Why do we have push-button screw-people-over systems at all?
If the problem is that there are “too many” things for companies to review manually, too bad! If a company is perfectly fine raking in money from massive sales at a global scale, they should be willing to spend a proportional amount of money to do business at that scale. Let them hire their own people to review content in depth. Let them hire their own goons to send legal notices. (We certainly need more jobs for people.)
> Why do we have push-button screw-people-over systems at all?
Because that's the way our shitty representatives in congress wrote the legislation?
Google could face real legal consequences for not responding to a DMCA request. They can't face any legal consequences for complying with a false one (DMCA, or their internal contentId system).
And companies with the DMCA/ContentId bots sending in these bogus notices know that they too are safe. Because a victim would have to jump over the insanely high hurdle of proving the company knowingly misrepresented their ownership of the work. The company can easily claim that is was not intentional, but rather a mistake caused by a bug in their software.
If congress cared about this, they could fix it in a minute: false DMCA takedown request = fine, regardless of knowledge or intent.
Can we fight them back? Can't we collectively submit our own DMCA requests on all their videos? Break the system so they have come to up with a new one.
No. Companies have a legally defensible narrative:
1. People were using Rhinna's songs without permission in large numbers.
2. The company wrote a program to automatically send out a takedown notice to violators
3. Whoops, the program made a mistake. We didn't mean to.
If you, dalore, write a takedown bot, it's obvious from the start you are acting in bad faith because there is no epidemic of people pirating dalore songs.
I do think that companies here are "acting in good faith" in so much as I do not think they are misrepresenting their intentions. I don't think Sony has a conspiracy to increase it's revenue by monetizing Minecraft gamer channels.
However, the law is written in such a way that there is no penalty for companies that write low precision, high recall, dumpster-fire grade take-down bot software.
This is the whole problem. Sick and tired of people complaining about YouTube/Google. For them to "fix the problem" just for their own platform would cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year in man hours to process every single last takedown request manually with no automation. Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.
The laws are broken. It doesn't matter how "big" Google is. They cannot afford to protect the small guy. It's a choice between "hurt the small guy" vs. "go bankrupt". Fix the laws. Don't blame Google.
Manually processing DMCA takedown requests would be a huge hassle, but this is still on Google - even without the DMCA and just with regular IP law they would still have a system like this if for no other reason than to appease the companies they want on Play Movies / Youtube rentals. They have deals with the MPAA / mafia that certainly include draconian contentID as a prerequisite of you being able to "rent" movies on Youtube.
And Youtube has had for years Netflix-styled stars in its eyes. They want to be cozy with big media and trudging all over their individual creators is business as usual if it gets them favorable deals with the "big boys".
> Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.
Why not Google themselves? If they're willing to take on the responsibility for false takedown claims by actively taking steps to remove a content creators': why can't Google themselves pay for enforcement of truth in the matter? They are creating EULAs and contracts around users basically having no choice in the matter, after all?
Google borders on insane with lacking any sort of manual support.
For example, when you are a paid G Suite customer - you'll need to dig hard to find their support number. Then you'll need to click several buttons making it clear you still need support. You also need to then generate a PIN used to access the phone support.
Similar story with Adwords - if you want support with that, you ain't gonna get it. It's a maze of FAQs and automated email responses with useless information.
If you manage to figure out the incantation to email an actual person, they're some kind of 1st-level support whose purpose in life is to piss you off so much with useless pre-canned responses that you finally give up.
Truely, incredible that they get away with it. Also incredible that they're OK with this given how much profit they make from ads.
By comparison, I've had excellent support from Bing Ads in the past - unfortunately they represent a much smaller number of impressions than Adwords.
Google is OK with it because they do it to small spenders. They have human account managers and a very visible phone number if you spend enough. Not saying I agree with it, but it makes sense.
I give then around $250/m. Obviously not a big spend, but I would expect to get support on the very rare occasions when I need it.
On the other side, Google semes very happy to spam me around once a once with offers of human help to restructure ads and so on. I took them up on this offer once, and it was a total waste of an hour - they were obviously going by script, and suggested changes that would increase my spend for no benefit. They also couldn't help at all with the one thing I actually wanted help with (increasing quality scores for obviously relevant content).
So they do have humans for the little people... but only to encourage you to spend more :/
Except legally, Youtube has no obligation to host these videos, and can take them down on a whim. So a lawsuit has no leg to stand on. While, on the other hand, they do have an obligation to take copyright infringement complaints very seriously - in fact, ContentID came from one of those "expensive lawsuits".
Facilitating copyfraud could invalidate their DMCA protections. Since they choose to provide monetary compensation based on accusations instead of evidence with a system they created, they would also be responsible for the system that they created facilitating said copyfraud that is knowingly taking money from legitimate copyright holders and giving it to false claimants. If any other publisher were to give money owed to a creator, say a book creator, this would be obvious fraud, as it is in this case. I think the case is stronger against YouTube than it will would initially appear.
> Facilitating copyfraud could invalidate their DMCA protections.
[citation needed]
> If any other publisher were to give money owed to a creator
YT doesn't actually owe money to anyone. Legally, they could host the videos, put ads and keep all the money. They distribute money because they want to incentivize content creators to upload stuff, but they do it at their discretion.
The creators uploaded their videos under the premise that they would receive a share of ad revenue. Given that creators retain copyright to the materials keeping all the money and continuing to distribute would seem problematic.
Damages for willful infringement are 150k per work. Pretending that they have zero obligations to creators is an .. interesting perspective that I don't think a lawyer would accept.
> legally, Youtube has no obligation to host these videos, and can take them down on a whim
Well, maybe law has to change.
For example, in my country if you offer a service to the public you cannot refuse a customer for no reason. It's intended as an anti-discrimination law, but also as a way to protect customers from abuse.
I think you don't understand what the anti-discrimination law means. That law lists reasons which you can't use to refuse service - and you're free to use any other reason to refuse service. This anti-discrimination law most probably does not force all businesses to provide services to everyone but only businesses with physical public presence.
Because it works the same in most countries, for a good reason. If they were from one of the very few (less than 10) countries where it's that wildly different, I assume they:
1) can't write on Hacker News (more likely)
2) would say it
3) would not use the country as an example of a functioning country
There are multiple legs for a suit to stand on, either against Google or the claimants. Bonus points if you registered the works with the corresponding IP department in your country (I think it's the Library of Congress in the US)
Talk to a lawyer
It seems people on the internet try to solve everything with buttons and emails and forget there's a world out there with laws and rights and everything else
Even then, the "big spender" level keeps shifting upwards. I remember back in the day it was $5k a month that got you special attention. Now it seems like only $10m+ clients get Google's attention.
In my experience it's not hard, maybe this is because i'm on a >50 user GSuite Business plan, but it goes like so:
1. admin console, click the question mark in the top right
2. "contact support" button is right on the front page
3. Choose live chat, phone, or email
4. enter your question
5. click "continue to phone" (can't blame them for trying to show relevant helpdesk articles first)
6. call the number and enter the pin
This is better than some customer support solutions, Many will bounce you back to the helpdesk homepage every chance they get, and the only way to actually get support is to email support@ or go to a special page (Tip: /hc/en-us/requests/new will work with most zendesk instances).
Because that's the compromise Google chose with the publishers to avoid getting sued to death over the massive and blatant copyright infringement of full TV shows and movies going on YouTube at the time
This is a less technical solution, and less profitable as consequence. It is also subtracting from software's image as magic, which again amongst other things makes it less profitable.
False claim of copyright is a criminal offense in the US. While prosecutions are extremely rare, they have happened. It is worth getting a lawyer to help you file a formal complaint with the US Department of Justice. While the odds of criminal prosecution are low, there's a good chance paperwork from a US Attorney's office asking some questions will be sent to the offender. That will reach their legal people, and something useful will probably happen.
By my understanding, you are mistaken or out of date. What you wrote is true for takedown notices issued under the DMCA, but YouTube is allowing companies to order takedowns or monetize other's videos without going through the legal DMCA process. That's what ContentID is about.
That link is for actual DMCA notices. With the Content ID take-downs, Google never actually receives a DMCA request. The music company (etc.) politely asks YouTube to take down the video, and YouTube complies out of the goodness of its heart. (Well, and a bunch of contracts that give some sort of quid pro quo for the arrangement between YouTube and these companies.)
It looks like these are all Content ID takedowns (well, actually not takedowns; whoever is making the requests is taking the ad revenue from the videos, but leaving them up). In these cases, YouTube has their own dispute system, but it doesn't touch the DMCA.
All of which makes Google liable for theft. They created the system, they run the system, they transfer the money. It's all facilitating copyfraud. Just because Google agrees to host the content doesn't mean that they are incapable of being able to be sued for their intentional actions.
It's not legally theft if Google makes a decision to start paying party B instead of party A.
You're choosing to let YouTube publicly host the video until further notice, and in exchange they agree to pay you whatever cut of ad revenue they deem appropriate. There's no question that under the terms you agree to, they can demonetize your videos at will. And if they also see fit to start paying somebody else when your videos get played, that's not something you have legal standing to complain about.
What it probably is, is fraud on the part of whoever's falsely claiming to Google that they have a copyright interest.
It's a two step process. The first step happens within YouTube's guidelines and do not involve the DMCA. It then can escalate to an actual DMCA notice / counter.
Critically though, going to DMCA is really bad for the uploader because Youtube does not remove the 'strike' against your account when it gets escalated. So content uploaders almost never go here.
Do I read this correctly? Using available legal options for protecting content you genuinely own labels you as "troublemaker" and will cost you your account when done repeatedly?
Part of the problem here would be that none of the claims sent to MumboJumbo have been through the DMCA. They all use Youtube's internal system instead, which was built to appease the big music publishers.
The question to me when these stories come up at least once a month is: Why would YouTube want to fix this? YouTube as a platform for generating revenue has largely become the domain of large media companies and top personalities. Those entities have a vested interest in keeping the copyright claim system exactly as it is, and YouTube has a vested interest in keeping those entities happy.
I think we've long since passed the point where anyone can say with a straight face that YouTube is first and foremost a platform for individuals to post whatever videos they want to.
FWIW, the author of the tweet, Mumbo Jumbo is a high-profile Minecraft videos content creator on YouTube (3M subscribers) and he's doing this as his full-time job. By your description, I would say he's in the top personalities group.
What's happening here is basically Warner Chappell is claiming a revenue sharing of his video with no recourse.
Edit: he posted a new video elaborating more about this issue.[1]
MatPat of Game Theory & Film Theory says that his YouTube rep explained the company has a categorization internally for video game accounts, which means they can never be part of the VIP category.
Any VIP program works on the (perceived) social standing that comes from (perceived) exclusivity. YouTube doesn’t want to alienate the traditional celebrities with ties to big media companies; part of that means stocking the VIP pool with only people that those celebrities consider to be their peers.
It's not that. YouTube is very worried about the copyright position of video game streams (ie. The stream clearly shows the copyrighted artwork of the games, unlicensed).
If they don't review the video, they can use the safe harbor provisions. If they look at the content and decide to promote or reward those creators, Google themselves could become liable for that IP infringement on aassive scale that so far is mostly going unprosecuted.
A person who uses YouTube heavily, who's content many people here will recognise, has a contact inside Google. This Google representative has reportedly said that the group who are recognised as "VIPs" (Very Important Person) by the company specifically excludes people working in a particular field of content production, namely gaming.
He has a contract with the musician whose songs he incorporated in the video. Would be simpler (and possibly more profitable) to use the dispute-resolution process and maybe indemnity built into that contract, tell the musician to call off the dogs and reimburse him for diverted profits and his time/expenses.
This doesn't sound like an example of YouTube badness, but rather an example of the hazards of working with unreliable business partners. And pay attention to your contracts!
It's quite possible that the musician doesn't actually own the rights and was never allowed to license the music in the first place. They may have negotiated some deal (handshake or formal), but musicians normally don't own the publishing rights to their own music; the label does.
>That does not - of course - give WC the right to steal 25% of the value of MJ's work just because YT says they can.
This is completely wrong. Youtube can do whatever it wants unless MumboJumbo specifically signed a contract with Youtube to receive guaranteed compensation. The only law Youtube has to follow is the copyright law and it's doing it to the fullest extent possible in this instance.
Yes but he doesn't work for the large media companies that effectively wrote the copyright law. He's merely running a "one man" operation + some support. Destroying these "one man" competitors who can become dangerous to the entrenched business models is part of the strategy.
I think you answered your own question. YouTube is running the risk of turning into a sterile, corporate mall.
Soon enough an edgier, more tolerant alternative will pop up and start attracting eyeballs.
YT is running the risk of its content creators organising themselves into an industry association with legal and financial teeth, and suing its profits into oblivion.
It was my understanding that YouTube isn't profitable; has there been any new data on this that I've missed? Lack of similar-sized competitors in the space would certainly indicate that the margins don't really stack up and you could make an argument that the aggressive foisting of their premium offering underscores that notion, but I don't know for sure. It'd be interesting to know more about operating a site of that nature at that scale but I don't suppose that sort of data will make it out any time soon!
There has been the ghost of this argument floating around for more than a decade at this point, based on the idea that Google pays for youtube bandwidth (due to peering, they don't).
If Google was losing money on youtube they wouldn't pay out billions a year to video creators in the face of zero competition.
The competition to youtube is virtually nonexistent. If you're a medium or small content creator (which most youtube creators are), then instead of deciding to go to vimeo you might as well just file for unemployment benefits.
And the network effects of youtube will ensure that this continues to be the case. Content creators aren't organised, so a mass exodus won't happen.
So maybe the concept of a medium or small content creator isn't profitable in our current pop-capitalistic system; I guess you are suggesting changing this system, because at the moment this process repeats, what has happened to 1000s of businesses (most recently small farms) in the real world too. Still people elect the ones being paid for by the profiteers very reliably year after year
What will they sue YT for? The creators aren't employed by YT and therefore YT doesn't owe them a cent. Copyright law doesn't forbid over-blocking or demonetization and the new EU Copyright directive explicitly forbids under-blocking. The only thing those creators can do is leave YT and let it die from a lack of content. They don't have any legal or financial teeth at all.
How big a risk is that really? Exploiting the other side's inability to coordinate seems like a standard business trick these days. All they need to do is to pay attention and do some token changes to the product or ToS every now and then, disrupting any attempt of creators at organizing themselves. They can keep at it forever.
I have never found data on whether or not the YouTube legal entity is an independent thing while the add supplier is a separate entity they can happily say they make no money to take for their other legal exposures that YouTube generates. There's also the fun outcome that tomorrow YouTube is sunset the moment the creators start being properly organized because like you mention the jig would be up.
>Recoding and hosting and transmitting video is so expensive that I can assure you Youtube does not exist
Many such platforms exist; starting a new one from scratch without monetization scale would be difficult, but certainly not impossible. The real expense when scaling would seem to me to be moderation of illegal content actually, since you have to pay people for that.
Hosting:
I'm fairly sure many streaming solutions (HLS, MPEG-DASH?) work by having the client request chunks of content pre-rendered at specific bit rates. Ergo the actual chunks are static content.
IPFS does static content and Cloudflare does a free IPFS gateway.
There's no technical reason someone couldn't put together a WordPress-for-Video system - or even add video to Wordpress. (Although that would almost certainly suck for performance reasons.)
The big problem is discovery. A lot of people are wondering about decentralised server networks with an open discovery/search system built on top.
That's a horrendously hard project for social as well as technical reasons. But it's badly needed to drag the web out of the corporate swamp it's currently drowning in.
I’d say the problem is less discovery as it is monetization.
The total bandwidth for one of these creators’ videos is not itself all that massive. Particularly if you are not live streaming, a few thousand dollars in hosting costs a year to get 100TB/mo dedicated servers in a couple datacenters.
But once you have the servers humming and serving a few million views a month, whose ads are you running alongside your content?
Patron is fractions of a percent of the GDP of YouTube’s content creator payout, and patron works for only a fraction of creators. It’s not even a comparison.
I have worked on a video streaming service[1] and I also worked for a company that did sell ad space on their own and with this background I can tell you that I do believe that it should be possible for him to set up his own video distribution site. You are right that he probably does not have the technical expertise to build it himself, but he makes about 1 Million Euro a Year. He probably has enough cash on hand to hire a team that can.
[1] Although a kind of specialized one with a lot simpler scaling characteristics compared to a YouTube replacement.
YouTube doesn't have a lot of flexibility here. The DMCA spells out specific requirements YouTube must follow when they receive a copyright claim and even with the current DMCA submission system and content id system which creators claim is too large media company friendly Google is constantly being threatened with law suits by the large media companies claiming they are in violation of safe harbor requirements for not making it even easier for them to make mass DMCA take down claims.
> Videos removed or blocked due to YouTube's contractual obligations
> YouTube enters into agreements with certain music copyright owners to allow use of their sound recordings and musical compositions.
> In exchange for this, some of these music copyright owners require us to handle videos containing their sound recordings and/or musical works in ways that differ from the usual processes [aka the DMCA takedown/counter-notification process] on YouTube. Under these contracts, we may be required to remove specific videos from the site, block specific videos in certain territories, or prevent specific videos from being reinstated after a counter notification. In some instances, this may mean the Content ID appeals and/or counter notification processes will not be available. Your account will not be penalized at this time.
That's not how that law works. The safe harbor protection in the DMCA is for Youtube, not their customers. It protects them from legal action by copyright holders as long as they honor the process spelled out in the statute.
There's absolutly no law requiring Youtube to host whatever content you want them to. Nor should there be, really.
> It protects them from legal action by copyright holders as long as they honor the process spelled out in the statute.
Yes, that's what I was referring to; YouTube is now saying in some of their emails[1] about taking down a video that they are not intending to forward the counter-notification to the claimant, which they are required under 17 USC 512(g)(2)(B) to do if they want to limit their liability as a service provider.
They don't have to put the video back up or do anything when someone sends a counter notification, but that means they have full copyright liability for that video. They can now be sued directly for violating copyright for each copy they made when someone viewed the video prior to when it was taken down.
In the video in my previous comment, a copyright lawyer discusses the situation. He thinks the big music industry companies that are involved in these agreements ("YouTube enters into agreements with certain music copyright owners") must have indemnified YouTube for any legal costs they might face in exchange for the power to anonymously kill videos without question or appeal.
> They don't have to put the video back up or do anything when someone sends a counter notification, but that means they have full copyright liability for that video. They can now be sued directly for violating copyright for each copy they made when someone viewed the video prior to when it was taken down.
Anybody claiming to own the copyright. It doesn't matter if the claim is legitimate; "safe harbor" means the time and effort wasted on copyright problems is limited to hiding/restoring videos and forwarding a few legal notices between the claimant and alleged copyright infringe channel. The expensive parts like defending against potentially frivolous claims happens directly between the parties involved.
Copyright holders could file a DCMA request, but YouTube's process makes it easier while achieving the same result. This allows YouTube to satisfy large content holders by avoiding the penalties for false DCMA claims.
DCMA is intented for forcing a comapny to remove content. YouTube simply removes things without actually involving DCMA.
It is less reach but people need to explore other options. Maybe Twitch streams and Patreon would allow him to monetize in a different (better?) way. I agree that YT only cares about corporate interests.
I really don't understand why the process has been designed to assume the copyright claimant is in the right from the get-go when it's the claimants that abuse the system. If I was Google I'd have my lawyers aggressively pursue the legal feasibility of banning companies from submitting complaints if they abuse the complaint system (if not then ban the channels of companies who have their lawyers abuse the system) and I'd have my developers build fair-use detection into content-id -- if the clip is less than 30 seconds or 10% of the work (or whatever threshold makes sense legally), then it's fair use, period, can't submit a claim on that.
It's really about time these companies felt some chilling effects.
>I really don't understand why the process has been designed to assume the copyright claimant is in the right from the get-go when it's the claimants that abuse the system.
If Youtube didn't allow claimants (who couldn't care less about "fair use" of their IP) vast and arbitrary power even to the point of abuse without consequence, those claimants would turn around and sue them into oblivion the way Viacom nearly did.
The system is doing precisely what it's intended to, which is to pay the Danegeld (of user content) to major media companies and not only keep Youtube alive, but make it attractive as a platform for officially licensed content.
>>> fair-use detection into content-id -- if the clip is less than 30 seconds or 10% of the work (or whatever threshold makes sense legally), then it's fair use, period, can't submit a claim on that.
That isn't how fair use works. 30 seconds might not be fair use and 10 minutes might, depending on how they're used.
> I really don't understand why the process has been designed to assume the copyright claimant is in the right from the get-go when it's the claimants that abuse the system.
Money.
If YT's system wasn't designed this way, claimants would file DMCA claims instead. This imposes a significant legal burden on YT; they would need actual lawyers with actual law degrees who've passed the bar to review each contested copyright claim.
The DMCA isn't designed in a way to make an easy path forward for a service like Youtube to operate fairly in a profitable manner. Article 13 prohibits it by law.
Copyright law reminds me of going to my parent's house and being asked to fix something on their computer. It's not this one thing that's broken, it's everything that's broken. I could fix all the little individual things, but it would be a lot easier to wipe it clean and start from scratch.
> they would need actual lawyers with actual law degrees who've passed the bar to review each contested copyright claim.
No, they wouldn't? The law clearly says that what they have to do "upon notification of claimed infringement" is "to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing". Nowhere does it say they are even allowed , let alone required, to legally review the claim.
If JoeGamer uploads a video of him playing dark souls with music in the background, and MusicCorp claims infringement, YT has to remove the video without putting it past a lawyer. You and I are on the same page so far.
Once JoeGamer contests the claim and says, "No, I got that from one of the dozen websites that offer CC licensed music, here is the link," YT either needs to have a lawyer review it, or simply side with MusicCorp. If YT sides with MusicCorp, YT quickly loses their monopoly.
Since the alternative is a terrible business strategy, I think the term "need" applies here.
You are factually incorrect about the well-known DMCA notice and counter-notice provisions. Please read 17 USC §512, subsections (c) and (g). The comment to which you are replying quotes what I presume from context to be subsection (c) (the language is repeated across multiple subsections).
The law provides that service providers can avoid liability by following these procedures, which afford them no discretion or opportunity to review claimed infringement.
You claim that "DMCA claims [...] [impose] a significant legal burden on YT; they would need actual lawyers with actual law degrees who've passed the bar to review each contested copyright claim." From the statute, it appears instead that reviewing section (c) notices or section (g) counter-notices and acting based on their own purported determination of infringement or non-infringement would cause the loss of their safe harbor, a safe harbor available only when the provider follows the nondiscretionary procedure laid out in (c)(1) and (g)(2).
> YT either needs to have a lawyer review it, or simply side with MusicCorp
No, YT must "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 [it] first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification (..) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order"
There's no opportunity for review by YT, from either side.
Heck, I'd even have my developers write an AI that automatically extracts fair-use-length clips from videos and songs belonging to some of the biggest complainers, and uploads them as "honeypot" videos. If they complain about one of those, ban 'em from complaining again. They don't understand copyright law.
A 10 second clip of a movie isn’t necessarily fair use; It’s decided on a case by case basis. You can use as much as you need to get your point across; No more. If that’s 10 seconds, you can use 10 seconds. If that’s a minute, you can use a minute.
But if Google's lawyers took a stance on this, they could use precedent to set defined rules for what actually counts as fair use and all these claimants would be fucked.
Now imagine if you don't have 3m subs, no 150k followers on Twitter, no one is posting your stuff on Reddit and even on HN. Good luck getting any help from Google
Now imagine it isn't YouTube but some other more significant privatized service near monopoly status, say a local grocery chain or car rental company, and they enforce a "policy" (say banning you) that is now difficult to separate from a law other than you have no voice and little recourse for action, especially as an individual.
Privatized monopolies are in general small totalitarian government regimes that reign over specific functions (markets) of life. Real competition is what breaks those regimes into a democracy where you can somewhat vote with your purchase decisions. We still have to watch out for cartels though where multiple near monopolies agree to stay out of each others territories or collude to set market practices.
You also have to watch out for the degenerate cases of competition that arise when the sold products are not commodities. The less a product is substitutable by another from its category, the more meaningless the competition is. On the commodity end, you have grocery stores; for most products, you have true competition because all grocery stores sell mostly the same stuff (and from the same brands). On the "meaningless competition" end you have streaming services like Netflix and HBO. Movies, TV shows, videogames are mostly non-substitutable goods (if you want to watch Star Wars, being told to go watch Princess Bride instead isn't going to cut it). Streaming services are so full of exclusively licensed content that they don't compete - you have to subscribe to those that have content that interest you. This is kind of like a cartel, but arises organically, bottom-up, instead of from explicit collusion.
Let's go a step further: imagine living in a new company town that Google bought/built. Three DMCA-claims and you're in violation of TOS, all your content (including what's in your apartment) is deleted and you're kicked out of town and driven to the town limits.
I'm sure there will still be people here who are quite happy with that because "it's not the government doing it" and they reckon they're not next in line for the same treatment.
If Google builds a town in the U.S., they're still subject to state and federal laws, which have protections for tenants and requirements for due process. (If it's really a company town, then the company would be the municipal government.)
The only way to fix this is to let you sue for damages + lawyer fees.
As it is right now, you can earn lots of money by DMCA:ing popular creators, monetize on their content for a while (or a long time if they don't have a friend at Google who can escalate the issue).
Bringing a lawsuit is not an option for the vast majority of people, but it seems this is the first option many people suggest. Situations like this are more of a problem with our laws that largely protect the interests of large corporations over individuals and really need to be changed.
Then maybe someone needs to sell DMCA insurance to small creators that could never afford to retain a lawyer individually. The majority of the invalid claims would get reversed the second a suit is filed and they wouldn’t go further than that.
I'm sure that based on the amount of copyright trolling going on on YT there would be a lot of money to be made suing YT and the companies/individuals making the copyright strikes
IANAL but I thought there was no way to lose those rights, regardless of what contract you sign or web form you click on. That's why they're called rights.
Large companies should be required to have a full-time consumer advocate (paid by the company, but selected by users) who can effectively have a say in matters.
>> Bringing a lawsuit is not an option for the vast majority of people.
Doesn't that mean that the whole justice system in US is broken? Courts of law exist for this very purpose, so that every citizen can fight for their rights, including defending themselves against this type of extortion. If the cost of lawsuit is prohibitive then you might as well live in some third world dictatorship, with no justice system at all.
It's not quite that drastic; we do have organizations like the ACLU and EFF that bring lawsuits for the public good. Though relying on foundations to fight for the same idea of "public good" as you do is a shaky footing to base a society around.
It would help if the damages were calculated as a percentage of revenue (or maybe equity) of the largest company involved in the clam.
Mirimax subcontracted to a fly by night organization that sent 10,000 bogus takedown requests? Great. The damages are 10% of revenue. Since Disney is the parent, that would include Disney theme park tickets, cruise ships, the entire Star Wars franchise, etc.
A 1% revenue hit per 1000 take downs seems completely proportional to me. To go after trolls with no revenue, add in a fine for 10x whatever ad revenue they raked in by camping on the disputed rights.
To make sure these get litigated, make sure the damages go to the victim and their lawyers (not google, etc), and also tack on legal fees.
What you’re looking for is called punitive damages, and already exists in the legal system (this is why McDonalds paid millions of dollars for a hot coffee). The goal is to actually open lawsuits including punitive damages for fraudulent or negligent DMCA requests.
True, but the punitive damages are set as a multiple of the damage done. I want them to be as a percentage of the revenue / valuation of the party at fault.
The current system is why PG&E has literally blown up neighborhoods and burnt down a city, but the investors only got a slap on the wrist.
In a system where punitive damages are a percentage of the valuation of the corporate entity that committed the crime, repeatedly breaking the law would force massive issuances of equity to the victims. For particularly lawless companies, this would mean the current owners equity would be diluted to the point where they would cede control of the company to the wronged parties.
To pick a different industry, this means that ownership of most coal mines would have been transferred to the miners and surrounding towns years ago (unless they stopped flouting safety and environmental regulations).
If you want punitive action, balance and justice in one package, aim high: eye for an eye.
For each case of copyfraud, have the defrauder lose copyright for one item in their catalogue and placed into public domain. The item? Victim's choice.
When legislatures come up with a penalty that depends on say a percentage of global turnover, HN lights up at the iniquity of it. Despite that being in a jurisdiction that demands proportionality in penalties, so it's a maximum that will rarely if ever levied, and only on the largest corporates.
"The current system is why PG&E has literally blown up neighborhoods and burnt down a city, but the investors only got a slap on the wrist."
This is such a strange comment to me. "Investors" use electricity, live in neighborhoods in California, etc. Why would they want to destroy that stuff? Or are you saying that investors that live far away and have a fraction of a percent of their money invested in PG&E through a mutual fund have the desire or the ability to cause PG&E to do bad things? Assuming they do, how do you envision a diversified investor be punished, even if you took away the whole thing?
It's been mentioned many times that there were "third degree burns". When I long ago read a definition, it said 3rd degree burns involve charred skin. That may not be quite accurate, but something still seems off. When I brew coffee or handle a pot of boiling water in the kitchen, I don't feel as though I'm risking "third degree burns".
Sure, but I was referring to a spill. If I spill hot water on myself, I don't expect the consequences to be the same as being immersed in it at constant temperature. Both because the time is short and it cools as it falls and spatters.
I mean, I have spilled boiling water on myself occasionally and I don't think I got third degree burns.
When you drive a car you probably don't feel like you're risking fatal road accidents happen either but it happens.
Third degree burns happen with boiling hot water, any boiling water is dangerous and potentially lethal if mishandled. People underestimate the energy stored in that water.
You can't do this on YouTube because YT satisfied the big copyright manipulators by adding their own system in front of the DMCA. As a result these claims don't go through the DMCA process and the legal penalties (toothless to begin with) built into the DMCA aren't available to you. Content ID killing your content or claiming it because someone misused Content ID isn't a legal matter so you are powerless. This is how it is intended to be: It's what Viacom/Disney/etc wanted and Google gave it to them.
AFAIK DMCA notices only produce a takedown, not monetization. If you want to monetize you go through Content ID, which is not the DMCA.
A false DMCA also exposes you to real legal threat, and a big player with money for a lawyer will dismantle you.
What happens if there's two claims? Could a YouTuber do something along the lines of just lodging claims against their own videos in order to prevent others from lodging claims?
I've heard from YouTubers that when they win the appeal they get the monetization that was taken returned back to them. This does not apply when the video was completely demonetized though, only when the monetization was reassigned.
Is there any context on this? I've never heard of this guy so I have no idea if his complaint is relevant or not. The fact that he tweeted this out on Sunday and then just a few hours later tweeted "Find it a little bit strange that @TeamYouTube have totally ignored this tweet" makes me suspicious.
I've heard of people getting claims from random companies like a South American tv network but these look like they are coming from Warner Chappel. I know youtube's content id system is broken but there isn't enough detail here to tell if this is a good example of this.
Edited to add:
He did a video on it. It looks like he is using a song with permission but the publishing company filed a claim anyway: https://youtu.be/LZplh8rd-I4?t=153
He's a quite well-known professional Minecraft YouTuber with 3 million subscribers. This copyright claim means for all these videos the company making the claim now gets a share of his income. Given he makes game videos, many of those videos do not even contain music outside the intro tune, which he's been using for years and licensed from the creator.
This really sucks. But just because he has gotten a "license" from a musician friend does not mean that they can use/copy any sounds or melodies, and the company attacking him might have some kind of valid claim. Just a quick check of the first video I found from him had an intro which could be argued to be similar to George Harrison, Got My Mind Set On You for example.
It sounds nothing like George Harrison's song. If similarities that superficial were enough for a copyright claim, then virtually every song in existence would be in violation of someone else's copyright. Neither the rhythm nor the melody is the same.
He has now tweeted an update acknowledging that the artist from whom he licensed the music may not have had the right to claim sampled music as their own. Another update urges others to ensure that licensees actually have the right to license the work that they claim as original. This is the only top-level comment that offers actual information on why this may have happened and it was downvoted for a difference of perspective informed by that information.
The timing of the few prominent notes in that intro are similar to the George Harrison tune, but the notes themselves as well as supporting elements are different, as is the overall percussion.
Unfortunately, while I feel it's not infringing, it is debatable enough to be a problem. "few note" cases like this tend to be painful and should be avoided. I would put that right on his musician friend.
Since the bell appears to be ringing at the school of hard knocks...
Given how YT works at present, this guy should immediately produce his music elements himself, as an original work, in tandem with a musician.
Validate that shit, and then move to using that imaging from here on out.
While that is in progress, definitely counter claim every single one. Gotta be someone in the family, or a friend, able to help. Just knock them out.
Make lots of noise about the whole mess too, including the production of original music, complete with behind the scenes videos that substantiate the originality, as well as inform and transition people to the new branding.
It's possible to move past this, and the creator absolutely should.
Hollywood started on the west coast because it was reasonably out of reach from the copyright and patent claims of the east coast. That's what allowed to a creative industry to start and strive.
Don't be surprised if the next cultural hub happens somewhere far from US IP's clutches.
The guy from this tweet concludes "Not only should you ensure you have complete rights to the music you are using for your videos, but also ensure that you ask about any samples that have been used. Otherwise you could end up in this situation (And you wouldn't want that)"
Creators simply do not have time for this shit. Hell, it requires a specialized lawyer team. Either have a simple process for them to handle that or you will see them fleeing from US-hosted servers.
How is it just as spam / disruptive behavior type protection do they not have a catch for if 1800+ claims ... maybe have a human with a brain take a look at what is up?
The problem here has nothing to do with the DMCA. The problem is that Google has implemented its own system that has little to do with the DMCA.
If it were handled the DMCA way, here is how it would go.
1. Someone complains to the hosting service alleging that you are violating their copyright.
2. The hosting provider takes down the material and notifies you. If you do not want to dispute this, that is the end of it.
3. If you want to dispute their claims, you notify the hosting provider. It doesn't really matter, as far as I recall, if you dispute the claims because you say the claimant does not hold copyright, or you say that they do but your use is covered by fair use, or any other mean.
4. The hosting provider puts your material back up, and tells the complainant that if they want to take it down, they need to take you to court, and provides your legal contact information for filing said suit.
If the claimant takes you to court, and wins, following the above procedure absolves the hosting provider of any liability for the infringement.
This is how it's working with hosting providers. Digitalocean didn't take my server down but said they need my reply for the accuser ASAP. I basically wrote this is fair use and I'm ready to go to court in the USA in some specific state/district (found a boilerplate of that letter from some law forum/site). Digitalocean said thank you and I never got a reply. They said I don't need to do anything else when it comes to them, they are satisfied. I knew the troll who didn't even live in the states, so I was confident.
If the claimant takes you to court and loses, there is no penalty, I assume? There's punitive damages in the US - any chance that would be applied to such a case?
As far as the court case goes, it's basically just like it would be if the complainant had simply sued you directly for copyright infringement. If you win, the court can award you costs and attorney fees. I'm not sure how they decide whether or not to do so.
A claimant trying to use DMCA where it is not justifiable faces a couple other deterrents.
First, unless the claimant is representing themselves in the case, they are going to have an attorney, and that attorney is going to take into account Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure [1]. If the claimant doesn't have a fairly reasonable case, he is going to have trouble finding an attorney.
Second, knowingly including false information on a DMCA takedown notice is perjury. The claimant can face criminal charges for that (although it would probably have to involve someone doing this on a large scale to get Federal prosecutors to prosecute).
Knowingly filing a false DMCA takedown also makes you liable for civil damages, including costs and attorney fees, incurred by the target of the takedown notice, the hosting provider, and in the case where neither the complainant or the target are the copyright owner, the actual copyright owner.
If the complainant who knowingly files a false takedown notice actually follows through and sue you for infringement, I'd guess that the damages due to you for the false notice would be handled there.
If the complainant isn't that stupid, and drops the matter after the notice and counter-notice, you could sue them over the false notice.
> Second, knowingly including false information on a DMCA takedown notice is perjury
I've reviewed the DMCA a few times and I am pretty sure this isn't true. It's supposed to be the "teeth" of the DMCA to prevent false claims, but the actual teeth are very blunted.
The requirements a DMCA takedown notice are[1]
1. you have to sign it as someone authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.
2. you have to identify the work you claim is being infringed.
3. you have to identify the work you want them to take down.
4. you have to give them your contact information.
5. you have to state that you have a "good faith belief" that the content is infringing.
6. Direct quote, and the only use of the word "perjury" in the notification requirements: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly in-fringed."
The only thing you must declare under penalty of perjury is that you are authorized to act for the copyright owner. The only other claim you make is that you are acting in "good faith", which is super fuzzy. An actor sending out notices on content detected by content-id bots is almost certainly acting in "good faith" if they haven't been made aware of potential errors by those bots.
That seems like basically what's happening. I guess the only place where YouTube might be non-conforming is that they break down the complaints by individual piece of content, rather than by claimant.
Maybe youtube should by default bundle the complaints? Ideally you'd have rich tools for slicing and dicing a complaint and responding to different slices in different ways.
That's very much not what's happening. The 'content owner' made a claim and because of that gets all the ad revenue from the works in question, until YouTube decides in the uploader's favor. (but the uploader doesn't get the money back)
It would seem if you make money on YouTube you should also be formally copyrighting your work, so you can easily go after people who perform these monetization attacks and maximize compensation.
In some countries (including the US) you can additionally "register copyright", and it makes enforcement easier or allows higher compensation, maybe that's what they're referring to.
That advice wouldn't help the british creator in this case though.
Correct, in the US there is implicit copyright by default if you include a copyright mark and date and formal copyright through registration. Implicit US copyright doesn't offer much protection, just an ability to tell people to stop using your works. Formal US copyright gives you rapid retort and default judement compensation that's just insane (something like up to $150,000 per infringement).
You don't have to be a US citizen to register for a US copyright.
Copyright is necessary and isn’t the problem here. What is the problem is Youtube’s refusal to require any verification when a copyright claim is made. YouTube has essentially created a society that doesn’t abide by due process because it’s a virtual society and therefore isn’t required to follow the same laws that physical societies are held to. This is a symptom of a much more dangerous problem - as we exist more and more in the online world, we are subject to whatever contrived laws the owners of that world decide to create. Those laws have serious fallout in the real world, like complete loss of income due to bogus copyright claims.
I reject the notion that copyright is necessary, what's necessary is my personal ability to use my devices without random companies being able to use the state to punish me for using an abstract concept that may or may not resemble one that they at some point also used. If you would like to make money from your art there are options such as commisions, but the onus is on you to find a business model that works, it is not for the government to be creating artificial monopolies to facilitate a business model that is incompatible with reality.
Copyright is enshrined in law. You don’t get the choice of picking and choosing to abide by it or not. The artificial monopolies (they’re not artificial btw) are guaranteed by those laws.
Should an artist want to not register copyright for their works, they are 100% free to do so.
They won’t make any money, but that’s their choice.
You may not agree with the system, but it’s the law.
In this single case, this is actually the system working as it should.
The DMCA law itself says the host can't require any such verification, and if YT started requiring it for ContentID, the complainers could just start sending regular DMCA takedowns.
which is better, because regular DMCA claims comes with a legal repercussion risk - you cannot file a false DMCA claim without punishment from the law.
But youtube contentID claim is not DMCA, and has no punishment attached for a wrong claim.
"Creators should enjoy the ownership of the products of their labor."
The basic issue some are concerned with is that "ownership" of intellectual property gives people or entities rights that infringe on regular property rights. There's an inherent conflict, so you can't just maximize both at once.
Socialism is doing quiet well in Europe and seem to provides a much better standard of living for the average person than America's capitalism implementation.
I only use YouTube occasionally but if I do, it's mostly for geek stuff by exactly these kinds of individuals. Are there any signs that another platform will take YouTube's place in that regard during the next couple years? I mean sites like Vimeo and daily motion have been around since forever but never managed to weaken the critical mass that YouTube had due to it's head start. Then there's the occasional startup that promises to fill exactly that gap, announced with fanfares and everything, but nobody came up with a killer feature yet. But that's just the gist of how I feel about that situation from when topics like that pop up every now and then.
Basically, my tldr question would be: How much worse do things have to get on YouTube for individual creators to leave, and are there any hints yet on what the winning replacement platform will be?
I would've loved it if it were PeerTube or something but the sad reality is that Twitch is the only platform that's even close to comparable to YouTube.
> How much worse do things have to get on YouTube for individual creators to leave
YouTube survived even the Real Name Policy during Google+ era. At this point, I can't think I think of anything that could do a permanent and immediate damage to YouTube popularity, even if they pull the equivalent of recent Tumblr purge. YouTube has enough momentum and its audience is way too diverse for it to fail overnight.
Also, video hosting is very hard and expensive. It's possible to have a service that is generally nice and serve some niche (like Vimeo or Dailymotion), but I feel they will break apart in some way or another if they ever gain YouTube-level of popularity (due to regulation, lawsuits, etc.).
If they perged or deleted enough content people would stop visiting. If content creators stopped making new videos the site would turn into more of a video backup/hosting service for sharing elsewhere. Wouldn't kill the site but it would reduce its value.
The RealName policy did not affect YT as it defaulted to a separate "profile" of the same account. And you got the option to merge them, or continue to use it with some nickname.
You see the inherent asymmetry of power in these massive platforms now. YouTube hasn't the slightest, tiniest imaginable incentive whatsoever to change their practices in any way here. This creator is just another meaningless bit of chaff in their grist mill of complete dominance over the web. People will get angry, retweet, do whatever, and YouTube will keep humming along. An unassailable behemoth whose total disregard for any form of fairness will never hurt it in any way.
And every second they think that way brings them a step closer to being replaced. Literally the only thing youtube has value-wise is its audience. Nothing they do can't be done with existing cloud networks and off-the-shelf open source software, or a bit of clever coding.
Furthermore by catering to advertisers wholesale, they are alienating their primary users and pissing everyone off. Eventually people will get sick of it and start a subscription-based video service where ads and sponsored content are banned.
But that isn't even necessary -- all it really takes is 3-4 of the major content creators to switch to another platform with a less draconian view on copyright and advertising policies and real change could happen.
Ive always worked at a much higher level than infra, and I used to be similarly dismissive about the difficulty of infrastructure at scale until I had some exposure to it; You'd be surprised at how much talent and effort and money goes into delivering the volume of content that YouTube does at the reliability it does. The fact that I subconsciously always pick YouTube video search results links over the alternatives has a lot to do with the fact that it's apparently difficult enough for every other entity to deliver video content reliably (with far, far lower volume).
Right but all of that auto scaling has been essentially donated to the community in the form of google cloud platform and AWS. Now we have cloud functions / lambdas (that are capable of running ffmpeg), Kubernetes, S3, Docker, and a whole slew of things that make this task fairly trivial compared to how it was in say 2005.
There also isn't any rule saying you have to do your video conversions server side. Imagine the cost efficiency of client-side video conversion. You could probably do it in js these days or very worst case scenario have a cross platform desktop / phone client.
WASM makes this an even easier task -- with some effort you could probably compile ffmpeg to WASM and run it fully client side in the browser with no performance penalty.
If you take video conversion out of the equation, all that's left is file hosting, which is commoditized as possible these days, and the search/suggestions algorithm, which pisses people off with its accuracy anyway.
> Kubernetes, S3, Docker, and a whole slew of things that make this task fairly trivial compared to how it was in say 2005.
Agreed, it's much _easier_ to do these things, but evidently not yet _easy_. Handwaving about who deserves credit is irrelevant compared to an analysis of whether executing on it is easy or not, and my (admittedly low-confidence) model,based on the empirics of the situation, is that its evidently still not that easy to reach the reliability and quality of YouTube as a service.
Could potentially be content creators that pay the subscription only. But yeah, something somewhere has got to give. Eventually people are going to be sick enough of ads that they will pay $5/month to remove them.
Maybe. But the thing is, as we move towards higher-resolution video formats we get into more expensive stuff. A 1080p60 Twitch stream is about 6128 Kbps per second (6Mbps video, 128Kbps audio). YouTube recommends 12Mbps for uploads. 4K is worse. YouTube recommends 35-45Mbps for 24/30fps videos and 68Mbps for 4K60 uploads.
So we're looking at using roughly a gigabyte of transfer for three minutes of 4K30 video at acceptable quality or about nine minutes for 1080p60 (video games, etc.). I dunno about you, but most of the creators whose stuff I follow are between 20 and 45 minutes a video. Call it 30 minutes. So if they put out one video every two weeks and I watch it once, I'm pulling ~4GB for 1080p or ~10GB for 4K30.
At S3 prices, that means that of that $5, Amazon eats $1.20 or so. It's worse if they're more prolific. You can say "raise prices", but Patreons, subscriptions, etc., are brutally inelastic. When Patreon wanted to go to a model where they passed transaction fees onto the funder, a ton of people came out to claim that they couldn't afford to keep all their pledges if they had to eat a ten to thirty percent surcharge. And I believe it.
It sucks. I'm trying to come up with a better option just for my own stuff. My solution, which I can do because I'm a software developer, is probably something like OVH, where they hand you effectively-unlimited transfer. But I also don't then need to pay somebody to manage it for me--and to try to turn it into a going concern, you're going back to the "hey, how much a month is this gonna cost me?" problem.
It's not an unfixable problem. But it is a problem where the winners have economies of scale. That means...well...a YouTube.
> Nothing they do can't be done with existing cloud networks and off-the-shelf open source software
Please, link to this off-the-shelf open source software that can be used to replicate the YouTube experience, both in terms of hosting and playing videos as well as distribution on various platforms. I'll settle for Android and iOS.
ffmpeg, s3 (or google cloud storage or if you want affordable then wasabi), and HTML 5 video tags basically get you there -- search you can just use off-the-shelf elastic search stuff. It's not like it was in 2005 where you had to invent the wheel.
Then you just set your subscription fee to match your average cost per user, add 50% to that, round up to the nearest dollar, and you're good.
So, frankly, you have nothing. Because none of that replicates the YouTube experience for both the producer and viewer. You also ignored delivery. Saying you can replicate YouTube with off-the shelf open source software and then proceed to provide me with common pieces that still need to be pieced together literally just don't know what "off-the-shelf" means.
The real problem with Youtube is that it remains to be the biggest copyright infringer on earth. There is almost no record and song, no matter how obscure, that you cannot find on Youtube, and nothing prevents you from downloading this content. I'm not judging this, just stating the facts, so don't downvote me for it. Who doesn't enjoy direct access to a gigantic music collection without paying? Everybody likes it and uses it.
Somehow Youtube gets away with that, because they are a major US company. If you'd find the same amount of content on a small foreign company's servers, the FBI would crack down on it in no time using all international law available.
The current extreme bias in the complaint system will not change, because it is Youtube's legal insurance. They need to be able to claim they've done everything they can fighting piracy. In reality, piracy is and always has been one of the major uses of Youtube in addition to the privately produced content.
As a result of this, Youtube is double unfair. It enables massive piracy and at the same time severely punishes original content producers in favor of predatory and sometimes plain fraudulent companies filing bogus copyright complaints. It's a systemic problem that IMHO could only be solved by drastic law reforms.
How about this: your copyright claim accuracy becomes a multiplier for monetization payouts. E.g. if 100% of claims are correct, you keep all monetization. If 10% of claims are correct, you only get 10% of monetization.
Also, if Google can show that the copyright claims are incorrect, then they get to keep the difference.
Now copyright holders are incentivized to make accurate claims and Google is incentivized to find inaccurate claims.
That doesn't make sense for the unambiguous cases of copyright violation. The copyright holder never agreed for the content to be monetized by Google and under their terms. Google can't just make up some revenue sharing policy and act like that's the law.
The content owner should be able to negotiate a rate with Google or choose not to, not have to be forcibly entered into it.
The 'content owner' can always choose to opt out and file DMCA requests instead of using ContentID, though. If they don't like Google's system... They don't have to use it.
But of course that just means that things get taken down - and no revenue goes to the claimant. Great for protecting your copyright, good for trolling, really shitty for extracting money from the works of others.
The DMCA may be rough on active content creators, but it is far worse on inactive ones and on the public interest in having that material available. ContentID has the same trouble. Consider:
* creator is in the hospital
* creator is dead, and the heirs know nothing about dealing with copyright claims
* creator is hiking the Appalachian Trail for the next year
* creator is in jail for something unrelated
* creator got deployed on a submarine
* creator now has Alzheimer's disease and can't remember the internet
ContentID becomes a trivial way to steal money, and the DMCA becomes a trivial way to suppress the creator's work.
Or just ban the channels of the networks that abuse the system. Would be hilarious if disney got their channel banned for not understanding fair use laws. Why can't google be more like that :/
How about every time a company files a frivolous claim they lose their ability to claim anything for an ever-increasing amount of time? An hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, etc up to a year.
since the ability to make copyright claims is required by law and there are requirements as to how platforms must respond to claims then any fix to the system that imagines ignoring the law in favor of its fix is bound to fail.
A three (or ten, or even 300) strike plan, where they lose the right to make copyright claims in a "guilty until proven innocent" fashion - the company must provide sufficient evidence to YouTube that the content is infringing.
They would still have the DMCA process, but they lose rights to use the copyright strike process until they prove their competence.
I completely agree with this. There should be enormous consequences for false reports, and there should be an AI that is designed to understand fair use (It's not fucking impossible).
True. If I was google I'd spend millions getting lawyers and lobbyists to try to change how fair use is applied and interpreted in the U.S. so it is as clear cut as "an excerpt of up to this percent size of the total work is fair use regardless of context" combined with "excerpts are not permitted to be pieced or packaged together in such a way that the entire or most of the original work can be consumed". So you wouldn't be allowed to just make a playlist of 30 second clips on youtube that equals the entire movie, but a stupid script could figure out if a clip counts as fair use.
To clarify, this would work the same way classified information works in the DoD -- many small pieces of information can be one classification level (or even unclassified), but if you aggregate them, they can become a higher classification level in aggregate. Similarly, small fair-use clips on an individual level would retain fair-use status, but if you start aggregating them, via a playlist or some other method, the playlist would not be fair use and would count as infringement.
The ballsier move than simply lobbying forever would be for Google to just go ahead and do this -- go ahead and write a script/AI that rejects infringement reports and/or DMCA requests on excerpts that are less than 5% of the total work on the basis that such a small excerpt necessarily must be fair use no matter the context because of the small size of the clip, and then battle each case out in court on behalf of the infringing user. I think they would win every single case, and once they have won a few in a row, precedent would take care of the rest and predatory media companies would stop trying.
This isn't impossible. Google is in a position to clarify / influence how copyright law is applied, and they should do it.
Sure, but YouTube doesn't have that option. Any of the suggestions given here would almost certainly lose YT their safe harbor status.
YouTube's policies are as Draconian as they are because that's literally the only way to comply with the law. I can't for the life of me figure out why YT doesn't have some kind of messaging strategy around that.
The point is though, they aren't fighting it at all. There are all kinds of ways they could penalize copyright claimants that wouldn't affect safe-harbor status, but they aren't doing it. They are in bed with the movie and music studios.
They do have over $100 billion in savings, so maybe that number should actually be $90 billion and that other ~10% dedicated to the boring stuff like supporting their users. It's no accident that Amazon, Comcast, AT&T etc can support 100m+ people by phone... and pure accounting chicanery that Google does not.
Why not say "no" to more people? Allowing the automation of this is really bad and heavily favors people with big bucks- would requiring a different written statement per video make sense at all?
Creators go where the consumers are. You can move to a different platform or start your own but you won’t get any viewers. It’s the equivalent of not liking the taxes in a city retail space, and moving your store out to the desert in protest.
What will end up happening is the major content creators, the ones that have massive followings will treat YouTube as the "advertisement" to the other platform they are on. "Hey guys thanks for checking out my video, here's a small preview. To view the full version, check me out at <some_other_platform>.com!" It's similar to what the big ones did with monetization (turned off all monetization, and now do in-video ads or some donation platform). Once that happens, there will be enough traffic on the new platform for enough medium size players to test the waters, then the whole thing will topple down. The only thing YT will have left is existing content, of which the only task remaining will be a race to archive what is currently on there.
Unlike a real desert, everyone can still reach you in your internet desert, and eventually it can become an internet oasis.
Then again, maybe once that happens YT will actually start to become content-creator friendly again.
If creators were smart they would always publish on two (or more) platforms - Youtube and Vimeo for example. It doesn't cost them much in terms of time and effort, it gives their viewers a choice (given the choice, I would rather watch alternative), and if enough creators do that, it keeps Youtube on their toes. Which means that they might care a bit more about the creators.
On a related note, Google should clean up their customer support. Everywhere.
There is a way to handle this, but you aren't going to like it.
Since there is absolutely no penalty for filing copyright claims, you just get together with other large youtube channels and begin filing claims against Disney, CBS, NBC, Fox, and so forth, all the large media companies that have youtube over a barrel, as well as their advertisers.
You simply decide not to play nice whatsoever. And you keep on doing it, as a growing group, repeatedly, until youtube is forced to take action. You do it to any large corporation that wants to post on youtube. And if they take the wrong action, which they will, you bring out RICO statutes and begin filing so many subpeona's they can't financially afford to work with it. You don't stop at youtube either, you get in groups and sue them for stuff they put on cable TV as well. Find yourself jr lawyers.
If Google wants binding arbitration contracts in place and then wants to sexually harass their staff, the appropriate turn-about play is for the staff to get together and plan on sexually harassing the executive management. And I'm not talking in ways they would like; I'm talking hundreds of people telling the execs and upper managers they want to do scat-play, or buying and mailing them used japanese underwear and mini goats with plushines, and so forth. And they get as viscious as possible about this, up to the point of following them around with handcuffs and leather straps in groups.
Because if we're going to be lawsless, it's time to act like total animals. And realistically, there's only one way to teach that lesson.
I'm down for ddos via lawsuit, but two wrongs don't make a right - sexually harassing people shouldn't be weaponized, as injust the power structures may be.
In fairness, the franchise or manager (not McDonalds) was at fault there.
They had the coffee machine set higher than standard McDonalds temperature, and had they been repeatedly cited by inspectors because it was a safety violation.
3rd degree burns over 6% of her body with lesser burns over 16% of her body. (Her labia were fused together.) And required extensive skin grafts to treat. While in the hospital she lost 20% of her body weight and was left partially disabled for 2 years following the incident and retain not-insignificant scarring.
>They had the coffee machine set higher than standard McDonald's temperature
It was within normal operating parameters as per the McDonald's manual. There had been 700 prior instances of warning about issues from hot coffee.
(And while I'm at it)
She was not driving, she was a passenger in a parked car when the incident occurred. She originally only sued for medical costs; McDonald's offered $800. The jury awarded $200,000 and the judge reduced that to $160,000. $2.7 million was awarded by the jury in punitive damages and reduced to $480,000 by the judge, however, there was later a settlement for an unknown amount after McDonald's appealed.
Why does everyone remember different? Because McDonald's spent more than a few million dollars on a PR campaign against her, after which she received lifelong massive amounts of hate mail and death threats and was reduced to gags on everything from Seinfeld to Jay Leno to Futurama.
What happened to Stella Liebeck was terrible, but it was no one's fault more than her own.
Stella's coffee was served within the temperature range that was, and still is, recommended by professional coffee associations like SCAA and NCA [1]. As of 2019, the NCA recommends that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C), which is likely near the temperature at which Stella was burned. This is a perfectly reasonable service temperature, widely used by coffee shops, restaurants, and home brewing machines to this day.
Stella Liebeck took her cup of coffee and squeezed it between her legs in order to fiddle with the lid. The result was tragic, but completely expected. If I spill a fresh cup of Starbucks coffee on my crotch today, I fully expect third-degree burns. So I take a little extra care with it until it has cooled to drinking temperature, which happens pretty quickly.
Tea is generally even hotter. Any good tea shop will serve a pot of freshly boiled water, at least twenty degrees hotter than hot coffee. Spilling that on yourself is guaranteed to melt your skin. Great care is warranted.
Again, what happened to Stella was terrible. She didn't deserve it, and she didn't deserve the hate she got afterward. But she did something really stupid. I sympathize, because I do stupid stuff all the time, and I have the scars to remind me.
We're surrounded by extremely dangerous things that require great care to use properly. It's useful for coffee to be held and served hot, just as it's useful for knives to be sharp and cars to be able to reach highway speeds. There will inevitably be accidents, but making the world completely safe for people who use these things carelessly would mean depriving everyone of their proper use.
> Tea is generally even hotter. Any good tea shop will serve a pot of freshly boiled water, at least twenty degrees hotter than hot coffee.
Depends on the tea. Most of the recommendations I see are below boiling:
> white and green teas are best at 70°c. For black and oolong teas use water around 85°c. For herbal infusions use 100°c water, and 90°c for Chamomile.
That's a really odd quote from Twinings - who should know better. So I had to go and look - silly me.
They contradict themselves multiple times within the page. For your quote, they may have meant to add for green teas - which definitely does prefer water off the boil. If you scroll down the very same page, they say:
"...a black tea is fully oxidized which means that it prefers boiling water and a longer brewing time. The same goes for processed teas such as Oolong. So pour on your freshly boiled water at 100 degrees", complete with graphic confirming this. I'd agree - only for black tea. But again they contradict themselves on Oolong - which should be just off the boil - and as confirmed in their graphic. There are others, like not recommending "one for the pot" - especially as Twinings tea bags contain less tea than most.
Ugh. I'm just going to assume a non tea drinking junior wrote that page. :)
"Depends on the tea" is absolutely right, but that website makes some odd claims. It reads like a content mill. Their claim that black tea should be steeped at 85 deg C is simply wrong. I don't know where they got that. Black teas are universally recognized to require the highest steeping temperatures, to the point that high-altitude brewing is a problem for many folks. The claim that green tea is best steeped at 70 deg C is similarly useless, simply because there are so many kinds of green tea. Really sweet, amino-heavy teas like a good gyokuro are definitely better done at lower temperatures. But most green teas are quite forgiving, and are commonly brewed at near boiling temperatures. Freshly boiled hot water is also often necessary for herbals, especially short-steeping acidic herbals like hibiscus and fruit.
Mate is uniformly prepared and served at around 180 deg F in my experience. Don't spill that shit either.
I've noticed a trend in recent years for tea retailers to lace their marketing with fancy instructions that treat their teas like autistic children, demanding gentle temperatures and strict timing rules. This started as a uniquely American bit of marketing wank, but it seems to be spreading recently. For a rebuttal with the credibility of an old-fashioned Englishman, here's Ginger Baker in an interview in Forbes a few years back:
> One thing that really bothers me in America is the inability of restaurants to make a good cup of tea. The instructions printed on the bag say, "Pour boiling water over the tea." How simple is that? No, they bring you an empty cup with an unopened tea bag beside it – how nice - and a pot of water that may be hot, but boiling it isn’t. So tea you have not. It’s boiling water that brings out tea’s flavor, and perhaps a dash of milk. But the brown liquid you end up with here looks like gnat’s pee, and has nothing to do with a really good cup of tea.
Even notwithstanding individual preferences, if you go to any good tea shop you're highly likely to be served a pot of freshly boiled water, which may still be well over 200 deg F by the time you pour it. A hazardous substance to be sure.
Agreed. Black tea will never brew properly at 85° - personally I'd throw that gnat's pee away and try and get it right the second time.
As near to 100 as you can manage, which means warm the pot or mug first - though most don't. Pot with loose leaf is much preferable. Let it brew to taste.
Yeah, it's kind of hit or miss at restaurants. The Chart House that I frequent is good at bringing boiling hot water, but they have only one tea-drinking waitress who always makes sure the cups she brings out are hot. The little tea shop near my house always brings everything hot, of course.
How do you feel about steeping times? There are some green teas that get nasty if I steep too long, but otherwise, for me, stronger is almost always better, so I've rarely paid attention to steeping times. Sometimes I make a big french press of tea and let it steep until drunk. Do you keep track of the time?
No, I don't time it - and I also prefer it good and strong. I suppose it roughly works out at 5 mins in a pot with loose leaf, and I'd guess around 3 mins with a teabag. Shorter as tea bag tea is so much nearer dust. Just not so long as to let it get stewed.
Green tea and some of the lighter black teas - like Darjeeling - definitely prefer a bit less time. Lapsang souchong seems to magically avoid stewing no matter how long you leave it. :)
Good to know. "Stewing" does sort of describe the way I make tea sometimes.
Where do you like to buy? I used to get great stuff like single-estate Darjeelings and Assams from a mail-order company that was later sold to (and destroyed by) Teavana. I mostly use Davidson's Organics now, but the selection is smaller.
Ooh, I avoid that change of flavour when it gets the stewed bitter edge and after taste. Wouldn't surprise me if that's British English separating us by common language though. :)
Can't help you too much on where - I'm in the UK, even most supermarkets take tea slightly seriously. Then we're spoiled rotten with a great tea shop nearby with loads of loose coffees and teas, including their own blends. https://www.johnwatt.co.uk
At the risk of repeating myself: when Stella was injured, McDonalds' corporate policy required coffee to be held at 180-190 deg F [1]. This is pretty well in line with the range recommended by professional coffee associations like the NCA, who currently recommend that coffee be held and served at around 180-185 deg F (~80-85 deg C) [2].
This temperature range was, and still is, used by nearly every coffee shop, restaurant, and domestic coffee machine. Starbucks regularly serves even hotter coffee. My Mr. Coffee machine holds coffee at around 185 deg F. So does your's. Look it up. And like I said, any good tea shop will serve you a pot of much hotter, nearly boiling water. Well over 200 deg F.
So if you really think McDonalds was negligent in serving coffee in compliance with recognized industry standards, then you must think every other coffee shop, tea shop, restaurant, and home coffee machine maker is also potentially guilty of negligence. Is that what you think?
Thankfully, the verdict against McDonalds in Stella's case was a pretty isolated result, and personally injury lawyers have moved on to suing over defective lids, rather than excessive temperatures [3]. Notice that in the linked case, Starbucks served 190 deg coffee, hotter than what Stella was injured by, yet they were not sued for the temperature, but rather a lid that came off too easily.
> Why would you argue that it is a binary choice between personal responsibility, or complete abrogation of responsibility?
That's the choice forced on us by frivolous lawsuits like this. Thankfully, that false choice has been thoroughly ignored, and we can still get appropriately hot coffee from establishments and our own coffee machines.
> She originally only sued for medical costs; McDonald's offered $800
Plaintiff sues the Defendants in the amount of $125,000 for physical pain, mental pain and anguish, and loss of life’s enjoyment during the pendency of treatment.
Liebeck initially approached McDonald’s with a demand of $20,000 to cover her medical bills, future medical expenses, and lost income. McDonald’s countered with an offer of $800. (Gerlin, Andrea. “A Matter of Degree,” The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 1994). As trial approached, Liebeck’s settlement demand increased to approximately $300,000.
Many of the downvotes may be because this comment feels like incredibly poor taste, given there was already a shooting incident at YouTube where people (in that case, the shooter) lost their lives.
Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
This post itself is copyrighted under the terms of US law, as well as similar language under common international 'Berne Convention" laws. As is yours. At the moment of creation, with no further action or registration required. For a duration of 95 years, as an anonymous work (17 USC 32(c)) -- or to 70 years after my death, if not anonymous.
A fact which I personally find to be grotesque and insane, but which is indisputably law.
I know this is a negative comment, but this whole thing smacks of a weird form of entitlement. Here's this dude making money by putting videos on the internet, and when his videos go away, he's outraged. But if you look at it another way, his living is based on a platform which provides him no guarantee of service, no support, and is also free of charge. His whole job is to generate attention for a platform that mines that attention for ad dollars, of which he gets a few pennies for his trouble. Even if this is his dream job, the risk he's taking is high.
Rather than continue to feed this completely one-sided relationship, these creators could shift to a competitor that will provide an equitable relationship between platform, creator, and consumer. A company that will treat both creators and users as important customers. This could be a gateway to a producing other kinds of content, like professionally produced movies and series for first-time filmmakers. Sort of like Netflix, but for lower-budget content.
That's how shitty parts of society work. An organization creates a monopoly platform to generate revenue, and then exploits content producers. Yes, our society has multiple examples of exploitative marketplaces. That doesn't make it okay.
But also, complaining has never helped! As multiple people have commented here, they have no incentive to change!
The one thing that does force change is competition, and there is basically no competition.
It's not entitlement to complain about copyright procedure abuse when you use a platform of a multi billion dollar company for its publicly communicated, and intended purpose.
If we assume the creator is using a licensed original work, then I would rather claim that if entitlement is expressed by anyone, it is expressed by the entity that sent, or are otherwise responsible for the 1000+ copyright claims. All claims toward a single channel, and apparently without verifying the validity of even one such claim.
If the problem is that there are “too many” things for companies to review manually, too bad! If a company is perfectly fine raking in money from massive sales at a global scale, they should be willing to spend a proportional amount of money to do business at that scale. Let them hire their own people to review content in depth. Let them hire their own goons to send legal notices. (We certainly need more jobs for people.)