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My Web Series Was Suspended by YouTube Without Explanation
- alexjmann 14y agoThank you to everyone who chimed in on this conversation. Apparently, the right person noticed. My suspended YouTube account has been reinstated. If you want to check out the web series, now you can. http://cwatf.com/ http://cwatf.com/
- anigbrowl 14y agoWhat was the explanation? Pardon my cynicism, but without furnishing even a screenshot of the suspension notice I have no way to decide whether Youtube was at fault or whether this is a marketing stunt. I find it hard to believe you have never received a single warning about anything prior to them using the nuclear option against you, given the well-documented existence of their DMCA grievance process and suchlike.
- alexjmann 14y agoI received the below email at 10:10pm yesterday (1/16/13), which was the first time YouTube has communicated with me. -- Hi there, After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is once again active and operational. If you forgot your password, please visit this link to reset it: (link) Sincerely, The YouTube Team -- Certainly not a stunt. I don't even know how I'd go about suspending my own YouTube account, which I was only able to access for the first time in over a week after receiving this email.
- anigbrowl 14y agoIt sounds more like someone falsely claimed you had hacked the account or so, if they shut it down with no communication at all.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoGood luck. Dealing with any Google service - and in particular, YouTube - is like dealing with a robot, you don't manage to get in touch with any human being. Their general policy is to automate everything and give zero user support.
- javajosh 14y agoI had to deal with a "This site may be compromised" notice on a client site recently, and Google handled it within a few days. So it's not always bad.
- nitrogen 14y agoIt's not just that; dealing with a robot should be easy and predictable. You're dealing with a robot that is trying its best to obey the irrational wishes of the content industry.
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y agoWhen people while about getting 'removed from friends list' like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN networks... If it is free, they can do this anytime they like. Your proper answer is to set up your own server and do it yourself. I guess taking it public and getting responses from individuals in that company is your response. Still doesn't mean you shouldn't set up shop in your own right. </rant=off>
- jamesaguilar 14y agoThis is the invariable response, and is, as it always is, wrong. One service provider failing to fulfill your expectations does not mean you should eschew services altogether.
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- therandomguy 14y agoIs this equivalent to building your own Disney Land if they ban you from entry?
- ryguytilidie 14y agoYou can't be serious. /jawdrop
- ratsbane 14y agoGiven the nature of the internet, even that's not a fix. If you set up a server, your ISP could shut you off in response to DMCA demands. I suppose you could find an off-shore server, but nothing's foolproof.
- TheAmazingIdiot 14y agoYouTube does automated dispute handling. They aren't even DMCA complaints. So they have no real burden. Hosting with The Pirate Bay would seem like an option. They seem to have 'stop shutdowns' stopped pretty well.
- rossjudson 14y agoYou probably got hit with a number of DMCA takedown requests. You've filed a counter-notice, which will put the content back up. But you have to wait until that occurs, which could be a while. You may not have done anything wrong, for this to occur. All it takes is someone willing to _say_ that you infringed on their copyright. I think you can sue the issuers of the takedowns, if they are fraudulent.
- Karunamon 14y agoYou can, but good luck. Filing a counternotice gets you the name (and I think the IP address) of the person that filed the notice, but considering that #1 is just a form input box and #2 is useless for identificiation purposes... This was likely the act of someone with an axe to grind, not any violation of YouTube policies.
- jacquesm 14y agoThis is the counter notification section of youtube: http://www.youtube.com/t/copyright_counter http://www.youtube.com/t/copyright_counter The final line reads: > We may then reinstate the material in question at our discretion. So it's a toss-up if they're actually going to do something but they will reveal your information to the party that claimed infringement. That seems to be a pretty lousy deal.
- zopticity 14y agoYou are probably doing something that triggered one of Youtube's automated system to flag you as an abusive API user.
- rpledge 14y agoWhy aren't you posting your content on the other services you mentioned anyway?
- georgemcbay 14y agoI am not the OP, but IME YouTube is by far the easiest to make ad money from. Google giveth and Google taketh away (often without you really knowing why).
- alexjmann 14y agoIn my experience producing web video content (especially if you plan on eventually selling ads against it), it's best to aggregate it on one platform. And traffic and visibility-wise, YouTube is the place to do it.
- rpledge 14y agoI hate to see anyone build a business based on one platform. I haven't looked at your content, but I'm pretty sure the biggest web video producer I know of (Leo Laporte/TWiT.tv) would disagree with your comment. Gain audience any way you can before trying to monetize.
- pasbesoin 14y agoI'll share my personal response. I suspect I'm not alone in this. Google is incurring and running up against some real trust issues. I haven't always agreed with their decisions, but even when I became discouraged, I'd still glean information and news that showed or hinted at concerned, ethical people behind the closed doors. But... the continuing lack of a public, human interface to their endeavors, and the increasing... unreliability of their products. (Well, their products to us end users of their ostensible services, as opposed to us as products delivered via their marketing and advertising mechanisms.) I increasingly don't trust them. And this is going to be a serious problem for Google, in the long run. Once you lose reliability and accountability, people start looking elsewhere. Ok, this is a bit of a long reach, but look at Apple. Jobs was, ultimately if somewhat capriciously, a primary source of Apple's accountability. And now he's gone. Even if people couldn't explain it and articulate it fully, they felt concern that his passing potentially represented a significant shift. The more and longer Google continues to refuse to acknowledge -- and address -- the gaming of the IP/content/distribution systems, the more distrust builds. Even still, this "silence" is not consistent and company-wide. For example, Google Fiber -- at least in its incarnation; I'm less certain about it's continuing and evolving existence -- is a fairly strong statement (even if and as also somewhat self-serving; this is a business, after all) about the current state and needed direction of development and growth of connectivity. But I don't know that this "under the radar" approach suffices. Back to the original point of this thread: I don't trust that anything on YouTube is going to be there, tomorrow. The Web is failing as archive. More and more, the public is learning that it is indeed transient. If you want people to "live" there and to trust to your online services, this may be a bad thing. (Yes, I'm one isolated opinion, and I may be blowing smoke. But I'm disgusted at the increasing constriction back towards an entrenched status quo -- or the attempts at same.)
- d2vid 14y agoI've been running into bad google experiences lately. I have a work email address that uses google for domains, and my account was completely disabled by google about a week ago with no response yet to my repeated contact attempts. Their error message was not exactly comforting, it included the following: Google reserves the right to: Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. I don't particularly care about that particular gmail account, but it's terrifying that they believe they have the right to do the exact same thing to my personal gmail account, which I definitely DO care about. That seems unethical, even if it's perhaps legal.
- denzil_correa 14y agoDoes anyone else think that lack of accountability from content hosting providers makes this game so unfair to people who use these services. For example, if YouTube were legally accountable to provide a service would this situation have occurred? I understand YouTube is free (itself a topic of contention) but just because you are free, it doesn't give you a guilt free pass to do anything you want.
- Terretta 14y agoJeff Atwood was having this problem, and finally hosted it with us at Vive.ly. We're a commercial CDN that made Vive.ly as a side project "Dropbox for Video" for small businesses or people who want to feel comfortable owning their content, and we are big supporters of "fair use". Atwood mentions his fair use issues here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/but-you-did-not-persuade-me.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/but-you-did-not-per... Granted, Vive.ly isn't free. There's a small cost for uploading, encoding, and storing the video, but that's a one time charge, and there's a nominal cost for bandwidth (we call it "minutes" to make it simple). But it's a wallet system, so if you don't use it you aren't dinged every month, and you own the content so you can run your own ads, name the site what you want or embed it anywhere. We've gone toe to toe with big content trying to do take-downs of fair use content, and won. The DMCA doesn't have to be handled the way YouTube does it. You can try it out through http://www.getvively.com/ http://www.getvively.com/ which explains the platform or direct at http://www.vive.ly/ http://www.vive.ly/ which is the platform itself. You can use the invite code "hd4yc" to try it out with 600 minutes of video storage, and 12,000 minutes of delivery.
- magicalist 14y agoYou don't have to have a Content ID system, but you have to take down the content in the face of a correctly filled out takedown request, even if it's plainly fair use. You also have to "replace the removed material and cease disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system or network."[1] (emphasis added) It would be interesting to hear about what you guys have found effective in helping support fair use with vive.ly, but since the DMCA makes it essentially zero cost to spam takedown notices, even if only to achieve a chilling effect, the only tool you have (talking to the company posting the notice) is not very effective. You certainly (AFAIK) have no legal leverage as a safe harbored service provider. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#g http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#g
- meaty 14y agoThat's the way of the cloud. Its also why I won't put any or my data near it.
- donniezazen 14y agoI strongly believe that we should start treating user data as a physical object. A law should be passed that would restrict scope of online vendors. Vendors should be free to stop providing services but not violently cut off users and delete all his/her personal data.
- conradfr 14y agoWell, if "stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars", I guess you have a point.
- jmettes 14y agoI'm a bit worried now reading this post, since I want to run a webseries[1] on YouTube too this year. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening to me? YouTube would be the easiest way to get it out there, being its own source of traffic in its own right. However, would Vimeo be a better option here? Obviously I could also run it from the website directly (e.g., cloudfront), but free services are always good too... :-) [1] http://www.baznsnags.com http://www.baznsnags.com
- JoshTriplett 14y agoWhy just use one? Upload to YouTube for the traffic, and blip.tv or Vimeo for the reliability. And whichever you do, try to get as many people as possible visiting your site directly and not caring about the video host.
- gesman 14y agoIf your videos are acceptable to Vimeo (they have anal TOS but great technical platform) then I recommend at all times upload duplicates to Vimeo (and someone else). Then register your own URL shortener domain (such alex.je or whatever) and send links to your video through your own shortlinks, such as: alex.je/2013 Trusting your business to single platform provider - no matter how big - is disastrous. With planning like above you'd be back in business in no time by flipping redirect URLs to your videos at secondary provider.
- alexjmann 14y agoThanks. In terms of marketing the show, I've been pointing everyone to CWATF.com/xxxxxx, so to get back up-and-running, I would just need to upload the video files to a different video platform and re-embed per URL. I do regret not backing up each video to another platform while I went. The reason was because I wanted to aggregate all traffic to a single platform, in the case that I started to run ads. I guess I could have uploaded them privately on another platform, only to open up publicly should something like this happen.
- gesman 14y agoGreat, so just reupload your greatest hits and most recent ones to Vimeo (or whoever) and update redirects from CWATF.com. I think your competitors complained to Google using the right terminology. I had similar experience with Google. The conclusion I saw for myself is to "use platform, but do not rely your business to platform".
- rexreed 14y agoBut what about the loss of ad revenue? I imagine folks are posting to Google because of what can be substantial monthly ad revenues -- which then a content producer becomes dependent on to finance the series and which makes an arbitrary termination like this even more disastrous.
- gesman 14y agoIt good while it works and last. Have backup plan when provider suddenly decides to boot you up or creative competitor complained to terminate your series.
- wjhirsch 14y agoHi Alex: Am I correct that the You Tube or Google user, like yourself, pays nothing for the service or space & is therefore receiving a gift? If that is true, than what alleged "right" does the gift donee have to continue receiving the gift? love PB 01/16/2013 17:37
- jamesaguilar 14y agoHi, wjhirsch, where did anyone claim they have a right to have their videos on YouTube?
- rexreed 14y agoIt would seem to be more of a trade of services - provision of content to Google which they then monetize in the form of advertising, and possibly share with the content generator. Google then keeps the majority (or all in most cases) of the ad revenues to cover their operating costs and profit, or shares a small percentage with certain eligible producers. So, I don't see it as a gift as much as an exchange of services that is balanced primarily to the benefit of Google. Otherwise, why would Google do it? They're a business, not a charity.
- mech4bg 14y agoPeople saying that the service is free and Google owes you nothing are missing the point. If Google continues this practice and makes things worse, then people will lose trust in them, move away from their services, and they will suffer financially. This isn't about entitlement - this is about wanting a service to be good, and giving feedback when it isn't. Also these services are only nominally 'free' - Google makes plenty of money off you by you using them. I find it bizarre that people think you can't give feedback on a company's bad behavior because their service is free.
- mikecane 14y agoGoogle Play apps, books, and whatever else they sell there aren't free. They are hurting their brand.
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