8 ms·

"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,

by 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
    Would a copyright owner who doesn't use YouTube be subject to such binding arbitration? Presumably such an owner could hire a third party to discover hypothetically infringing content?
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      All parties involved would have to have agreed in writing to binding arbitration, so yes any non-party can do whatever they want. EDIT: IANAL and this is not financial advice. ;)
  - hellbannedguy 6y ago
    I don’t think people realize how companies/people use binding arbitration to their advantage? These companies pay the arbitrators. It’s usually done by mail, and their usually is no investigation into your case. The little guy wins only in egregious situations, and I have never met anyone who won especially going up against a big company? I get arbitration agreements for small companies, but not for huge monopolies, and scummy high interest rate card it cards. I had a run in with Columbia Credit Services, and still have a judgement following me over a credit card. Someone decided to look into the arbitration process of this company, and something like 99.9 percent of the time the customer lost. Even hired process servers whom would lie about serving the papers. All over a credit card sent in the mail. (Judgements last 10 years, and can be renewed. They tick away at 10% per year, if the creditor can’t immediately your life miserable, and take your stuff with a warrant.)
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      I think it can be okay with companies large or small if the contract is something that is negotiated with real opportunity for making changes like removing such agreements. Arbitration when done with the real consent of both parties and with the choice of a neutral party that isn't expecting more business from one of them can save time and money. However, it's tyrannical for both large and small companies to just force these things on people regardless of how vulnerable their business model is. I'd note that it has never occurred to me that arbitration would ever have been in my own interest.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Are you asking if a Record Company would sue someone on the Internet for copyright infringement? They are rather famous for doing so, and more than that, for asking for extremely large settlements. Sometimes calculating the "damages" in completely ridiculous ways like multiplying every view by $50,000. Don't forget what happened to cdrom.com. Literally sued out of existence because they allowed people to upload their own music to the cloud. They couldn't even share it, it was just uploaded to the cloud. Business completely destroyed.
  - derekp7 6y ago
    The way cdrom.com worked is you would upload a fingerprint of your music. Then if they already had a track that matched the fingerprint, they would link that to your account and not require you to upload the whole track. So this was technically not within the scope of what is allowed by copyright law, which is why they got in trouble. Which is kind of strange how when something is "technically" a violation, even if it is within the spirit of the law (or equiv. to what is allowed), the copyright hammer comes down. Whereas when something is "technically" NOT a copyright violation, the hammer still comes down (such as that company that used a bunch of tiny TV antennas to stream broadcast TV over the internet to other markets -- each customer was "renting" one of the dedicated TV antennas and using the internet as a "long cable". Or the company that would dedicate a DVD player to each customer and stream movies across the internet, again claiming the internet was just a "very long cable". They both got shut down hard even though they weren't "technically" in violation).
    - jandrese 6y ago
      The whole "they're not physically your bits" argument never made a lick of sense. They never would be after you uploaded them over the Internet. The whole case depended on the Doctrine of First Sale not applying to CDs, so that's what the courts agreed to. The record companies could have gone after second hand record stores, at least the ones that sold CDs, if they wanted to at that point but it was kind of unnecessary because they were already dying.
    - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
- devrand 6y ago
  Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. is basically what caused Content ID to come into existence, despite being ruled in Youtube's favor. It was going to go to appeal but a non-monetary settlement was agreed upon, which is why it's believed that Content ID came from that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The copyright owners are terrified by a new medium they don't understand for the most part so they extract their rents the way you know how. I made a dumb mashup containing spoken words and a song, I'm not sure whether that is fair use or not, but it got copyright striked for infringing upon something like "test song #3" by some record label. I couldn't even find out what that was.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > How does one sue a firm that never has humans available for interaction with the public? You don't sue a company by contacting customer service. I'm pretty sure they need to have some official representative on file somewhere, and you could probably serve them the lawsuit by sending a certified letter to their official address. The bigger barrier is Google/Youtube almost certainly have an arbitration clause in their terms of service.
kube-system 6y ago
Music copyrights are a minefield, even for old music, because it is often performed and rearranged, both of which would restart the copyright clock. And even if your church pays for performance licenses, it may not apply to when Google redistributes that performance. There is not a simple solution to the problem, even if there are 'mistakes' in the performance. Mistakes only make it more impossible of a problem to solve, because 2 notes could be the difference between a public domain work, and a rearrangement done last week. Did the performers make a mistake on the two notes that differentiate the works, or a different place? It's simply not possible to tell from the audio.
- mikece 6y ago
  "Music copyrights are a minefield, even for old music, because it is often performed and rearranged, both of which would restart the copyright clock." Most of what the choir was flagged on was Gregorian Chant, the settings of which trace their origins to Old Testament worship in the Temple of Jerusalem, possibly as far back as King David's tabernacle singers. The texts are all ancient (200 to 1600 years old) and the "new" settings were composed by William Byrd (1540 - 1623) and Palestrina (1525 - 1594). We're not talking about something that was recently reset... though that would explain why Morten Lauridsen's "O Magnum Mysterium" is almost never heard in Divine Worship (that setting isn't even 30 years old yet).
  - kube-system 6y ago
    There are undoubtably a ton of variations of those chants over the past 120 years and probably millions of recorded performances of those chants. Any of which would be subject to a new copyright on the date of that performance or rearrangement, regardless of the original date of the composition. A work being widely performed is a common situation that complicates attempts to solve the problem automatically. An infinite number of monkeys randomly singing a song will eventually sing one that sounds exactly like yours. How does an algorithm determine the difference in intent between my randomly singing choir of monkeys and your church's performance? It can't, as it compares audio -- it doesn't reason like humans do. Content ID doesn't know who your performers are, who recorded it, which sheet music your performers were reading from, where they made mistakes, and/or what licenses you have. (and FWIW, any given human watching the video wouldn't know much of this either) Two audibly identical works can be non-infringing, and two audibly differentiable works can be infringing. ContentID is an approximation -- it does not and never will have enough information to accurately judge everything.
doh 6y ago
Can't speak for YouTube, but we[0] solved issues like this by making public domain the first class citizen of the system. Once a work enters a public domain in any of the 195 countries, is no longer possible to register it in our system for that country. This prevents any rightsholder to abuse the system. It also allows platforms and creators to freely utilize public domain, royalty free and Creative Commons works in their content without worrying about situation like this. We also distinguish explicitly between publishing and sound recording/performance so one can register one without impacting the other. [0] https://pex.com https://pex.com
- brailsafe 6y ago
  This sounds like a sufficiently hard problem to devote a whole business to.
  - doh 6y ago
    If this is not a sarcasm then that’s what we did. If it is, I honestly believe that this will end up being better that it seems on the surface. We modeled the company on VISA. The idea is to bring three-sided marketplace to allow creators to do what they do best, create, without worrying about the laws and regulations across the world, platforms to bring new opportunities to express to creators and rightsholders to benefit from their content.
    - brailsafe 6y ago
      Not sarcasm, though in retrospect I can certainly see how my choice of sentence structure would indicate that. Seems like there's a lot of value here.
      - doh 6y ago
        Thank you. Appreciate it
- narrationbox 6y ago
  Do you have any public pricing or startup plans?
nullc 6y ago
> This system is clearly a CYA for Google: Sorry, the DMCA protections for google are almost absolute. Without a notice and takedown they are unexposed. Their handling might just be incompetence, or it might be a money maker (e.g. to force people to allow copyright holders to monetize their videos)... what it isn't is a CYA.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  YouTube's copyright system isn't the DMCA. The DMCA contains minimum protections for abuse (penalty of perjury), whereas YouTube's private system contains absolutely none. Content owners literally make money by flagging as much as possible, and there's no reason not to.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- kelnos 6y ago
  No, that's not correct. Google goes above and beyond what the DMCA requires in order to curry favor with the movie/TV/music studios. Presumably Content ID was a part of Google's bend-over-backwards settlement with Viacom when they sued. The DMCA process does not require content hosters to pro-actively guess whether or not newly-posted material might violate someone's copyright. It just requires that they provide an avenue for rightsholders to file claims, which have to be promptly acted upon. Google's system unnecessarily favors big players at the expense of individual creators. For all the flak the DMCA gets, its claim/counterclaim process is way better for creators than Google's system is.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    >For all the flak the DMCA gets, its claim/counterclaim process is way better for creators than Google's system is. I suspect this is the crack in the YT foundation that will allow for real competition to emerge. Several YouTube creators have formed a competing network specifically because of the BS they deal with regarding ContentID being so anti-creator.
elliotbnvl 6y ago
Great to see another TLMer out on the internet :) Sounds like you have an awesome choir (schola?)! Thanks for sharing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
drivebycomment 6y ago
If you know you're in the clear in terms of copyright, you can always dispute to clear the claim. You want to pay attention to what kind of claim it is - it can be against the performance (recording), or it can be against the composition. If it's performance, and your recording is a live recording of obviously different performance, it's a false match and you can dispute. If it's against the composition, if you are absolutely sure you're using the original composition and not any modern rearrangement, you can dispute. I've never lost my dispute so far.
suifbwish 6y ago
Why exactly do people keep thinking Google cares about the profit of its apps at all? They are notorious for killing off a ton of successful products that have a ton of users. I’m pretty sure they are using selling tech products as a front for whatever they are really doing. Probably building a temple to worship that AI demon they are creating.

by mikece 6y ago

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
  Would a copyright owner who doesn't use YouTube be subject to such binding arbitration? Presumably such an owner could hire a third party to discover hypothetically infringing content?
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    All parties involved would have to have agreed in writing to binding arbitration, so yes any non-party can do whatever they want. EDIT: IANAL and this is not financial advice. ;)
- hellbannedguy 6y ago
  I don’t think people realize how companies/people use binding arbitration to their advantage? These companies pay the arbitrators. It’s usually done by mail, and their usually is no investigation into your case. The little guy wins only in egregious situations, and I have never met anyone who won especially going up against a big company? I get arbitration agreements for small companies, but not for huge monopolies, and scummy high interest rate card it cards. I had a run in with Columbia Credit Services, and still have a judgement following me over a credit card. Someone decided to look into the arbitration process of this company, and something like 99.9 percent of the time the customer lost. Even hired process servers whom would lie about serving the papers. All over a credit card sent in the mail. (Judgements last 10 years, and can be renewed. They tick away at 10% per year, if the creditor can’t immediately your life miserable, and take your stuff with a warrant.)
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    I think it can be okay with companies large or small if the contract is something that is negotiated with real opportunity for making changes like removing such agreements. Arbitration when done with the real consent of both parties and with the choice of a neutral party that isn't expecting more business from one of them can save time and money. However, it's tyrannical for both large and small companies to just force these things on people regardless of how vulnerable their business model is. I'd note that it has never occurred to me that arbitration would ever have been in my own interest.
jandrese 6y ago
Are you asking if a Record Company would sue someone on the Internet for copyright infringement? They are rather famous for doing so, and more than that, for asking for extremely large settlements. Sometimes calculating the "damages" in completely ridiculous ways like multiplying every view by $50,000. Don't forget what happened to cdrom.com. Literally sued out of existence because they allowed people to upload their own music to the cloud. They couldn't even share it, it was just uploaded to the cloud. Business completely destroyed.
- derekp7 6y ago
  The way cdrom.com worked is you would upload a fingerprint of your music. Then if they already had a track that matched the fingerprint, they would link that to your account and not require you to upload the whole track. So this was technically not within the scope of what is allowed by copyright law, which is why they got in trouble. Which is kind of strange how when something is "technically" a violation, even if it is within the spirit of the law (or equiv. to what is allowed), the copyright hammer comes down. Whereas when something is "technically" NOT a copyright violation, the hammer still comes down (such as that company that used a bunch of tiny TV antennas to stream broadcast TV over the internet to other markets -- each customer was "renting" one of the dedicated TV antennas and using the internet as a "long cable". Or the company that would dedicate a DVD player to each customer and stream movies across the internet, again claiming the internet was just a "very long cable". They both got shut down hard even though they weren't "technically" in violation).
  - jandrese 6y ago
    The whole "they're not physically your bits" argument never made a lick of sense. They never would be after you uploaded them over the Internet. The whole case depended on the Doctrine of First Sale not applying to CDs, so that's what the courts agreed to. The record companies could have gone after second hand record stores, at least the ones that sold CDs, if they wanted to at that point but it was kind of unnecessary because they were already dying.
  - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
devrand 6y ago
Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. is basically what caused Content ID to come into existence, despite being ruled in Youtube's favor. It was going to go to appeal but a non-monetary settlement was agreed upon, which is why it's believed that Content ID came from that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._YouTube,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
mhh__ 6y ago
The copyright owners are terrified by a new medium they don't understand for the most part so they extract their rents the way you know how. I made a dumb mashup containing spoken words and a song, I'm not sure whether that is fair use or not, but it got copyright striked for infringing upon something like "test song #3" by some record label. I couldn't even find out what that was.
tablespoon 6y ago
> How does one sue a firm that never has humans available for interaction with the public? You don't sue a company by contacting customer service. I'm pretty sure they need to have some official representative on file somewhere, and you could probably serve them the lawsuit by sending a certified letter to their official address. The bigger barrier is Google/Youtube almost certainly have an arbitration clause in their terms of service.

kube-system 6y ago

Music copyrights are a minefield, even for old music, because it is often performed and rearranged, both of which would restart the copyright clock. And even if your church pays for performance licenses, it may not apply to when Google redistributes that performance. There is not a simple solution to the problem, even if there are 'mistakes' in the performance. Mistakes only make it more impossible of a problem to solve, because 2 notes could be the difference between a public domain work, and a rearrangement done last week. Did the performers make a mistake on the two notes that differentiate the works, or a different place? It's simply not possible to tell from the audio.

mikece 6y ago
"Music copyrights are a minefield, even for old music, because it is often performed and rearranged, both of which would restart the copyright clock." Most of what the choir was flagged on was Gregorian Chant, the settings of which trace their origins to Old Testament worship in the Temple of Jerusalem, possibly as far back as King David's tabernacle singers. The texts are all ancient (200 to 1600 years old) and the "new" settings were composed by William Byrd (1540 - 1623) and Palestrina (1525 - 1594). We're not talking about something that was recently reset... though that would explain why Morten Lauridsen's "O Magnum Mysterium" is almost never heard in Divine Worship (that setting isn't even 30 years old yet).
- kube-system 6y ago
  There are undoubtably a ton of variations of those chants over the past 120 years and probably millions of recorded performances of those chants. Any of which would be subject to a new copyright on the date of that performance or rearrangement, regardless of the original date of the composition. A work being widely performed is a common situation that complicates attempts to solve the problem automatically. An infinite number of monkeys randomly singing a song will eventually sing one that sounds exactly like yours. How does an algorithm determine the difference in intent between my randomly singing choir of monkeys and your church's performance? It can't, as it compares audio -- it doesn't reason like humans do. Content ID doesn't know who your performers are, who recorded it, which sheet music your performers were reading from, where they made mistakes, and/or what licenses you have. (and FWIW, any given human watching the video wouldn't know much of this either) Two audibly identical works can be non-infringing, and two audibly differentiable works can be infringing. ContentID is an approximation -- it does not and never will have enough information to accurately judge everything.

doh 6y ago

Can't speak for YouTube, but we[0] solved issues like this by making public domain the first class citizen of the system. Once a work enters a public domain in any of the 195 countries, is no longer possible to register it in our system for that country. This prevents any rightsholder to abuse the system. It also allows platforms and creators to freely utilize public domain, royalty free and Creative Commons works in their content without worrying about situation like this. We also distinguish explicitly between publishing and sound recording/performance so one can register one without impacting the other. [0] https://pex.com https://pex.com

brailsafe 6y ago
This sounds like a sufficiently hard problem to devote a whole business to.
- doh 6y ago
  If this is not a sarcasm then that’s what we did. If it is, I honestly believe that this will end up being better that it seems on the surface. We modeled the company on VISA. The idea is to bring three-sided marketplace to allow creators to do what they do best, create, without worrying about the laws and regulations across the world, platforms to bring new opportunities to express to creators and rightsholders to benefit from their content.
  - brailsafe 6y ago
    Not sarcasm, though in retrospect I can certainly see how my choice of sentence structure would indicate that. Seems like there's a lot of value here.
    - doh 6y ago
      Thank you. Appreciate it
narrationbox 6y ago
Do you have any public pricing or startup plans?

nullc 6y ago

> This system is clearly a CYA for Google: Sorry, the DMCA protections for google are almost absolute. Without a notice and takedown they are unexposed. Their handling might just be incompetence, or it might be a money maker (e.g. to force people to allow copyright holders to monetize their videos)... what it isn't is a CYA.

Someone1234 6y ago
YouTube's copyright system isn't the DMCA. The DMCA contains minimum protections for abuse (penalty of perjury), whereas YouTube's private system contains absolutely none. Content owners literally make money by flagging as much as possible, and there's no reason not to.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kelnos 6y ago
No, that's not correct. Google goes above and beyond what the DMCA requires in order to curry favor with the movie/TV/music studios. Presumably Content ID was a part of Google's bend-over-backwards settlement with Viacom when they sued. The DMCA process does not require content hosters to pro-actively guess whether or not newly-posted material might violate someone's copyright. It just requires that they provide an avenue for rightsholders to file claims, which have to be promptly acted upon. Google's system unnecessarily favors big players at the expense of individual creators. For all the flak the DMCA gets, its claim/counterclaim process is way better for creators than Google's system is.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  >For all the flak the DMCA gets, its claim/counterclaim process is way better for creators than Google's system is. I suspect this is the crack in the YT foundation that will allow for real competition to emerge. Several YouTube creators have formed a competing network specifically because of the BS they deal with regarding ContentID being so anti-creator.

elliotbnvl 6y ago

Great to see another TLMer out on the internet :) Sounds like you have an awesome choir (schola?)! Thanks for sharing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

drivebycomment 6y ago

If you know you're in the clear in terms of copyright, you can always dispute to clear the claim. You want to pay attention to what kind of claim it is - it can be against the performance (recording), or it can be against the composition. If it's performance, and your recording is a live recording of obviously different performance, it's a false match and you can dispute. If it's against the composition, if you are absolutely sure you're using the original composition and not any modern rearrangement, you can dispute. I've never lost my dispute so far.

suifbwish 6y ago

Why exactly do people keep thinking Google cares about the profit of its apps at all? They are notorious for killing off a ton of successful products that have a ton of users. I’m pretty sure they are using selling tech products as a front for whatever they are really doing. Probably building a temple to worship that AI demon they are creating.