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U.S. indicts two men for running a $20M YouTube content ID scam
- eloff 5y agoThis kind of scam is enabled by the way Youtube, Facebook, and others offer no way to contact an actual human for help (or if you find a way, you get a useless canned response.) People who realize something is wrong have no forum to air their concerns.
- travoc 5y agoIs there a word for this new world where we find ourselves without the ability to appeal our problems to human rationality, where instead we are continually subjected to the whims of automated systems that no human fully understands?
- derekjdanserl 5y ago[flagged]
- dd36 5y agoUnregulated.
- Jach 5y agoAh yes, the free market system known as copyright.
- conanbatt 5y agoI don't think the URSS had a Customer XP department. Or the government in general for that matter.
- acta_non_verba 5y agoI don't know how helpful a deliberate misunderstanding of the current economic model is to this conversation. Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation, it just hasn't happened as politicians don't really understand the space. China, which runs a completely different economic system has similar issues.
- jklinger410 5y agoCapitalism is anti regulation by nature.
- themaninthedark 5y agoHuman nature is anti-regulation by nature. Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay Totalitarianism: There were several regulatory oversight failures in Germany during their stint with Fascism
- jklinger410 5y agoThat's crazy considering how much more regulation humans have had than any other observable creature.
- derekjdanserl 5y agoThis just isn’t true. Every social species found in the wild relies on brutal social regulating behaviors that maintain social conditions necessary for group survival.
- pydry 5y ago>Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation It doesnt forbid but it strongly inhibits. A system under which you are able to acquire vast resources then creates the ability to use those vast resources to sway the political process in your favor. Even when the regulations exist (e.g. antitrust) regulatory capture will inhibit their enforcement. It's surprising how many people consider this process to be somehow irrelevant or out of scope when you analyze how capitalism functions. It's a core feature.
- jd115 5y agoLife. Right? Is Life a bad word? No. It's a beautiful word. Does it contain the good, the bad and the ugly? Of course. Is Capitalism a bad word? No. It's a beautiful idea, and it works significantly better than anything else humans have ever been able to think of on a mass-scale. Does it contain the good the bad and the ugly? Sure.
- jklinger410 5y agoA capitalist society has told you that capitalism is good and you think you're so smart parroting this opinion around. It's getting very old.
- hackflip 5y agoI don't think capitalism is good, I just think the alternatives are worse.
- 7sidedmarble 5y agoIs it not a little pessimistic (and not to mention, very convenient for the ruling class) to believe that we've reached the peak process of resource allocation and community building in the western world of 2021? There is no possibility for an alternative to the current system that is slightly more equitable to slightly more people? I think that's why these statements sound like cheerleading for the status quo.
- mistermann 5y agoIt's like propaganda (Our most sacred institution) has killed people's imagination and hardened their hearts.
- finiteseries 5y agoThe twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building are not propaganda, it happened. It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!
- g_p 5y agoKafkaesque?
- gostsamo 5y agoKafka's processing distopia.
- nono-no-no 5y agoDystopia
- domador 5y agoDystopAI
- HenryKissinger 5y agoThe 21st century.
- me_me_me 5y agoIts the same when trying to get mortgage when you are not on fixed salary income. "Computer says no", "But on average over last 5 years I make 5x what you need me to earn", "Sorry, but computer says no"
- boringg 5y agoOh yah the mortgage thing is hilarious in that you would think banks were smarter than they are (spoiler alert: they arent). Really demoralizing to see how mechanic a bank is, also means that you can understand how risk accrues secretly in a bank due to them being so mechanical.
- sharperguy 5y agoCustomer service
- junon 5y agoBroken.
- tibbetts 5y agoUtopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias.
- Goronmon 5y agoUtopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias. I don't see what about ContentID is related to the "Utopia of Rules" issue. ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Alongside the inability to effectively reign in corporations who make such decisions.
- sidewndr46 5y agoContentID is less of a "Utopia of Rules" and more of a "Kingdom of dictates". Google dictates you are subject to ContentID if you want to participate in YouTube. If you don't want to be subject to that, leave the kingdom.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago> ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Capitalism is the thing where there is supposed to be vigorous free market competition and ContentID would have no power. Because even if 70% of the services were getting it wrong, anyone could switch to any of the other 30% with minimal friction, and then the original 70% would fix their shit or lose market share. Capitalism isn't a synonym for anarchy. It needs, for example, government enforcement of property rights. But it also needs antitrust. Constraints on vertical integration. The lack of effective antitrust enforcement has allowed markets to concentrate. Which removes competitive pressure, which allows incumbents to make rules that benefit them and their business partners at the expense of customers who now have high switching costs. Enabling the "Utopia of Rules."
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI don't think this answers your question, but it was exemplified in the movie "Brazil", iirc.
- dmos62 5y agoIt's an automated bureaucracy (bureaucrazy). It's tyrannical, in that it has power over you and it's unjust and cruel in how it disregards you. You can lump those words together however you like. Tyrannical automated bureaucracy, autotyranny, bureautyranny. You could put the word tech or technological somewhere in there, but I don't think there's much technology in this form of oppression. After all, bureaucracy in itself is a technology (a tool). That's all from the point of view that this tyranny is external. I'd actually prefer to look at it as something we're subjecting ourselves to. We're half-knowingly turning our tools against us; painting ourselves into a corner; becoming increasingly entangled by our conflicting goals. We're not the victim, but the fool.
- rPlayer6554 5y agoBur-auto-cracy?
- thechao 5y agoBureaucomputation. (Byur-ah-computation?)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Humdeee 5y agoIn - internal issue Comp - computer/tech Pet - sub-human, regarded as secondary if at all Tence - (tense), as in past tense and you will be forgotten
- raisedbyninjas 5y agoThis implies that implementing a fair system is beyond their capabilities. I think profitable convenience is more apt to their design choices.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> It's tyrannical, in that it has power over you and it's unjust and cruel in how it disregards you. Welcome to new bureaucracy, same as old bureaucracy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dangoor 5y agoweb3
- routerl 5y agoKafkaesque. Maybe cyber-kafkaesque, but that feels redundant, since the only difference is that it is being done by computers, rather than thoughtless people.
- nullc 5y agocomputational-Kafkarcy -- the difference is in the scale and efficiency. Millions of people can be abused at once at practically no cost.
- domador 5y agoHow about "autocratic", with an emphasis on "auto"?
- AlwaysRock 5y ago"new" haha. Check out the trial by franz kafka
- quercusa 5y agoHarlan Ellison described it in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
- remram 5y agoThat machine is actually sentient thought, and openly hateful.
- goblin89 5y agoThe situation with almost-no-appeal big tech platforms reminds me of an article titled “the human-built world is not build for humans”[0]. Related phenomenons keep coming up (cities for cars, ecosystems of tokens and identities dependent on remembering secret passkeys, and so on). Desires to profit and to not have to trust each other keeps motivating humans’ attempts to devise environments that are hostile to humans themselves. [0] https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-world-is-not-built https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-w...
- HPsquared 5y ago"Computer says no"
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIts kafkaesque, the established world for inconprehensible and cruel bureaucracy that destroys lives for no reason. The term predates internet.
- loceng 5y agoCriminal [for the parties facilitating it by allowing it], comes to mind as a naming option.
- tlb 5y agoIt’s a strong assumption that humans are more rational than machines. Certainly typical customer service reps get bamboozled frequently, such as with SIM-swap scams. Even supposedly highly rational professionals like judges are often wrong. You might find that overall, human failures are worse than code-as-policy failures.
- gpderetta 5y agoWell, the amount of damage an incompetent human can deal is much more limited than an incompetent but very efficient machine.
- routerl 5y agoMachines aren't rational at all. That is, they do not respond to reasons. Machine behaviour is only ever caused (i.e. syntactic), not reasoned. When a human follows a rule, for example as part of a bureaucracy, then our behaviour is merely caused. But we can also be given reasons to not follow the given rule. This is precisely why "I was just following orders" is not a valid defence; even soldiers are expected to use their reasoning to disobey illegal orders.
- treeman79 5y agoThis is the purpose of a court system.
- rchaud 5y agoHow about: "You get what you pay for"
- hindsightbias 5y agoIt’s interesting how people expect all sorts of protections for services they pay nothing to. Get a record label or agent if you want or need “protection”
- soperj 5y agoIs this really new? This is pretty much exactly what Kafka writes.
- travoc 5y agoIt’s new in the sense that it suddenly afflicts my family on an almost daily basis.
- munificent 5y agoAutomatacracy.
- kansface 5y agoCheck out The Trial or The Castle for examples of old world systems that existed outside of the grace of human rationality, indifferent to justice and human suffering alike.
- robomartin 5y ago> Is there a word for this new world where we find ourselves without the ability to appeal our problems to human rationality How about a term like "millennial business ethics"? Seriously. I know some will take this as an insult. I don't offer it in that way. Hear me out for a minute. The generation that grew up without the internet was just as sophisticated --if not more in some areas-- than millennials. I have news for you, we were doing pretty amazing things with computers and hardware in the 80's an 90's and very little of it was about tricking people to click on ads. Go back and look at AI books from that era and you will find pretty much everything being done today...we just didn't have the hardware and the speed. Excuse the digression. Growing up without the internet and with conventional brick-and-mortar, in-person businesses meant that person-to-person relationships were important. Nobody --nobody-- from my generation would seriously consider running a business where you absolutely ghost your customers and users. That's just unthinkable. That is not the way human beings related to each other in any pursuit. However, for a generation who's reality has been looking at a screen and clicking buttons far more so than engaging with other humans in person, the idea of not bothering with real person-to-person problem solving might just be perfectly logical and sensible. Why bother? You can do everything with buttons on a touchscreen. Except, you can't. To me this is a cultural problem. I have often imagine that some of the people who built these companies had the social skills and maturity of a brick. I know this isn't entirely accurate. Yet, how else does one explicitly make these choices? I can excuse social ineptitude as a sign of the time. The alternative would be to make such a choice while knowing just how harmful it could be. That is pure evil. They have built mechanisms where destroying someone's business overnight, with no path to having a proper person-to-person business discussion, is deemed normal and acceptable. Talk to people who's lives were turned upside-down by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google and you'll learn just how horrific this kind of thing can be on the receiving end of the algorithms. On this planet, today, if these three companies ban your from using their services, you do not exist. Period. Try running a business without using these channels (and their associated properties) for marketing and delivery and see how well you can do. I am not a big government guy at all, quite to the contrary. However, I have, for some time, felt that this particular issue is one that needs truly intrusive government intervention. Companies of this scale and importance should not be able to kill your business on any given Monday and just ghost you forever. That is just plain wrong. And evil.
- bserge 5y agoIt's amazing considering they could hire a small army of good employees for ~$500/person in one of the many developing countries. Don't need an office, don't even need to bother with taxes if they don't want to, just remote hire and work.
- noodlesUK 5y agoSurely there is some case that could be brought against YouTube by an EU citizen or someone else in a country where automated decision making is limited without human review, no?
- kevincox 5y agoI don't know what the argument is though. You have agreed to this Content ID system and automatically distributing the ad revenue based on YouTube's discretion when you signed up. Note that the system also has advantages. As a publisher you are protected from lawsuits most of the time, the worst case outcome is that you don't get revenue from a video or that you get banned from YouTube. I'm not saying that the tradeoff is optimal for creators but I don't see how what YouTube is doing is illegal. Unless you try to assert that you were forced to accept the ToS because YouTube is effectively a monopoly. But I find that a really hard argument to make.
- mellavora 5y agoThe argument is that the GDPR requires companies to provide human review.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe GDPR is very poorly enforced and regulators have shown no desire to enforce it. At least in the UK, the process requires you to try and get in touch with the company to resolve it and give them 30 days to reply, providing evidence of your attempts (a bit difficult with online forms as opposed to emails - I guess you have to take screenshots of the contact form before you submit?), and if you still don't get a satisfactory response you can raise a complaint with the regulator where from my experience it just goes to a black hole where you're lucky to get a (useless) response in a few months.
- sofixa 5y agoNo. It just takes a lot of time to deal with all the transgressions. https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
- INTPenis 5y agoI know it's awful and true, BUT, can you blame them? Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook. Just a regular ISP in my country of Sweden needs an entire call centre to handle the calls it gets from customers. Now scale that up to the levels of Google. I can totally see why they've made the decision to avoid consumer contact. Their consumers are the entire internet. I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.
- Neil44 5y agoJust because it's hard doesn't mean they should get away with not doing it. Google 2020 revenues were 181 Billion, you can build a VERY big call centre with that.
- Orionos 5y agoI'm failing to understand your logic. Google could put a call center in every country to handle local user's requests could'nt they ? Your ISP can afford to do so... But yes, as they have a monopoly, they can afford not putting any call center anywhere.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ratww 5y agoYep. And it doesn't even have to be a call center, manual verification would be enough.
- ahahahahah 5y agoI pay my ISP a lot more than I pay Google.
- jimhefferon 5y agoSo, this business does things that take away people's rights, but it is OK because otherwise their cost of business would be too high?
- reactspa 5y agoSilver Lining in this trend: The beginning of the end of Amazon may be at hand. The other day, I really really needed to get in touch with a human at Amazon to resolve an issue (Amazon issued me a refund, apparently in error). After an hour of researching how, I gave up. The last time I needed to get in touch with a human there was 15 years or so ago. I was able to send an email to an actual human there, who responded! And was able to resolve the issue after 3 or 4 emails back and forth. Now, all you get is a "Chat AI" who can't help you. It's the beginning of their end folks. And that's a good thing (Martha Stewart voice). (The other canary in the Amazon coal mine: their search engine results seem manipulated.)
- lil_dispaches 5y agoAt some point these companies have to be on the wrong side of negligence.
- paulpauper 5y agoAlso, relying on algos to detect spam instead of using humans, means that scammers are able to run their scams much longer.
- pokot0 5y ago100% agree. They reap the benefits of the automation efficiency while not paying the costs of it. I think these companies should be considered directly responsible if they don't pay royalties to the rightful owners. This should include how the royalties are split when multiple properties are connected to the same Ad (ex: one video that contains a song and a commentary). Right now, for their convenience they only pay the stronger party (usually the song rights holder) and ignore the other party. I think they should be legally required to split the revenues fairly. Is it a hard problem to solve and risk a lawsuit hell? Sure, but they did solve way harder problems when they had the incentive to do so and certainly have the resources to solve this one. It's also rather easy to solve 90% of the problem and not being blatantly unfair, and I think 90% is way better than 0%.
- SR2Z 5y agoTo put this really bluntly, these companies would _prefer_ that kind of system. Right now the problem is that they are held legally liable if they incorrectly reject a copyright complaint (which, by the way, can only be determined to be valid in court) but only run the risk of pissing off users if they accept a fraudulent one. The problem here is not convenience, it's that copyright was designed for an era when it was kind of hard to copy things. The DMCA was a good shim to make it feasible for Internet companies to even exist, but it's not enough to fix things in a world where literally every single bit of IP can be copied or downloaded in less than a day. If, for example, Congress required content owners to submit copies of their works to some centralized US copyright database as a condition for being eligible to receive damages from platforms, that would go a long way to fix things on its own. Expanding the explicit set of fair use exemptions and allowing them to matter outside of a court would also be a big help.
- toss1 5y agoExactly >>Over the years, countless YouTube users have complained that their videos have been claimed and monetized by entities that apparently have no right to do so but, fearful of what a complaint might do to the status of their accounts, many opted to withdraw from battles they feared they might lose. This fact and the aggressive-anti-support policies should setup Youtube for a class action suit. Merely to avoid the expense of actually sorting out who is the actual copyright owner, Alphabet (& others) setup a system that systematically enables this type of fraud against artists, and provides no way to resolve it, and so they happily pay millions to fraudsters like these instead of the actual owners. It'd be nice if the actual artists could get paid and if Google etc. could get the point that some things require actual support. Unlikely, but it'd be nice.
- londons_explore 5y agoSo how did this pair get away with it for 5 years? Surely it only takes a single false claim for someone to be able to take it to police as fraud? And it looks like these guys must have claimed hundreds of thousands of videos... And yet none of them found a suitable way to get this addressed for four years? Seems like a pretty open and shut case too... Lots of paper trail...
- pjc50 5y agoThe police basically don't investigate difficult cases or "commercial disputes". You'd have to take Google to court, and who's going to run that risk?
- elliekelly 5y agoEven trying to report identity theft to the police is a massive pain. They’ll try to pawn it off on the police department where the fraudulent transaction occurred and that PD will tell you they don’t have jurisdiction and it’s really the PD where the victim is located who should investigate. Most police departments just don’t have the technical knowledge to look into these things. They send you around in circles, and maybe to an FBI form that goes nowhere, and wait for you to give up.
- danlugo92 5y ago#BitcoinFixesThis
- southerntofu 5y agoThat's what you get when entities get so big and powerful we users don't have a single recourse against them. The ContentID system being a fraud has been well-known in librist circles since whenever it was launched. It's a bit similar to how higher-ups in the police and secret services have run massive drug imports in France/USA for decades and everybody knew about it but it took many years for the competent authorities to react. When your entire society is based on obedience to a higher authority, we all become come to depend on the goodwill (or lack thereof) of that entity. Google is not exactly reputable when it comes to dealing with user complaints, and they have exactly 0 financial incentive to fix this huge problem.
- sschueller 5y agoThat line is thin, large studios have been using Content ID on things that are not under their copyright. [1] [1] https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-di...
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoYour linked article is about fair use issues, which I'd argue is a much different problem, and much more of a gray area, than just outright falsely claiming you are the rights holder to stuff you don't own (and not paying out royalties after you collect).
- 1cvmask 5y agoI am happy that this story made it to the main page. I submitted it earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427272 My main concern is when you try to automate all the human intelligence is eliminated and can lead to both identity theft and money based fraud. Then you the innocent have to prove yourself against the fraudsters. Easy when you have a big megaphone on say Twitter but very hard for the individual. How many times have we seen automated troublesome issues resolved here on HN when someone from the company is luckily reading a post of a victim.
- LanceH 5y ago> Then you the innocent have to prove yourself against the fraudsters. All too often you are referred to the fraudsters to resolve the problem.
- eatonphil 5y agoThis article has some more detail on some of the artists and songs they stole royalty from. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/two-charged-with-stealing-20m-in-elaborate-youtube-music-royalty-scam-11638478339 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/two-charged-with-stealing-...
- OneTimePetes 5y agoAnother symptom of a monopol. If peertube or the likes was a full blown alternative, people would just quit youtube over this, putting the squeeze on google to clean up its act.
- acdha 5y agoIt’s not that simple: YouTube has a huge natural lock-in because videos use lots of bandwidth and Google’s advertisers are willing to pay for that. Peer to peer systems struggle to offer a competitive a competitive experience because few people are able/willing to volunteer significant bandwidth or take on the personal liability for serving content which is copyrighted or otherwise illegal. They’ll work okay for a hugely popular video but fall off the cliff for the long-tail of niche interests and there aren’t enough people who care about it enough to make “YouTube but slower and less reliable” work in general.
- coldacid 5y agoYeah. Essentially, YouTube is all but a natural monopoly given today's legal and technical environment. Unfortunately, it doesn't get the oversight that natural monopolies are supposed to have to prevent abuses like these.
- acdha 5y agoThat’s my take as well: regulation and liability for errors are the most realistic way to fix this. Even if ISPs were required to offer symmetric bandwidth I don’t see anywhere near enough people even being interested in serving other people’s content to make P2P work, which makes me feel old for remembering how cool the BitTorrent launch seemed before I understood the social aspects of the problem.
- imglorp 5y agoMaybe worthy of its own post but there's another kind of overt scammer on Youtube. It goes like this: They find some technically hip, well known content and create a new channel with a very similar name as the originator. Create an exciting full screen ad for a crypto currency faucet scam, with price charts and crawls. "Live" stream the original content inset into the ad. Here's one example: https://cryptoplayboys.blogspot.com/2021/11/spacex-scam-livestream-with-fake-crypto.html https://cryptoplayboys.blogspot.com/2021/11/spacex-scam-live... Even if you report these things, they don't get removed very quickly. They're getting tons of views so why would YT care? The original content holder would care about being associated with them and should sue for defamation though.
- kuu 5y agoThat could be some "name squatting" / "cyber squatting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting
- imglorp 5y agoYes, it's a combination of name squatting, defamation, copyright, AND faucet scam. (bingo?) YT should act on any one of these but they don't.
- donmcronald 5y agoThat's clever, but won't most of the live stream viewers still be viewing on a legitimate platform? I'm guessing that framed stream doesn't actually have too many viewers.
- ricardo81 5y agoI think in these cases, this kind of setup can be largely automated since there isn't really any unique/quality content that'd take a person time to create - and getting smaller view counts over many channels perhaps mitigates the risk of having the channel removed I've seen similar with sport highlights searches, screenshots and automated commentary scraped from a news source. They don't get many views but there's hundreds of them, particularly for sport behind paywalls. No one wants to see them but they turn up in searches at the right time. Must be demotivating for content creators to be continually dealing with this kind of thing.
- caf 5y agoBet the artists still end up with fuck all.
- mleo 5y agoHopefully there is some recourse to the actual copyright owners owed the lost 20 million directly from A.R. or YouTube.
- intricatedetail 5y agoSince this is in my opinion YT fault they should pay and then pursue the money from the scammers on their own. Hopefully YT won't wiggle their way out of this.
- coldacid 5y agoYou know they will.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere's a strong case to be made that YT: - Failed due diligence. - Made infringing performances of the work. - Misrepresented the authorship and/or ownership (moral rights). - Are liable for infringement. - And owe the true copyright owners both the lost revenue and an infringement penalty. This case could get quite interesting.
- throwaway47292 5y agoCan't we make illegal to not be able to contact human support? It would put a hard cap on growth as well, not sure if this is horrible. maybe instead of having one giant youtube or facebook we will have thousands, maybe millions, of small ones. Or is this just the luddite in me talking?
- amelius 5y agoHow would you ever discover content worth watching?
- fer 5y agoIntroducing: Hypertext Joking aside, it's not like automatic content suggestions are perfect, they tend to lock you into whatever you consumed lately, ultimately causing things like Elsagate[0] For music or films I rarely use recommendations any more and go back to the old school thing of reading reviews from people who know the material and can compare and draw non obvious parallels with other artists and works. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
- moron4hire 5y agoHow did we ever discover content worth watching?
- degenerate 5y agoI got my eBay account "permanently suspended" the other day. I was traveling for Thanksgiving and they had a $10 off $10 promo if you login to the app for the first time. I used the app from the Airport wifi to purchase two books for my friend I was visiting. Upon landing, I had received an email about my "permanent suspension" and if I had any questions, to contact eBay support. I thought, OK, I tripped up their IP security rules. I'll just call them and get it sorted out. Except... you can't call eBay anymore. Their phone lines are a recording that tell you to login first. When I login, all the support options for my now suspended account are missing. There's no messaging, phone, text, chat, or email options provided to me. Only an endless loop of support articles. Cross-checking this against my friend's account, he has all the options available and I do not. So in essence, they've shut me out from all communication and I can't ever get this account recovered. Many big companies moved to this communication model during covid, and it's extremely disheartening when something goes very wrong like this. If this is the new normal, we need to make it illegal.
- _jayhack_ 5y agoSince nobody has commented this yet - provably representing content rights is a great application for NFTs
- tantalor 5y agoEh not really. You still need a central authority to determine whether the rights claimed by the NFT are authentic or fraudulent. Might as well have a central database. Scenario: 2 users present an NFT claiming the rights to a song. Who wins?
- alteriority 5y agoIsn't the entire point of an NFT the fact that two users can't simultaneously possess it? I don't know if NFTs are the ideal approach but that seems like the one critique that doesn't apply.
- tantalor 5y agoFor the NFT itself? yes. For the thing the NFT claims? no; that is up to some authority to decide whether to honor it. e.g., 2 users have NFT which claims "I own the Mona Lisa". Who is right?
- bsagdiyev 5y agoNo it isn’t.
- iKevinShah 5y agoI used to be a creator (YT) in 2011 (channel created in 2011), granted I was young and inexperienced, I used certain copyrighted music / images initially and those particular videos were de-monetized. I feel my account was "flagged" internally for the lack of better word. But then, I learned of how to give credits and all, but once you are "marked" there's very little chance that you may get monetized (at least used to be that way, haven't checked now). Also, by default, your videos would be marked as "Has copyrighted contents" which might not always be true. The biggest pain point comes when you have to argue with the system / support. There were 2 videos where I did not use copyrighted material and credited royalty free track as per the requirement but there's no winning over them(even with facts). For an organization as big as the Big G, this automated system and lack of actual checks until someone with big following tweets at them is sad to see even in 2021.
- crtasm 5y ago> how to give credits Am I misunderstanding you? Just giving credit in no way grants you the right to use the content / monitize the video.
- iKevinShah 5y agoI am sorry by credits I meant attribution. I remember there was a certain channel on youtube which let you use the song provided you shared the source / original song (their yt link to the music)
- acd10j 5y agoThis lawsuit should also have Youtube as party. They should be massively fined not preventing this kind of scams, although any sane individual can spot this from distance.
- myself248 5y agoBingo. The chance that NONE of the affected creators tried to appeal this for FOUR YEARS is effectively zero. YouTube's negligence rises to a new level here. They should be culpable as well.
- cpcallen 5y agoI see this kind of thing happening all the time, facilitated by third parties. For example, a few months ago I found this funny video of some trombonists playing Bruchner in unusual situations[1] that had been uploaded on 14th September 2015 and noticed it had an obviously-bogus copyright claim for the music ("Song: Calling You (Live), Artist: FUN, Licensed to YouTube by (on behalf of FUN); Songtrust, Sony ATV Publishing, and 2 music rights societies"), with a link to where this bogus "song" had been uploaded[2]. The "song" proved to be a video consisting of the original trombone video's soundtrack played twice, over an unrelated static image, that had been uploaded on 13th May 2021—six years after the video it was ripping off. There was enough information on the "song" video to find out that it had been supplied to YouTube by a company called TuneCore[3] who according to their website offer to "SELL YOUR MUSIC WORLDWIDE: Get your music on Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, TikTok, Tencent & more". I contacted TuneCore in July to point out that their service was being abused, but got a semi-automated reply to the effect that unless it was _my_ copyright that was being infringed they weren't interested. I replied, and also responded to their automated did-Jira-help-you-today survey, in both cases pointing out that they were (however inadvertently) involved in fraudulent activity but (unsurprisingly) never heard back. I see now that the TuneCore 'song' video has been made private, but the original trombone video still carries the false copyright claim. So frustrating. [1] https://youtu.be/rY0m2cLH1m8 https://youtu.be/rY0m2cLH1m8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-577Wp8yBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-577Wp8yBQ - now private [3] https://www.tunecore.com/ https://www.tunecore.com/
- ratww 5y agoTuneCore has really gone to hell after it was sold. I know horror stories from musicians that used them years ago but since had to move away because of technical and support issues.
- aspenmayer 5y agoWhat are some good alternatives? I've heard bad things about almost every company in this space.
- 5y ago
- fibbberMEN 5y agoThere was a community project like this years ago where they submitted tens of thousands of 10 second clips and random beats they made just to get back at all the record companies claiming they own 10 second sound samples. I guess it's unsurprising the lawsuit goes after the small guys and not the big companies that have been doing it forever.
- FjgdymdjttdjG 5y agoI deleted 400 videos and closed my YouTube account in October because of this, or similar. These were not easy videos to produce: audio, video, photography, text in multiple languages, etc. Hundreds of hours went into that channel. It was the only one that had the complete (!) recordings of early 20th century baritone Titta Ruffo, including the unpublished Edison cylinders, and I'd put a ridiculous amount of my free time into it over about a decade. I may have had 10 down votes on 400 videos. Except for five or six of of more modern artists (1960s), all 400 were 80, 90, 100+ year old audio recordings. It was an exceptional resource, and included many other artists besides. I just couldn't stand the scam-legal this-that thrown my way by untold numbers of "legal entities" whose ownership claims I couldn't possibly contest. I gave up, unable to balance, in my mind, outflows to criminals, even if it was just pennies. Part of me regrets deleting it. It was a one-of-a-kind resource, but the legal blerg was eine komplette Scheiße. YouTube, if you're listening, you're welcome to resurrect all of those videos and take whatever ownership you can muster. I certainly won't try anymore. I won't upload so much as a video of me drinking a cup of coffee because the coffee cup, the coffee in it, and probably the traffic noise playing in the background will be claimed as property of someone else. Yes, even property that's over a century old and in the public domain. The channel was registered to tittaruffooffurattit@gmail.com, also deleted. You have my permission to resurrect and take ownership if you can.
- maccolgan 5y agoI think you should publish your videos on something like LBRY or IPFS (heck, even put it up as a torrent), that's the only way this kind of stuff will be sustainable.
- heresie-dabord 5y agotl;dr: "The pair falsely represented to YouTube and an intermediary company identified only by the initials A.R. that they were the owners of the music and were entitled to collect “royalty payments” from their use on YouTube. In some cases the defendants used forged documents claiming to be from artists declaring that the pair had the rights to monetize their music."
- rmu09 5y agoI'm not a US citizen and not a lawyer either, but shouldn't it be possible (for a US american copyright holder) to sue youtube and/or those that claim the copyright in small claims court? AFAIK you would not need a lawyer and at the same time create a very big hassle for the companies involved.
- landonxjames 5y agoBenn Jordan (perhaps better know by his musical moniker The Flashbulb) put out a video today[0] about another scam in a somewhat similar vein, but this one perpetrated by a NYTimes reporter and specifically targeting musicians [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA