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This is a very easy position to take when you are not familiar with the scale of the task at hand. You have 10,000 reports come in every day. How do you get thr

This is a very easy position to take when you are not familiar with the scale of the task at hand. You have 10,000 reports come in every day. How do you get through them? One person won't do, so you will need a team. Who will you hire? Are they educated in copyright law? Hiring people with that sort of education for something as rote as content moderation will be difficult and take a long time (and probably cost a lot), so good luck. Are they interns and people with no related education hired for low wages? Great, now you have a team, but it seems that reports are being mishandled and copyrighted content is getting through. Legal liability is on the line and a PR disaster is brewing. We need to reign in these minimum wage moderators. Where do we go from here? Moderator-moderators who validate the validation from the moderators? Now we're back to where we started. And who will validate them? Etc, etc...

callalex 3y ago
The scale is a problem they created for themselves. If they didn’t take the time to build the legal/monitoring team you describe, they shouldn’t have taken on more customers than they could afford to support. Would you make the same defense if the company that makes M&M candies said that since they have hundreds of factories they would have to hire 10,000 janitors a day to keep cockroaches out of candy bags? After all, it’s very complicated to collect and manage so many people and schedules.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Eh, this is a two part issue... They are under a strict legal obligation to follow the DMCA. They are under a far less strict to nearly non-existent legal obligation not to fuck their customers completely over. The first issue is an "IS" problem. The second issue is an "OUGHT" problem. If you want to solve the Is-Ought problem you have to change both sides of the equation to an is, or to an ought via law.
- skeaker 3y ago
  The difference is that keeping cockroaches out of candy bags is a much more black-and-white problem that can be solved by following the same unchanging set of steps every time. Moderating and distinguishing copyright material requires awareness of a lot of abstract and often arbitrary rules and is prone to being done incorrectly. I am not defending this, it is for sure a shitty situation and is exactly why things like Youtube suck when it comes to DMCAs, but I am clarifying that it is a non-trivial issue with no easy solution that is brought on by the DMCA being ripe for abuse. It's just the reality of the thing. Moderation at that scale is probably never going to graduate from being shitty purely because of the nature of the problem.
mvdtnz 3y ago
It's not my problem to determine how a company complies with regulations. They can either resource themselves or go out of business. I don't care.

callalex 3y ago

The scale is a problem they created for themselves. If they didn’t take the time to build the legal/monitoring team you describe, they shouldn’t have taken on more customers than they could afford to support. Would you make the same defense if the company that makes M&M candies said that since they have hundreds of factories they would have to hire 10,000 janitors a day to keep cockroaches out of candy bags? After all, it’s very complicated to collect and manage so many people and schedules.

pixl97 3y ago
Eh, this is a two part issue... They are under a strict legal obligation to follow the DMCA. They are under a far less strict to nearly non-existent legal obligation not to fuck their customers completely over. The first issue is an "IS" problem. The second issue is an "OUGHT" problem. If you want to solve the Is-Ought problem you have to change both sides of the equation to an is, or to an ought via law.
skeaker 3y ago
The difference is that keeping cockroaches out of candy bags is a much more black-and-white problem that can be solved by following the same unchanging set of steps every time. Moderating and distinguishing copyright material requires awareness of a lot of abstract and often arbitrary rules and is prone to being done incorrectly. I am not defending this, it is for sure a shitty situation and is exactly why things like Youtube suck when it comes to DMCAs, but I am clarifying that it is a non-trivial issue with no easy solution that is brought on by the DMCA being ripe for abuse. It's just the reality of the thing. Moderation at that scale is probably never going to graduate from being shitty purely because of the nature of the problem.

mvdtnz 3y ago

It's not my problem to determine how a company complies with regulations. They can either resource themselves or go out of business. I don't care.