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YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

561 points by baoyu 5y ago

1970-01-01 5y ago
The problem isn't that this video was quickly taken down by an algorithm, but that it cannot be restored by the same. Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube. We should hear from her why YouTube's systemic takedown problem can not be rectified.
- rogers18445 5y ago
  What incentive does she or anyone at youtube have to improve the situation? Creators aren't going to go anywhere else. And if you are someone who pushes through the changes internally no one who is in any position to benefit you will thank you and if it causes any legal problems you are going to be blamed.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    The downside of not having an automated system to restore takedowns: people being angry on twitter. Downside of having an automated restoration system that puts an actually offending piece of content back up: Multi-billion dollar lawsuits from the media cartels.
  - randombits0 5y ago
    She let’s you use her service as she sees fit. Best you can do is embarrass her, which is in the works.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > We should hear from her why YouTube's systemic takedown problem can not be rectified. We should pass legislation that forces them to rectify it, at the expense of hiring actual humans if they have to.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Until copyright length is something more sensible, there’s really very little YouTube can do to rectify the situation. When they’re looking at policing copyright on basically all modern works versus just the last 20 years worth of works, there has to be some automation involved. When you involve automation, you’re inevitably going to see dehumanizing situations like this. They can’t just decide to not uphold the law though.
    - t-3 5y ago
      > They can’t just decide to not uphold the law though. Why is that? Google is not, nor should they be, a law enforcement agency. There are multiple law enforcement agencies and interested individuals/organizations (the copyright holders) who should bear the responsibility for enforcing copyright. Putting the onus on the "public square" to police speech is the worst solution for all parties with the possible exception of copyright trolls.
      - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
        There's a name for deliberately hosting a service that blatantly disregards copyright enforcement. It's called "contributory infringement", and the litigation of which will have existential amounts of potential damages.
        colonwqbang 5y ago
        Source on this? I thought this was the whole point of US laws like DMCA. If you comply with all reasonable and lawful takedown requests, you are supposed to be safe. It particularly shouldn't require YOU as web host to try to ascertain the legal status of every 100-year old sound clip. That's not realistic, as Youtube's experience clearly seems to show. It does require you to respond when someone sends a signed document claiming it's theirs. I'm not a lawyer etc., would be happy to have this explained if I'm wrong.
        5y ago
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  I wonder too why there is no option to pre-file an assertion of fair use or public domain material and have it acknowledged as filed by YT. Some people put disclaimers in the opening frames of their video or in the description but there's no indication that YouTube acknowledges this in any way.
  - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
    When rightsholders give notice of alleged infringement, YouTube can't simply be like "well, they say it's fair use, so we're going to ignore this." If they did, they'd be knowingly contributing to copyright infringement and lose out on safe harbor provisions.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      I didn't propose that, so I'm not sure what point you're making. I just said that YT should receive and acknowledge claims of fair use or public domain status. Then, if a copyright claim arises, video uploaders know that YT is already aware of the asserted status and will evaluate it alongside the copyright claim, instead of assuming the latter to be true by default.
- RyJones 5y ago
  I have a video with a copyright claim by a third party. The music on the video is from the YouTube library they provide creators. You would think YouTube would recognize a library they own?
  - type0 5y ago
    > You would think YouTube would recognize a library they own? Happens all the time, they don't give a shit, in fact I'm starting to suspect that some music creators do this on purpose.
    - RyJones 5y ago
      You're obviously right; the claim is by Syntax Creative, on behalf of Pro Piano Records. The content is 14 Bagatelles, Op. 6: Lento by Jerome Lowenthal. I made the video[0] public so people can see it, but I hate the idea that these creeps get to make money off of a scam on my part, so I usually mark them private. 0: https://youtu.be/a__9f4yh4qU https://youtu.be/a__9f4yh4qU
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
In the case of the Happy Birthday song, falsely claiming rights over public domain content was expensive for the putative rights-holders.[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warner-music-lawsuit-settlement-idUSKCN0VI1PE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warner-music-lawsuit-sett...
- crazypyro 5y ago
  Doesn't seem that expensive when the article also mentions they were making $2 million per year in royalties.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  It says they took in over $2 million a year, so the false claim still likely made them millions over the decades.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
History is inconvenient.
- verdverm 5y ago
  I only learn through hands on experience
munk-a 5y ago
I know that music rights is a complicated subject with no really easy answers[1] but there's got to be a way to do it better than the current system where you need to chase after platforms to actually get them to unblock your misclassified videos. 1. Unless you believe artists should make money solely from performances and not from streamed music which I was sorta onboard with until streaming-music-as-a-service turned into a gigantic industry.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  This is my least popular opinion, but NFTs should have been applied here. We desperately need a legally binding, decentralized and distributed way for us to attest ownership of digital products. Sure, sure, "blockchain bad" and "don't apply crypto to everything", but this genuinely seems to me like the most mutually beneficial way to proceed.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    What problem do NFTs really solve here? They just make sure that a ledger (in this case, of rights) is immutable but...is anyone worried that record companies are mutating the rights to begin with? It seems like what would really help would be to make rights public and easily accessible. However, making the rights platform into an NFT platform specifically wouldn't really help.
  - peab 5y ago
    How would it work?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thanhhaimai 5y ago
    When you start talking about "legally binding" then the "decentralized" part doesn't apply anymore. You're relying on government enforcement for the "legally binding" part; whether the system is centralized or decentralized is a moot point.
  - 5y ago
jazzyjackson 5y ago
This mentions something that has always irked me, YouTube trying to be informative about who the music is licensed by. For one, it's completely useless on classical piano music because the Content ID algo finds similarity in a dozen different recordings. But even when there is one canonical recording, such as Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, I'm informed that the music is licensed by: (on behalf of Sony BMG Music UK); UMPI, Kobalt Music Publishing, LatinAutor, Warner Chappell, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, LatinAutor - UMPG, SOLAR Music Rights Management, AMRA, UMPG Publishing, CMRRA, LatinAutorPerf, LatinAutor - Warner Chappell, and 15 Music Rights Societies What is happening here? Does YouTube have legal arrangements with all of these bodies to make sure they get their penny per kiloview?
- djthorpe 5y ago
  In my vague understanding, there are five parties: 1. The viewer or listener of the music, you might or might not get the right to listen to music in your "territory" or country, and often the music is monetised which means you get ads, or a portion of your subscription revenue is apportioned to the "view"; 2. YouTube itself, whom decides on the viewers' right to listen to the music based on their complicated set of algorithms or "claims" on the music track. They also have a complicated database of rights which includes not only rights holder relationships, but the much of the music catalogue itself; 3. A publisher of a piece of music. This copyright is for the composition (sheet music), and often YouTube may be able to work out the publishing right in a territory based on the melody match. So when you say "Content ID algo finds similarity in a dozen different recordings" this is in fact by design. Their melody matching system is in play as often publishers get paid on the composition; 4. The performance copyright of the music. This copyright is for the actual performance - whether it be live, on CD or MP3. Usually this is the record company, they will often upload or provide the music to YouTube and expect to get paid for performances. Content ID will then "claim" any third party copies of the performance and monetize them too (or sometimes block, depending on the territory of viewer, and what the publisher and performance owner wants to do for that territory); 5. Most countries also have music societies who collect on behalf of artists. So GEMA in Germany or PRS in the UK will collect money per view and by some complicated reporting will pay artists directly some small pittance every year if they are lucky. Some countries don't have societies which means YouTube doesn't need to pay. Where YouTube does not have an agreement in a country (less and less now) the music will not be monetized or may be blocked. There are huge data reports which move around to keep this system going - and the collecting societies themselves work together to ensure that the money for a view of "Never Gonna Give Up" is passed to PRS who then occasionally will pay Rick Astley. It's a nice earner for a minority of musicians to have this income when all the cover versions and MP3 sales have dried up. YouTube does have a lot of agreements with all the other parties and it's a constant job to renew and renegotiate these contracts constantly. You can see that in the rights notice you mention, this includes all the territories in which there are rights established: it's mind-boggling. No-one wants to lose control of this system and I imagine that makes it brittle and very difficult to disrupt...it's lawyers all the way down. I hope that is not all too misleading!
matheusmoreira 5y ago
A 1914 work causing copyright problems in 2021. That's over 100 years. You gotta be kidding me.
- throwuxiytayq 5y ago
  Here's to another hundred years of corporate rent-seeking!
EvanAnderson 5y ago
Presumably this will encourage the creator of the 1914 work to create new works.
- soperj 5y ago
  I personally have been waiting for new John McCormack material for a long long time.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jkonline 5y ago
    See, by siding with just McCormick, though, you're absolutely missing out on all the great Schmick content. They're Collab albums, produced much later and (of course) in John's heyday, are amazing. Spicy, even.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Yeah. He'll sell his records, make his money. After a while he'll have to create more if he wants to earn more. It totally won't enable over a hundred years of rent seeking for him, descendants who could inherit his property after he's dead and of course the monopolistic copyright giants.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    That's obviously facile. He's dead, and unable to make decisions anymore. I, on the other hand, am alive and would definitely have decided to become a world-renowned operatic singer, if only copyright wasn't so short that I couldn't pass on the rights to my artistic creations to my children's children's children's children's children's children's children. I could pass it on to my children's children's children's children's children's children, but I worry about their kids. Copyright isn't sufficiently long enough for that so I decided to produce no art at all instead, and become an engineer to produce trade secrets that can last indefinitely. We definitely need an extension to copyright to incentivize long-term planners like me to create more art. /s
fsckboy 5y ago
speaking of take down notices... I don't know the full details, but as a point of interest, the Ig Nobel awards was a project at MIT, and after a dispute between the editor, Marc Abrahams, and MIT, he claimed to own the intellectual property rights and MIT dropped it and he moved it to Harvard where he is an alum. here from "The Tech" http://tech.mit.edu/V115/N48/ignobel.48n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V115/N48/ignobel.48n.html "Legal rift takes awards from MIT For the past four years, the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded at MIT, by the Journal of Irreproducible Results and its successor, the Annals of Improbable Research. However, a legal dispute that arose between the MIT Museum - the publisher of AIR - and its editor, Marc Abrahams, caused the ceremony to be moved from MIT to Harvard. Abrahams and the MIT Museum produced AIR for a year without a contract between them, but the museum wanted to create another organization to publish the magazine because handling the AIR required too much effort from the museum staff, said Warren A. Seamans, director of the MIT Museum. Last March, contract negotiations broke down, and Abrahams claimed sole control of AIR. To avoid a lawsuit, MIT abandoned the magazine and the Ig Nobel prizes."
thombat 5y ago
Since the Ig Nobel awards have a flexible set of categories, YouTube might now be a shoo-in for the 2022 prize for Legal Fiction.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Maybe their own whole category.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Here’s what triggered this: The ceremony includes bits of a recording (of tenor John McCormack singing “Funiculi, Funicula”) made in the year 1914. The Corporate Takedown > YouTube’s takedown algorithm claims that the following corporations all own the copyright to that audio recording that was MADE IN THE YEAR 1914: “SME, INgrooves (on behalf of Emerald); Wise Music Group, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, UMPG Publishing, PEDL, Kobalt Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, Sony ATV Publishing, and 1 Music Rights Societies” So what's going on here? Did some record company reissue the song later on CD, so YouTube is treating it like it was released at a later date than it was? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...: > All works first published or released before January 1, 1926, have lost their copyright protection, effective January 1, 2021. Google probably should compile a list of public domain recordings to act as a blacklist for YouTube copyright claims. Maybe that should even be legal a requirement for such automatic enforcement systems. If they partner with some library or national archive, such a project could help with media preservation efforts.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > All works first published or released before January 1, 1926, have lost their copyright protection, effective January 1, 2021. That's not the entire story. Sound recordings are a separate category, and pre-1923 sound recordings have a special clause that means they don't enter public domain until 2022. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1401 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1401
  - gundmc 5y ago
    So this is WAI per current copyright laws?
    - cybersol 5y ago
      For now, at least until they extend it another 100 years.
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hulitu 5y ago
Mivkry Mouse strikes again.
phendrenad2 5y ago
In previous years, we'd look at stodgy bureaucratic systems like this and think "Just wait until Google and/or venture capital disrupts them!" But now it is Google and venture capital perpetuating the slow, banal, bureaucratic injustice. The good news is, there's no reason to believe that Google won't also be disrupted eventually. It's sort of happening already, with people voluntarily deciding to not use music in their videos, which makes YouTube less valuable as an asset, something Google brought upon themselves.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Does Google actually gain anything from enforcing IP, or is it they stand to lose lots by getting persecuted by the powerful IP lobby (Disney, etc), which is the real driver of all this?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    They pocket every penny they fail to spend on checking for spurious claims.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I'd assume them being very cooperative with rights holders makes it a lot more difficult for other companies to enter the market and disrupt them. If tomorrow you come with an alternative that pleases customers but irks IP lobbies, you'll be fighting that battle alone while Youtube continues business as usual. Today the only alternative is pirating related, and it is notoriously a tough business model now that financial system players can just cut offending companies off their network.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  Anecdotally, I think it's here. Tiktok is wildly popular and more informative these days. Having to fit a concept in 3 mins doesn't allow for nuance, but that aside, it's condensed and exactly the type the younger generation seems to prefer.
nomaxx117 5y ago
Ingroove is known to be a fraudulent troll. They have been doing this to massive amount of creators, in many cases asserting rights to music they do not own the rights to.
- zuminator 5y ago
  If we can call copyright infringement theft, then improperly asserting rights to media one has no rights to ought to be considered theft against the Commons or the valid rightsholder, and a flagrant repeat violator should be subject to punitive damages. Charges of fraud and identity theft should also be on the table.
  - nomaxx117 5y ago
    I would agree completely. There are documented instances of this entity being called out by the parties who actually own the rights to the music. I described them as fraudulent for a reason: what they are doing is fraud.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Perhaps his estate sold it to a cartoon mouse and it is never going to be public domain.
NKosmatos 5y ago
This phrase right here is what’s wrong with all major sites/networks/apps/services >>> “We have so far been unable to find a human at YouTube who can fix that.” Replace YouTube with Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google and it pretty much sums up the problem of moderation or human decision. This can be solved very easily by these big corporations, by using some of the millions they have as profit, by hiring more people who will take the results of the algorithms and have a second look at all appeals by using common sense :-)
- amelius 5y ago
  > by hiring more people who will take the results of the algorithms and have a second look at all appeals by using common sense Who wants to work for these companies anymore?
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    H1B seekers. But that is a whole can of worms.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
twirlock 5y ago
Trump killed the TPP, but because Google is a monopoly and functionally a state entity, Google gets to veto that decision and simply implement draconian IP law outside of any democratic oversight.
mhh__ 5y ago
I made a mashup once that got copyright struck on the basis that it infringed up on "Test sound no 1" or something ridiculous like that.
- MikeDelta 5y ago
  I heard similar cases where videos got taken down because of the sound of church bells, rain, or even white noise [0]. [0] www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523.amp
10GBps 5y ago
YouTube has so many bad practices beyond just this kind of stuff. There are a lot of reasons not to go there any more. We need suitable alternatives. Maybe something decentralized in nature.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
The most true thing of this millennium is that copyright ruins everything it can.
dr-detroit 5y ago
All you have to do is demonetize, shill.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
This happens in the Synthesizer world. It started with Starsky Carr's channel has had a takedown because he did a filter sweep on his synthesizer, and YouTube removed it because it violated Chemical Brother's works, but it's happened to a lot more since then. Soon a single stroke of a piano will be all it takes to take down videos :(
hsuduebc2 5y ago
YouTube is such a cringe.
hsuduebc2 5y ago
Daily remainder that corporations even from silicon valley are as bad as others and their solely purpose is to make money.
LightG 5y ago
I remember a time before youtube. Recording tunes on a tape recorder as a child. It's not so fanciful to project that history to the digital now and run with it. I'm rambling, but I'm over youtube. I'll access it via third party tools stripping adverts, and recording (just like I did as a child) but I don't see them as necessary. Youtube was a delight before. And generally still can be. But not necessary and increaslingly clunky and way too overly advert dominated. Maybe they should rebrand it as a historical archive and be done with it. If they can't make the copyright work, sunset it like almost everything else and let other players emerge who can. /endrant
h0nd 5y ago
'Funnily', youtube does not tell me that the video has been deleted. youtube tells me that the video has been made unavailable in my country by the uploader.

561 points by baoyu 5y ago

1970-01-01 5y ago

The problem isn't that this video was quickly taken down by an algorithm, but that it cannot be restored by the same. Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube. We should hear from her why YouTube's systemic takedown problem can not be rectified.

rogers18445 5y ago
What incentive does she or anyone at youtube have to improve the situation? Creators aren't going to go anywhere else. And if you are someone who pushes through the changes internally no one who is in any position to benefit you will thank you and if it causes any legal problems you are going to be blamed.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The downside of not having an automated system to restore takedowns: people being angry on twitter. Downside of having an automated restoration system that puts an actually offending piece of content back up: Multi-billion dollar lawsuits from the media cartels.
- randombits0 5y ago
  She let’s you use her service as she sees fit. Best you can do is embarrass her, which is in the works.
lamontcg 5y ago
> We should hear from her why YouTube's systemic takedown problem can not be rectified. We should pass legislation that forces them to rectify it, at the expense of hiring actual humans if they have to.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Until copyright length is something more sensible, there’s really very little YouTube can do to rectify the situation. When they’re looking at policing copyright on basically all modern works versus just the last 20 years worth of works, there has to be some automation involved. When you involve automation, you’re inevitably going to see dehumanizing situations like this. They can’t just decide to not uphold the law though.
  - t-3 5y ago
    > They can’t just decide to not uphold the law though. Why is that? Google is not, nor should they be, a law enforcement agency. There are multiple law enforcement agencies and interested individuals/organizations (the copyright holders) who should bear the responsibility for enforcing copyright. Putting the onus on the "public square" to police speech is the worst solution for all parties with the possible exception of copyright trolls.
    - ThrustVectoring 5y ago
      There's a name for deliberately hosting a service that blatantly disregards copyright enforcement. It's called "contributory infringement", and the litigation of which will have existential amounts of potential damages.
      - colonwqbang 5y ago
        Source on this? I thought this was the whole point of US laws like DMCA. If you comply with all reasonable and lawful takedown requests, you are supposed to be safe. It particularly shouldn't require YOU as web host to try to ascertain the legal status of every 100-year old sound clip. That's not realistic, as Youtube's experience clearly seems to show. It does require you to respond when someone sends a signed document claiming it's theirs. I'm not a lawyer etc., would be happy to have this explained if I'm wrong.
        5y ago
anigbrowl 5y ago
I wonder too why there is no option to pre-file an assertion of fair use or public domain material and have it acknowledged as filed by YT. Some people put disclaimers in the opening frames of their video or in the description but there's no indication that YouTube acknowledges this in any way.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  When rightsholders give notice of alleged infringement, YouTube can't simply be like "well, they say it's fair use, so we're going to ignore this." If they did, they'd be knowingly contributing to copyright infringement and lose out on safe harbor provisions.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    I didn't propose that, so I'm not sure what point you're making. I just said that YT should receive and acknowledge claims of fair use or public domain status. Then, if a copyright claim arises, video uploaders know that YT is already aware of the asserted status and will evaluate it alongside the copyright claim, instead of assuming the latter to be true by default.
RyJones 5y ago
I have a video with a copyright claim by a third party. The music on the video is from the YouTube library they provide creators. You would think YouTube would recognize a library they own?
- type0 5y ago
  > You would think YouTube would recognize a library they own? Happens all the time, they don't give a shit, in fact I'm starting to suspect that some music creators do this on purpose.
  - RyJones 5y ago
    You're obviously right; the claim is by Syntax Creative, on behalf of Pro Piano Records. The content is 14 Bagatelles, Op. 6: Lento by Jerome Lowenthal. I made the video[0] public so people can see it, but I hate the idea that these creeps get to make money off of a scam on my part, so I usually mark them private. 0: https://youtu.be/a__9f4yh4qU https://youtu.be/a__9f4yh4qU

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago

In the case of the Happy Birthday song, falsely claiming rights over public domain content was expensive for the putative rights-holders.[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warner-music-lawsuit-settlement-idUSKCN0VI1PE https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warner-music-lawsuit-sett...

crazypyro 5y ago
Doesn't seem that expensive when the article also mentions they were making $2 million per year in royalties.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
It says they took in over $2 million a year, so the false claim still likely made them millions over the decades.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

History is inconvenient.

verdverm 5y ago
I only learn through hands on experience

munk-a 5y ago

I know that music rights is a complicated subject with no really easy answers[1] but there's got to be a way to do it better than the current system where you need to chase after platforms to actually get them to unblock your misclassified videos. 1. Unless you believe artists should make money solely from performances and not from streamed music which I was sorta onboard with until streaming-music-as-a-service turned into a gigantic industry.

smoldesu 5y ago
This is my least popular opinion, but NFTs should have been applied here. We desperately need a legally binding, decentralized and distributed way for us to attest ownership of digital products. Sure, sure, "blockchain bad" and "don't apply crypto to everything", but this genuinely seems to me like the most mutually beneficial way to proceed.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  What problem do NFTs really solve here? They just make sure that a ledger (in this case, of rights) is immutable but...is anyone worried that record companies are mutating the rights to begin with? It seems like what would really help would be to make rights public and easily accessible. However, making the rights platform into an NFT platform specifically wouldn't really help.
- peab 5y ago
  How would it work?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thanhhaimai 5y ago
  When you start talking about "legally binding" then the "decentralized" part doesn't apply anymore. You're relying on government enforcement for the "legally binding" part; whether the system is centralized or decentralized is a moot point.
- 5y ago

jazzyjackson 5y ago

This mentions something that has always irked me, YouTube trying to be informative about who the music is licensed by. For one, it's completely useless on classical piano music because the Content ID algo finds similarity in a dozen different recordings. But even when there is one canonical recording, such as Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, I'm informed that the music is licensed by: (on behalf of Sony BMG Music UK); UMPI, Kobalt Music Publishing, LatinAutor, Warner Chappell, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, LatinAutor - UMPG, SOLAR Music Rights Management, AMRA, UMPG Publishing, CMRRA, LatinAutorPerf, LatinAutor - Warner Chappell, and 15 Music Rights Societies What is happening here? Does YouTube have legal arrangements with all of these bodies to make sure they get their penny per kiloview?

djthorpe 5y ago
In my vague understanding, there are five parties: 1. The viewer or listener of the music, you might or might not get the right to listen to music in your "territory" or country, and often the music is monetised which means you get ads, or a portion of your subscription revenue is apportioned to the "view"; 2. YouTube itself, whom decides on the viewers' right to listen to the music based on their complicated set of algorithms or "claims" on the music track. They also have a complicated database of rights which includes not only rights holder relationships, but the much of the music catalogue itself; 3. A publisher of a piece of music. This copyright is for the composition (sheet music), and often YouTube may be able to work out the publishing right in a territory based on the melody match. So when you say "Content ID algo finds similarity in a dozen different recordings" this is in fact by design. Their melody matching system is in play as often publishers get paid on the composition; 4. The performance copyright of the music. This copyright is for the actual performance - whether it be live, on CD or MP3. Usually this is the record company, they will often upload or provide the music to YouTube and expect to get paid for performances. Content ID will then "claim" any third party copies of the performance and monetize them too (or sometimes block, depending on the territory of viewer, and what the publisher and performance owner wants to do for that territory); 5. Most countries also have music societies who collect on behalf of artists. So GEMA in Germany or PRS in the UK will collect money per view and by some complicated reporting will pay artists directly some small pittance every year if they are lucky. Some countries don't have societies which means YouTube doesn't need to pay. Where YouTube does not have an agreement in a country (less and less now) the music will not be monetized or may be blocked. There are huge data reports which move around to keep this system going - and the collecting societies themselves work together to ensure that the money for a view of "Never Gonna Give Up" is passed to PRS who then occasionally will pay Rick Astley. It's a nice earner for a minority of musicians to have this income when all the cover versions and MP3 sales have dried up. YouTube does have a lot of agreements with all the other parties and it's a constant job to renew and renegotiate these contracts constantly. You can see that in the rights notice you mention, this includes all the territories in which there are rights established: it's mind-boggling. No-one wants to lose control of this system and I imagine that makes it brittle and very difficult to disrupt...it's lawyers all the way down. I hope that is not all too misleading!

matheusmoreira 5y ago

A 1914 work causing copyright problems in 2021. That's over 100 years. You gotta be kidding me.

throwuxiytayq 5y ago
Here's to another hundred years of corporate rent-seeking!

EvanAnderson 5y ago

Presumably this will encourage the creator of the 1914 work to create new works.

soperj 5y ago
I personally have been waiting for new John McCormack material for a long long time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jkonline 5y ago
  See, by siding with just McCormick, though, you're absolutely missing out on all the great Schmick content. They're Collab albums, produced much later and (of course) in John's heyday, are amazing. Spicy, even.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah. He'll sell his records, make his money. After a while he'll have to create more if he wants to earn more. It totally won't enable over a hundred years of rent seeking for him, descendants who could inherit his property after he's dead and of course the monopolistic copyright giants.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  That's obviously facile. He's dead, and unable to make decisions anymore. I, on the other hand, am alive and would definitely have decided to become a world-renowned operatic singer, if only copyright wasn't so short that I couldn't pass on the rights to my artistic creations to my children's children's children's children's children's children's children. I could pass it on to my children's children's children's children's children's children, but I worry about their kids. Copyright isn't sufficiently long enough for that so I decided to produce no art at all instead, and become an engineer to produce trade secrets that can last indefinitely. We definitely need an extension to copyright to incentivize long-term planners like me to create more art. /s

fsckboy 5y ago

speaking of take down notices... I don't know the full details, but as a point of interest, the Ig Nobel awards was a project at MIT, and after a dispute between the editor, Marc Abrahams, and MIT, he claimed to own the intellectual property rights and MIT dropped it and he moved it to Harvard where he is an alum. here from "The Tech" http://tech.mit.edu/V115/N48/ignobel.48n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V115/N48/ignobel.48n.html "Legal rift takes awards from MIT For the past four years, the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded at MIT, by the Journal of Irreproducible Results and its successor, the Annals of Improbable Research. However, a legal dispute that arose between the MIT Museum - the publisher of AIR - and its editor, Marc Abrahams, caused the ceremony to be moved from MIT to Harvard. Abrahams and the MIT Museum produced AIR for a year without a contract between them, but the museum wanted to create another organization to publish the magazine because handling the AIR required too much effort from the museum staff, said Warren A. Seamans, director of the MIT Museum. Last March, contract negotiations broke down, and Abrahams claimed sole control of AIR. To avoid a lawsuit, MIT abandoned the magazine and the Ig Nobel prizes."

thombat 5y ago

Since the Ig Nobel awards have a flexible set of categories, YouTube might now be a shoo-in for the 2022 prize for Legal Fiction.

ncmncm 5y ago
Maybe their own whole category.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Here’s what triggered this: The ceremony includes bits of a recording (of tenor John McCormack singing “Funiculi, Funicula”) made in the year 1914. The Corporate Takedown > YouTube’s takedown algorithm claims that the following corporations all own the copyright to that audio recording that was MADE IN THE YEAR 1914: “SME, INgrooves (on behalf of Emerald); Wise Music Group, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, UMPG Publishing, PEDL, Kobalt Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, Sony ATV Publishing, and 1 Music Rights Societies” So what's going on here? Did some record company reissue the song later on CD, so YouTube is treating it like it was released at a later date than it was? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...: > All works first published or released before January 1, 1926, have lost their copyright protection, effective January 1, 2021. Google probably should compile a list of public domain recordings to act as a blacklist for YouTube copyright claims. Maybe that should even be legal a requirement for such automatic enforcement systems. If they partner with some library or national archive, such a project could help with media preservation efforts.

jcranmer 5y ago
> All works first published or released before January 1, 1926, have lost their copyright protection, effective January 1, 2021. That's not the entire story. Sound recordings are a separate category, and pre-1923 sound recordings have a special clause that means they don't enter public domain until 2022. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1401 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1401
- gundmc 5y ago
  So this is WAI per current copyright laws?
  - cybersol 5y ago
    For now, at least until they extend it another 100 years.
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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hulitu 5y ago

Mivkry Mouse strikes again.

phendrenad2 5y ago

In previous years, we'd look at stodgy bureaucratic systems like this and think "Just wait until Google and/or venture capital disrupts them!" But now it is Google and venture capital perpetuating the slow, banal, bureaucratic injustice. The good news is, there's no reason to believe that Google won't also be disrupted eventually. It's sort of happening already, with people voluntarily deciding to not use music in their videos, which makes YouTube less valuable as an asset, something Google brought upon themselves.

pphysch 5y ago
Does Google actually gain anything from enforcing IP, or is it they stand to lose lots by getting persecuted by the powerful IP lobby (Disney, etc), which is the real driver of all this?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  They pocket every penny they fail to spend on checking for spurious claims.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I'd assume them being very cooperative with rights holders makes it a lot more difficult for other companies to enter the market and disrupt them. If tomorrow you come with an alternative that pleases customers but irks IP lobbies, you'll be fighting that battle alone while Youtube continues business as usual. Today the only alternative is pirating related, and it is notoriously a tough business model now that financial system players can just cut offending companies off their network.
8ytecoder 5y ago
Anecdotally, I think it's here. Tiktok is wildly popular and more informative these days. Having to fit a concept in 3 mins doesn't allow for nuance, but that aside, it's condensed and exactly the type the younger generation seems to prefer.

nomaxx117 5y ago

Ingroove is known to be a fraudulent troll. They have been doing this to massive amount of creators, in many cases asserting rights to music they do not own the rights to.

zuminator 5y ago
If we can call copyright infringement theft, then improperly asserting rights to media one has no rights to ought to be considered theft against the Commons or the valid rightsholder, and a flagrant repeat violator should be subject to punitive damages. Charges of fraud and identity theft should also be on the table.
- nomaxx117 5y ago
  I would agree completely. There are documented instances of this entity being called out by the parties who actually own the rights to the music. I described them as fraudulent for a reason: what they are doing is fraud.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Perhaps his estate sold it to a cartoon mouse and it is never going to be public domain.

NKosmatos 5y ago

This phrase right here is what’s wrong with all major sites/networks/apps/services >>> “We have so far been unable to find a human at YouTube who can fix that.” Replace YouTube with Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google and it pretty much sums up the problem of moderation or human decision. This can be solved very easily by these big corporations, by using some of the millions they have as profit, by hiring more people who will take the results of the algorithms and have a second look at all appeals by using common sense :-)

amelius 5y ago
> by hiring more people who will take the results of the algorithms and have a second look at all appeals by using common sense Who wants to work for these companies anymore?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  H1B seekers. But that is a whole can of worms.

deleted 5y ago

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twirlock 5y ago

Trump killed the TPP, but because Google is a monopoly and functionally a state entity, Google gets to veto that decision and simply implement draconian IP law outside of any democratic oversight.

mhh__ 5y ago

I made a mashup once that got copyright struck on the basis that it infringed up on "Test sound no 1" or something ridiculous like that.

MikeDelta 5y ago
I heard similar cases where videos got taken down because of the sound of church bells, rain, or even white noise [0]. [0] www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523.amp

10GBps 5y ago

YouTube has so many bad practices beyond just this kind of stuff. There are a lot of reasons not to go there any more. We need suitable alternatives. Maybe something decentralized in nature.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

The most true thing of this millennium is that copyright ruins everything it can.

dr-detroit 5y ago

All you have to do is demonetize, shill.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

This happens in the Synthesizer world. It started with Starsky Carr's channel has had a takedown because he did a filter sweep on his synthesizer, and YouTube removed it because it violated Chemical Brother's works, but it's happened to a lot more since then. Soon a single stroke of a piano will be all it takes to take down videos :(

hsuduebc2 5y ago

YouTube is such a cringe.

hsuduebc2 5y ago

Daily remainder that corporations even from silicon valley are as bad as others and their solely purpose is to make money.

LightG 5y ago

I remember a time before youtube. Recording tunes on a tape recorder as a child. It's not so fanciful to project that history to the digital now and run with it. I'm rambling, but I'm over youtube. I'll access it via third party tools stripping adverts, and recording (just like I did as a child) but I don't see them as necessary. Youtube was a delight before. And generally still can be. But not necessary and increaslingly clunky and way too overly advert dominated. Maybe they should rebrand it as a historical archive and be done with it. If they can't make the copyright work, sunset it like almost everything else and let other players emerge who can. /endrant

h0nd 5y ago

'Funnily', youtube does not tell me that the video has been deleted. youtube tells me that the video has been made unavailable in my country by the uploader.