> there are provisions in the CDMA precisely for that, and the platform is liable for indulging those in systematic cases. (assuming you mean DMCA) Yes, that h

> there are provisions in the CDMA precisely for that, and the platform is liable for indulging those in systematic cases. (assuming you mean DMCA) Yes, that has provisions, but YT copyright claims are explicitly not DMCA claims. This is intentional to both protect the content creator (lawsuits are expensive!) and YouTube. > YouTube lawyers must know that there’s a significant risk they’ll piss of a someone like a law professor and that they’ll use all their faculty to go after what is essentially fraud: YouTube can ban you from the platform at any time for any reason. While it's not good publicity, you don't have a legal right to be on YouTube or receive money from them. > Even if it’s not, they are risking a change in law. I doubt Google is happy with the status quo, actually, since it is not good for their creators. But with the system being as it is, they're doing what's best for them. > Compared that PR nightmare to having an engineer spend a few days to hack a “public domain” user that automatically accepts re-use, or re-train to distinguish interpretations from copies… I feel like I’m missing something For one, recognizing this music is not an easy problem. You'll need to be accurate in a wide variety of cases, lengths and qualities, which in itself is already very hard. But, just because it's that piece, it's not necessarily free: Recordings of these songs can be copy-righted. For example, Beethoven's music itself is free, but the recording performed by the Sydney opera is not. So you need to decide whether the uploader has rights to this specific recording, which is nearly impossible. And this is just the easy case. Fair use, for example, is a very gray area and something which can take courts years to decide. Same on whether a piece is derivative or different enough to be its own work. There is no chance for Google to automate away any of this.