. I suspect this move was in direct response to those hearings.

Kaze404 6y ago

Meanwhile, in the real world, Jim Sterling is facing their channel being taken down because a random game developer didn't like their review and decided to copyright flag a bunch of different videos. They're at 2 strikes now, which means one more and the channel goes down. Fantastic system. https://twitter.com/JimSterling/status/1372585399667806211 https://twitter.com/JimSterling/status/1372585399667806211

peterlk 6y ago
Huh... This actually seems like not a bad way to ensure that Google is aware of the problem. A sufficiently large reddit community could probably knock a lot of big fish off of youtube with this approach
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
  The fish big enough for google to care about are all protected from this stuff. YouTube is completely and utterly broken for anyone smaller than “I make tens/hundreds of thousands for google and have a management team to handle my YouTube issues”
  - tadfisher 6y ago
    Sterling does not monetize their videos, instead relying on Patreon support, so even fewer shits will be given.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  This has been happening for years. A friend of mine lost their channel twice because, somehow, his channel got hit by a ban wave of channels that were uploading specific Japanese adult videos with a very specific title. It took him weeks of messaging YouTube to even get to a human being, and even then it was another month for his channel to come back. They know the system is bad, they just don't care.

mrkramer 6y ago

This should've been implemented earlier it would save a lot of users time and hassle. Google has enormous engineering manpower and computing resources they can do pretty much anything.

vallas 6y ago

Are there any copyright on watchers comments?

villgax 6y ago

This should have been the norm & if someone else copyrights an older content then the new video is to be scrutinised not the creators content & otherwise a notice needs to be shown instead of a strike outright for valid claims

airhead969 6y ago

Will YouTube also warn creators when Telemundo or extortion trolls try to claim original works as their own?

_nalply 6y ago

A problem about copyright I encountered: I don't hear and need captions for videos. Sometimes material I have is not captioned. But when I resubmit them I can get a copyright warning. I stopped resubmitting to avoid Youtube blocking me. I could create throwaway accounts, but this is a hassle, and it's only me who benefits from captions. This is a case were indiscriminate enforcing of copyright is hurting people with disabilities.

intricatedetail 6y ago

Big labels are churning music at an unprecedented rate as if they wanted to copyright all possible combinations of chords / melodies (that universally sound good). At one point in the future it won't be possible to upload any new music without having to pay those label or just being outright censored. This is going to be a disaster for culture in few years and winners will be big corporations.

agilob 6y ago
> This is going to be a disaster for culture in few years and winners will be big corporations. Yes, that's the point. Can you even comprehend how much money two corporations will make off governments and individuals?

kevincox 6y ago

This is a huge improvement because very often by the time ContentID claims are resolved most of the subscribers and other early-serge viewers have seen the video so that money has basically been stolen from the creator and that video will not bring in much profit after that initial surge. It obviously isn't perfect but at least this lets the creator appeal/update the video before effectively cutting a large check to companies who very often don't deserve it.