7 ms·

This doesn't surprise me. People seem to think Fair Uses is a justification, and not a defense. It's only something you can claim in a court. YouTube is oblige

This doesn't surprise me. People seem to think Fair Uses is a justification, and not a defense. It's only something you can claim in a court. YouTube is obliged to respond to claims immediately under the safe harbor laws, but they are not obliged to continue pushing if a user disputes the claim. At that point it should be handed off to the claimant so they can pursuit further action and YouTube is off the hook. YouTube is doing more work than they need to, but probably because it costs them less effort and time to just side with copyright claim holders and act as a thorn to users who would use the content. Whether something is "Fair Use" is still pretty ill defined and depends on a number of factors. I agree that this use would likely win in court with a claim of Fair Use (and I am not a lawyer but I've had some experience enforcing and responding to copyright claims, and have interfaced with lawyers who do know about them). The problem is that it will only win when both parties go to court, and the cost of that is high enough that the copyright owner holds a ridiculous amount of power since it will always be monolith versus one-off alleged-offender, which is the particular kind of bullshit being smelled by jwz. edit: My guess on why they do it this way rather than just handing it off is that a great deal of effort is required to correctly identify users for claims, and if YouTube takes on that responsibility, they need to make sure they are not passing on the name/address of someone who is lying about their identity. Rather than making people jump through hoops to get their actual identity to pass to the copyright owner for litigation, they delay the process as long as possible.

georgemcbay 12y ago
YouTube is in a very difficult spot, but you can't help but shake your head when you submit a home video using only a music clip that they offer within their free-use audio library here: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music ...and you still get automatically flagged for a music copyright violation, which has happened to me multiple times. Granted in both cases one counterclaim submission (mentioning that I got the music from their free library in the first place) was sufficient for them to stfu about it, but the fact that this happens in the first place is a powerful example of how broken the system is.
- codezero 12y ago
  Yeah, that's a pretty ridiculous situation.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  I got once a copyright claim on behalf of Antonio Vivaldi, at first I was like "WHAT??? You can't be serious, who the •••• owns Vivaldi's copyright?!?!?!" But the record label that issued the claim answered promptly to my counterclaim and the video was restored in 24 hours. My supposition is that record labels upload thousands of songs to the Content ID system without checking them first, and they correct the copyright status of songs with the counterclaims they receive.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
YouTube does it this way because their "content partners" want it this way. If YouTube did only what they were legally required to do, namely removing content when receiving a notification and restoring it with a counter-notification, then they'd be legally in the clear, but the partners currently making extensive use of their Content ID system would complain bitterly or leave. (Or sue; see the ridiculous Viacom lawsuit for example.)
saidajigumi 12y ago
YouTube is doing more work than they need to, but probably because it costs them less effort and time to just side with copyright claim holders and act as a thorn to users who would use the content. To put a fine point on it: there's a cultural attitude I've observed within Google[1] against doing anything that "won't scale." Both for better and worse, this manifests in a lot of Google products. A corollary of this guiding principle seems to be that having a real human being in the loop is anathema, even if the resulting end-user experience is terrible. Annoyingly, this approach seems to take precedence even when the need for scale is in some indeterminate future and when the current experience is poor. As JWZ rightly calls out, this is him versus "the robots". This is probably exactly right, and completely fucked up w.r.t. any reasonable balance of fair use rights. It's kind of crazy that there's even a form that asks for input of the kind a human would read. [1] From multiple discussions with Googlers, as well as various public articles by same.

georgemcbay 12y ago

YouTube is in a very difficult spot, but you can't help but shake your head when you submit a home video using only a music clip that they offer within their free-use audio library here: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music ...and you still get automatically flagged for a music copyright violation, which has happened to me multiple times. Granted in both cases one counterclaim submission (mentioning that I got the music from their free library in the first place) was sufficient for them to stfu about it, but the fact that this happens in the first place is a powerful example of how broken the system is.

codezero 12y ago
Yeah, that's a pretty ridiculous situation.
Aldo_MX 12y ago
I got once a copyright claim on behalf of Antonio Vivaldi, at first I was like "WHAT??? You can't be serious, who the •••• owns Vivaldi's copyright?!?!?!" But the record label that issued the claim answered promptly to my counterclaim and the video was restored in 24 hours. My supposition is that record labels upload thousands of songs to the Content ID system without checking them first, and they correct the copyright status of songs with the counterclaims they receive.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

YouTube does it this way because their "content partners" want it this way. If YouTube did only what they were legally required to do, namely removing content when receiving a notification and restoring it with a counter-notification, then they'd be legally in the clear, but the partners currently making extensive use of their Content ID system would complain bitterly or leave. (Or sue; see the ridiculous Viacom lawsuit for example.)

saidajigumi 12y ago

YouTube is doing more work than they need to, but probably because it costs them less effort and time to just side with copyright claim holders and act as a thorn to users who would use the content. To put a fine point on it: there's a cultural attitude I've observed within Google[1] against doing anything that "won't scale." Both for better and worse, this manifests in a lot of Google products. A corollary of this guiding principle seems to be that having a real human being in the loop is anathema, even if the resulting end-user experience is terrible. Annoyingly, this approach seems to take precedence even when the need for scale is in some indeterminate future and when the current experience is poor. As JWZ rightly calls out, this is him versus "the robots". This is probably exactly right, and completely fucked up w.r.t. any reasonable balance of fair use rights. It's kind of crazy that there's even a form that asks for input of the kind a human would read. [1] From multiple discussions with Googlers, as well as various public articles by same.