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I am guessing that YouTube isn't the real problem here. If everyone self-hosted their videos, the first thing a media company would do is hire a bunch of progr

I am guessing that YouTube isn't the real problem here. If everyone self-hosted their videos, the first thing a media company would do is hire a bunch of programmers to crawl the internet, download the videos (probably in a buggy way costing you megabucks in transfer fees), scan the audio against my music library, and auto-send DMCA takedowns to the ISP that owns the IP address. If it was successful, I'd probably spin it off into its own company, and charge others to use it. Congratulations, you have Content ID! And Google already did this. I think that moving off YouTube would be the same story as other filesharing systems. Napster worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then (and my memory is foggy here) Limewire/Kazaa/etc. worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then public Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then private Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until someone accidentally invited the lawyers. That's exactly what would happen if everyone started hosting video files on their personal domains. It would work for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. (Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy.) Anyway, the problem is copyright law. Society would probably not implode if you said "movies and music are no longer copyrightable", and these probably would all go away overnight. What you'd see instead would be really competitive streaming services, and probably a lot of product placement in music and movies. (Except, you already see these things. This comment was sponsored by SquarespaceVPN! Sign up now with this offer code that I'm going to say is limited to the first 100 users but is actually unlimited because who is going to deny a customer? Also, did you know that Hacker News knows your username when you log in? Install our snakeoil VPN widget thing for only $34.99 per month and ... some security shit will happen to prevent that! Hackers! News! Scary!)

mschuster91 5y ago
> Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy. They have it on their radar, but compared to torrents Usenet is so cumbersome to use it's definitely not a large enough market to waste resources on.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Very good. I'm looking forward to having to switch back to Gopher at some point to evade the lawyers for another couple years.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
ISPs are only required to forward the DMCA notice to you (unless they suck and just want to drop you). The only reason the DMCA notices took down Napster et al. is because the requests are valid. You could build Content ID for the real internet but it would only as much as you can intimidate each individual creator/site operator. They are free to at least decide to defend themselves if they wanted to. Under the Youtube ContentID that really isn't an option. Plus non-US creators could care a lot less since enforcing DMCA/copyright internationally is going to be even more costly.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Absent a VPN, ISPs have teamed up (as in, are often ran by the same media giants sending the request) to give customers a 3/6-strike policy for DMCA takedowns. So people self-hosting could eventually mean no internet for them (at least, for as long as the internet isn't considered a utility). https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comcast-we-wont-terminate-your-account-under-six-strikes-well-just-block-every-single-website.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comca...
- jrockway 5y ago
  It depends on what the ISP wants to do, right? They could forward the request along, or they could say "whoaaaa we don't want this customer" and turn you off with no appeal process. They have an obligation to forward the notice to the end user, but the end user doesn't have the right to have Internet access while the dispute process proceeds. That is a legal program, and it is certainly worth considering whether or not business Internet should be a "right" or not. (And I guess that as the Internet market heats up and competitors become available, a ToS like "we won't turn you off just because you get a DMCA notice" could be quite appealing.)

mschuster91 5y ago

> Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy. They have it on their radar, but compared to torrents Usenet is so cumbersome to use it's definitely not a large enough market to waste resources on.

jrockway 5y ago
Very good. I'm looking forward to having to switch back to Gopher at some point to evade the lawyers for another couple years.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

ISPs are only required to forward the DMCA notice to you (unless they suck and just want to drop you). The only reason the DMCA notices took down Napster et al. is because the requests are valid. You could build Content ID for the real internet but it would only as much as you can intimidate each individual creator/site operator. They are free to at least decide to defend themselves if they wanted to. Under the Youtube ContentID that really isn't an option. Plus non-US creators could care a lot less since enforcing DMCA/copyright internationally is going to be even more costly.

judge2020 5y ago
Absent a VPN, ISPs have teamed up (as in, are often ran by the same media giants sending the request) to give customers a 3/6-strike policy for DMCA takedowns. So people self-hosting could eventually mean no internet for them (at least, for as long as the internet isn't considered a utility). https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comcast-we-wont-terminate-your-account-under-six-strikes-well-just-block-every-single-website.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130227/14231422143/comca...
jrockway 5y ago
It depends on what the ISP wants to do, right? They could forward the request along, or they could say "whoaaaa we don't want this customer" and turn you off with no appeal process. They have an obligation to forward the notice to the end user, but the end user doesn't have the right to have Internet access while the dispute process proceeds. That is a legal program, and it is certainly worth considering whether or not business Internet should be a "right" or not. (And I guess that as the Internet market heats up and competitors become available, a ToS like "we won't turn you off just because you get a DMCA notice" could be quite appealing.)