Explaining copyright broke the YouTube copyright system

https://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/engelberg/news/2020-03-04-youtube-takedown

by pulisse • 6 years ago

653 278 6 years ago

law.nyu.edu

ikeboy13• 6 years ago

We discovered that if we continued to challenge the accusation of infringement and lost, our video would be subject to copyright strikes. If the account was subject to multiple strikes its ability to live stream could be restricted or the account could be terminated. While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet.

To be clear, if you dispute and counternotice everything, then the only way this would happen is if the other side actually sues you, which is incredibly unlikely here.

crescentfresh2• 6 years ago

That's not how I read that. "lost" in this context simply means the so-called copyright holder clicks the button that says "nah, still can't use my stuff" that's considered a strike.

JoshTriplett2• 6 years ago

Right. The DMCA takedown process is more reasonable in this regard: if you post a counter-notice, the service provider puts your content back up and the party trying to make a copyright claim has to sue you. YouTube, on the other hand, makes purported copyright holders the absolute judge of their own cases.

ikeboy13• 6 years ago

Which is why I felt the need to clarify, since OP is somewhat misleading.

A strike is a DMCA notice that's submitted. That can be counternoticed and the only way to prevent that is filing a lawsuit within 10 business days.

wtallis3• 6 years ago

The "Resolve a copyright strike" section of [1] includes:

There are three ways to resolve a copyright strike:
[...]
3. Submit a counter notification: If your video was mistakenly removed because it was misidentified as infringing, or qualifies as a potential fair use, you may wish to submit a counter notification.

That's not entirely clear whether the copyright strike is removed when you submit a counter notification, or whether the status of the copyright strike is resolved after further proceedings.

I think the strike is removed immediately upon submission of the counter notification, because I think this is the action that moves the dispute fully into the formally defined DMCA takedown legal procedure and out of YouTube's own content ID procedures. But Google's documentation is obviously avoiding any clear statement of user's rights and what's required by law vs by Google policy. Google and the big copyright cartels want the system to continue to function largely on intimidation, and don't want it to be too easy for users to find and exercise the "sue me or fuck off" option they are legally entitled to.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000

luckylion2• 6 years ago

With Google's questionable policies, buggy automatic decision-making and notoriously terrible support? Unless they're sure they can make their complaint go viral, the risk feels quite high.

ikeboy13• 6 years ago

What policy here is questionable, what automatic decision here is buggy?

You don't need any virality to get a DMCA counternotice accepted.

forgottenpass• 6 years ago

To be clear, if you dispute and counternotice everything

This isn't happening under the DMCA, it's Google's own brand of copyright process more tailored to appeasing the giant media companies.

ikeboy13• 6 years ago

I'm well aware. If you dispute content ID claim the content owner must submit a DMCA notice to keep the claim active.

css• 6 years ago

The "solution" they arrived at boggles my mind:

We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.

We need competition in this space.

crescentfresh2• 6 years ago

This is the most concerning part. What do "regular" content creators (read: no legal team) do to remove these kinds of invalid copyright strikes?

undreren• 6 years ago

They give up. Literally. A lot of content creators even joke about it during their videos.

“Gotta hurry past this café so the music won’t get my video copyright striked, lol!”

hnick• 6 years ago

It's not even just copyright strikes. Sometimes they worry about being demonetised over swearing or other minor indecencies so they self-censor more than they should to be safe.

I saw one video where they spent some time up front saying how great Stadia is so the algorithm treats them nicely before spending the next 10 minutes saying how bad it is. They were clearly joking, but it does make me think about the type of control the system has and what messages get promoted. Who knows?

stale20023• 6 years ago

There actually is a process. You send an official copywrite counterclaim.

Not through their fake on platform system, but instead through their "official" counter claim contact info email.

They would then be required by law to reinstate the content.

The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content.

NorthOf33rd• 6 years ago

I work for a rather large consumer goods company. We had a video taken down during a really important product launch. We had absolutely no idea why for three days.

It cost us maybe two full days of development resources + consultants + throwing money at different consultants to get an "in" to youtube to figure out why our video was taken down. About a week later we received official word from the artist and then we figured out that our consultants who made the video messed up and forgot the critical step of securing permission.

It was an expensive blunder, both from a media standpoint but also in the amount of resources we burned trying to figure out what the hell was wrong.

I'm not mad at youtube for taking the video down, but it's absurd that there's nothing in the system that would tell me why, and absolutely zero hope of figuring it out.

vkou2• 6 years ago

What makes you think that a competing hosting service is going to result in competition that benefits the users, and not the rights-holders?

The rights holders may end up playing the two services against eachother, and use the more draconian policy of one as arguments for making the other more friendly to their interests.

They have a lot more skin in the game than users do.

lgats• 6 years ago

The problem doesn't exist to such an extent in the web-hosting world. (where there is much competition)

DMCA requests usually don't result in a website shutting down unless the webmaster is non-responsive and the claimant makes further moves beyond the first request.

bavell2• 6 years ago

Completely agree with you. To be fair to the authors, they did address this in their conclusion:

This is not a reasonable expectation to place on average users.

munk-a2• 6 years ago

We do - or we need to start declaring services like Youtube/Facebook platforms with the necessary requirements for public access that common platforms have under other circumstances.

hmage• 6 years ago

About that -- https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/google-has-right...

> a Seattle appeals court said on Wednesday. It’s neither a public forum nor a “state actor”, and it can’t be held to First Amendment court oversight as if it were a government body.
> »violation of First Amendment protection of free speech. That argument doesn’t fly, the appeals court said on Wednesday, given that YouTube isn’t a public forum

The big mistake people make is that youtube is a public platform/forum. It is not, it's a privilege that their server accepts your browser's request, not a right. They have every right to refuse for any reason they want. Same for videos you upload there, them holding it is a privelege, not a right.

It's in company's best interest to make people believe that it's a public forum, because people will start using it every day. In case of google, people use their browser to visit their website, sometimes using their ISP (google fiber), and log in using their account. As soon as you do something google doesn't like, you risk losing access to one of those, because it's not actually yours, it's a service provided as a privelege, unfortunately.

TheRealPomax• 6 years ago

I'd settle for a business-law-mandated access to legal recourse, and forced accountability of platforms (any platform, not just Youtube. If a US platform bans your content, you should have legal recourse in the US, not "a black hole unless you know someone on the inside", and not "a web form no human ever reads"), instead of competition.

After all, you can't compete on "we have a better legal process": if your selling point is is "once things have gone wrong, and we already ruined your day, at least your recourse is better than at Youtube", you don't have a selling point.

raxxorrax3• 6 years ago

I would like to settle for both as Google does remove or demonetize unwanted content without valid justifications while still showing ads. I think youtube developed in a significantly worse direction for both content creators and users. It isn't the groundbreaking new platform for alternative content where the user decides what he wants to see.

Copyright law still needs a reformation. The incentive to allow preferential monetization of orginal content in exchange for making it public is probably more of a hindrance for digital content. In reality it serves large publishers that technically should play a smaller role by now, since content logistics are cheaper now. At least for the vast majority of creators.

philsnow• 6 years ago

They probably could have pursued it further. Presumably their time is valuable (and that value is easily quantifiable) and they had to spend some of it defending this spurious claim. It feels very much like patent trolling but it's copyright trolling.

Cloudflare famously stood up to a patent troll and prevailed. In their first blog post about it [0], they wrote,

This claim is a nuisance for us. The lawsuit will take our time, distract us from our work, and it will cost us money to fight. Patent trolls like Blackbird Technologies (@bbird_tech) exist to create these headaches so companies will play along and give them money to go away.

The only difference I can see is that patent trolls like Blackbird use the courts whereas copyright trolls use YouTube.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/standing-up-to-a-dangerous-new-b...

voicedYoda• 6 years ago

There are plenty of other options. Try Vimeo...

judge20202• 6 years ago

We need competition in this space.

Hard to compete against a free service like YouTube. You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively, you'll have to build your own ad network to make any revenue, and even then you'll need some way to draw both content creators and users to your service to have any chance.

We had some competitors, but Vimeo effectively gave up and is marketing for B2B, and Twitch's video upload feature doesn't work since they haven't pushed hard enough for it (a huge marketing push, some UI work, and exclusivity deals on Twitch's side would go a long way if it can get any initial momentum).

rabuse• 6 years ago

One way, is to start something up, and then get acquired by Amazon, Netflix, or any other larger player that has the infrastructure for it.

uk_programmer3• 6 years ago

You'd need to build out your own infrastructure if you want to deliver videos cost-effectively.

For non-streaming video web-torrent is probably the best attempt I've seen as it offloads bandwidth to the viewers.

However the real problem that is impossible to get around is storage. To run a moderately large site the largest cost is storage as you will be seeding a copy of the video.

The few competitors (which are about <1% of youtube's views) are built quite poorly IMO.

You won't beat youtube by copying it. You need to build something new that addresses many of the short comings.

takeda• 6 years ago

Yeah, most people don't have this option.

I'm not a content creator, but I run into it myself, when I wanted to upload a dashcam recording of an accident to share with my insurance company.

It was tagged, because radio was playing a song and of course after my appeal they insisted the copyright was theirs. I gave up after getting the page which threatened me with the possibility of terminating my account.

The thing is that if I could I would actually prefer to remove the music from the video, I was interested in the other sounds.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 6 years ago

It's going to be hard to get competition in a space that is unprofitable and requires huge infrastructure investment.

doh2• 6 years ago

Agree. That's why we built our Attribution Engine [0]. It's much more advanced that YouTube's Content ID, it's free to all rightsholder, creators and platforms (we make money from taking % of monetized/licensed content) and it's completely transparent.

[0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...

KCUOJJQJ• 6 years ago

All companies should make their rules clear or be fined. And if a company has unclear rules, is asked to explain these rules, and still doesn't explain them, the company should pay an enormous fine. After all, the company must be acting in bad faith if they don't explain their rules when asked.

notRobot• 6 years ago

While our colleagues in the communications department were highly supportive of our efforts, they were concerned that one misstep could wipe NYU Law’s entire YouTube presence off the internet.

The copyright system on YouTube is broken and stuff like this allows rightsholders to abuse the DMCA and bully small creators. It's a shame.

Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.

It is so with all Google products. Your content will be taken down or account will be randomly locked or your apps will be removed and unless you have lots of "clout" and/or can build up an outrage about the incident on Twitter/HN, you're screwed.

joelg2• 6 years ago

I think a lots of people end up having a reaction like "well they're trying their best! what else are they going to do!? it's basically an impossible problem!" to things like this and other recent youtube headlines.

That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already. And I think that assumption is dead wrong: we're bumping up on all kinds of emergent phenomenon (conspiracies, runaway recommendations) and issues (copyright, borderline child porn) that cannot be solved, and we shouldn't let Google give us their best-effort compromise. If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.

aabhay• 6 years ago

There’s an interesting meta-phenomenon here. I call it automation handcuffs. A platform grows massively due to radically eliminating the policy and bureaucracy infrastructure that others have (YouTube vs typical content distro channels). That same platform is now so big that it has to add back in that bureaucracy and policy that it lacked. However, it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people. In the end, society gets a half-measure. The platform is too big to legalize. The existing players are too small to compete. Users are forced to accept substandard experiences.

jay_kyburz2• 6 years ago

If government wasn't broken, users would have have the power to say we don't want these substandard things in our society.

_bxg12• 6 years ago

it’s now so big that it must use automation to solve these problems or else go bankrupt hiring people

This is what Google and Facebook would like us to believe, but I'm not convinced. What it really comes down to is that they'd very much like to stay in the realm of automation, especially Google who are notorious for keeping humans out of the loop at any cost. See the long history of problems with their automated "developer relations" on Android. And the problem is that the disincentives for continuing to fail at these halfway-automated tasks are simply not strong enough to force their hand.

So they can just keep "doing their best" with automation, even though automation itself is far from the best they could do.

nerdponx4• 6 years ago

go bankrupt

How many people would they really have to hire? YouTube alone made $5 billion in 3 months' ad revenue: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

jay_kyburz2• 6 years ago

I agree, and say similar things when talking about holding social media responsible for the things posted by users.

If you want to be a "carrier" you can't moderate anything. If you are going to moderate some things, you have to be responsible for all things.

If your business can't work within those rules, then go out of business.

save_ferris• 6 years ago

1000% agree with this.

It’s crazy how we as a society just accept this as the new status quo as if the world would fall apart if these services were scaled back or redesigned in such a way to reduce sharing and content proliferation on a mass scale. Sure, billion-dollar businesses have been built around these apps, but that alone shouldn’t justify their existence.

Sadly, we’ve seen this before. Back in the 70’s, Ford sold the Pinto knowing that it would result in deaths due to the location of the gas tank. Basically, if they got rear-ended, the gas tank had a decent chance of exploding and killing the driver. Instead of issuing a recall, Ford surmised internally that it would be cheaper to settle with victims.[0]

Unfortunately, social media companies have been so good at avoiding regulation, to the point that the people don’t have a real way to contest these kinds of practices.

0: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/

xyzzyz3• 6 years ago

The world would not fall apart if we make it impossible to have YouTube, or, for that matter, if we make it impossible for people to personally drive cars. This would, however, make billions of people, who currently derive great benefits from status quo, very unhappy.

Billions of people use YouTube, and like it a lot. They like it much more than what was available before it, given how much time they spend on it now. They would be very unhappy if government decided that "this alone doesn't justify its existence". Why do you think the government back in 70s, government didn't just say "usefulness of cars doesn't justify their existence" and banned them?

d1zzy5• 6 years ago

No, the world wouldn't "fall apart" if services like Youtube cease to exist, it just would suck more than it does now, for me at least. And that's true for many things like that: Google Maps, Search, Mail.

Because in either situation (with and without Youtube) there are drawbacks, the question then becomes one of weighing those, rather than blindly deciding to rollback.

tmpz22• 6 years ago

Humanity built the pyramids. We went to the fucking moon. To say basic content moderation is impossible by "the best and brightest software engineers" is such a cop out.

The real impossibility: "doing it while still optimizing for the greatest amount of ad revenue".

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

Humanity built the pyramids. We went to the fucking moon. To say basic content moderation is impossible by "the best and brightest software engineers" is such a cop out.

You can easily get everyone to agree on the answer to "is there a pyramid right here?"

Try getting them to agree on "is this video valuable?"

joshspankit2• 6 years ago

This is a very important distinction.

YouTube Kids was the service where this really stunned me: How could it possibly make sense that a service designed specifically for children can’t be properly moderated?

Even of they had one single employee manually reviewing the full content of all submitted videos, they would have 6-8 hours of safe content each day. With an automated quality check first, they could have had 6-8 hours of excellent safe content per day.

Instead they created a service that damaged countless children.

For the sake of ad revenue.

lunias2• 6 years ago

Yeah, but I'd argue its larger than YouTube. I think copyright (for digital assets) is near impossible to enforce on the internet - it's akin to the war on drugs. And I don't think we should unbuild the internet.

The new model seems to be: give away all digital content for free (marketing), build a trustworthy brand (to prevent any ol' copy cat from beating you), and sell a service / experience / physical item(s) associated with it.

e.g. When someone uses your song in their YouTube video it should be seen as free advertising for your guitar lessons / live show / t-shirt company.

Lapsa• 6 years ago

It's not just songs. Do you want to identify as nothing more but a brand?

cortesoft• 6 years ago

So your take is that since Google sometimes removes content that is actually legal, the solution is... to remove all content?

How is that in any way better than the current situation? Currently, there is a chance your video will be pulled from YouTube, and you might get your entire account banned... meaning a fraction of people don't get to use YouTube to host their videos.

If instead, we just shut down YouTube, then.. everyone doesn't get to host on YouTube...

I don't get how that is better

rodgerd• 6 years ago

So your take is that since Google sometimes removes content that is actually legal, the solution is... to remove all content?

No, their take is to refuse to allow socially harmful monopolies to exist just because they already do. The problem is that Google want YouTube to own everything to do with video, and don't want to take any responsibility for making that work at the scale they want to profit from.

There's no good reason for YouTube to be there for hosting personal videos, music videos, education videos, vlogs, game streaming, and a bajillion other things. There's no good reason not to have more humans involved in assessing and tidying up when "the algorithm" fucks it up.

dsjoerg• 6 years ago

The problem isn't the scale of Youtube, it's the scale of the Internet. If Youtube didn't exist, we'd still have billions of people posting billions of videos, and who is going to take the time to police it all?

Extending your argument about Youtube to the Internet & humanity, I think you're arguing that if we cannot address these kinds of problems in our Internet, then we shouldn't fucking build it. I disagree. I think we're better off with the Internet even though these moderation problems are unresolved.

snarf21• 6 years ago

I think the issue is that anything that is uploaded is freely searchable. I think they need to force everything into a channel structure. You apply for a channel and have to designate the content type, etc. and that requires humans BUT it also lets you earn from advertising so it is a hoop worth jumping through for most. It is also probably 90% of the views on YouTube today anyway. Search merely shows you a representative channel video and then you have to subscribe and opt-in to that kind of content. People will have to host random garbage somewhere else.

I agree that upload anything, search anything, view anything can never be moderated or sustained.

ssivark• 6 years ago

If you can't address these kinds of problems in your product, don't fucking build it.

If they’re so intent on moving fast and breaking things in search of growth, the only way to introduce skin in the game is that old adage “you broke it -> you bought it”

Dahoon• 6 years ago

borderline child porn

I don't know what you are referring to but how can something be "borderline child porn"? It would think either it is or it isn't. Legal or illegal?

nemothekid2• 6 years ago

That reaction betrays an assumption that YouTube must exist at its current scale in its current form, just because... it does already.

No, YouTube must exist at its current scale because a lot of people find it massively useful. Your argument is no different that saying we shouldn't have cars because some people get behind the wheel drunk. The argument you should be making is the impact of YouTube a net-negative on society or a net-positive and for YouTube specifically you'd have to convince me its a net-negative.

In any case, copyright and borderline childporn are problems with the internet in general, but I don't see why you stop at dismantling YouTube instead of just turning the entire internet off.

d1zzy5• 6 years ago

I completely disagree with that. I think that even with all the issues small content creators run into because of overzealous automated systems, Youtube's overall value to me has been tremendous across its lifetime. Every day I watch some new clip and learn something new. It's just not imaginable to look back before we had free third party video hosting, to me at least.

Thing is, if Youtube wouldn't function for most people then it wouldn't get that many viewers then the ads wouldn't be paying as much then it wouldn't exist. But practice proves that it can exist, with lots of compromises being made err-ing on the side of the large copyright holders. Maybe it's possible to build alternative systems that work better, there's no law that says there can't be alternatives to Youtube so let's see if it happens. If not, that itself should be a strong enough signal that maybe the way Youtube is done may be one of the _few_ ways this can be done.

xen0• 6 years ago

I don't think this is a useful view.

We, as a society, clearly want YouTube to exist. The fact that Youtube/Google's efforts and our current legal frameworks cause problems in edge cases doesn't mean we should just give up.

krapp2• 6 years ago

We, as a society, clearly want streaming video hosts which allow free accounts and public uploads to exist. Youtube doesn't need to be (and isn't even) the only site to offer that.

Also, Youtube didn't have a lot of these problems before getting acquired by Google, so they're not inherent to the nature of the platform. Youtube could still exist with different, less hostile policies.

blunte• 6 years ago

Once again, this illustrates how modern tech companies (primarily Google) are failing in terms of overall correctness of following or apply rules - apparently primarily because they choose not to employ enough humans in the process.

In most of these cases of unreasonable takedowns or account closures, there is no way to reach a human to have the case reviewed reasonably. It seems to (almost?) always depend on somehow finding an employee, such as often happens when someone posts their story here on HN.

I haven't read the annual report of Alphabet lately, but I can safely assume they are making enough profit that they could afford to make improvements in these systems (by employing more humans in key positions and by slowing or limiting the chances of automated processes reaching terminal decisions).

lizhang• 6 years ago

Could anyone comment on copyright infringement and sampling? I recall reading that using short snippets of songs in your own music is considered sampling, but doing so on Youtube would incur a copyright strike?

bavell2• 6 years ago

There are many potential technical solutions to solving the problems of identifying copyright infringement and mediating the dispute between parties in a way that is fair to all involved. But why is the current system a dumpster fire? It seems Google/YT doesn't care because the companies sending out fraudulent disputes are many times the the same companies spending $$$ on ads. Without any real penalties for fraudulent claims (correct me if I'm wrong) they have every incentive to send out disputes by the truckload just to see what sticks.

The only real damage done to Google/YT as a result of fraudulent disputes like these are to it's reputation of not being friendly to creators - a view I think is already firmly rooted. We desperately need alternatives but it's an uphill battle the whole way with huge barriers to entry...

clarry• 6 years ago

But why is the current system a dumpster fire?

Lack of incentive to care. They're too big, and what can the small user or uploader do except whine?

It's always the same problem with massive power asymmetry.

d1zzy5• 6 years ago

And very strong incentive (ie lots of expensive lawsuits) to care in the other direction.

Create the same incentive in the direction that you care about (maybe also with lawsuits) and maybe something will change.

bostik2• 6 years ago

The solution is to go nuclear and enshrine adversarial balance in law.

If a company, or an agent acting in their name, makes a fraudulent copyright claim, then have the wronged party name one item in the offending company's catalog that becomes public domain. Any contractual losses for entities who were benefiting from royalties in the said work are the offender's problem. Not only do the copyfraudsters lose a (possibly much more valuable) item from their catalog, they'd also have to compensate those whose incomes they have affected with their fraudulent acts.

Align the incentives and make the stick painful enough. People being people will take care of the rest.

jbay808• 6 years ago

What's to stop me, jbay808, from sending fraudulent copyright claims in Disney's name, against you, bostik, as part of a coordinated plan to make Star Wars public domain?

kevingadd2• 6 years ago

No regulatory change will make any difference here unless you ban Content ID via new regulations. Google opted out of the DMCA claim-and-takedown system in order to avoid being harassed by big companies like Viacom, the system people are dealing with is broken by design because it's the system Big Media demanded. As a result none of these claims go through legal channels and there is no way to apply legal penalties, all the users consented to this system in the 375th version of the YouTube Clickthrough Terms of Service.

philpem• 6 years ago

Judge: "BigMedia, this court finds you made a false copyright claim for Billion Dollar Movie. Per 123 USC 8675309, you must select one item from your catalogue to release to the public domain."

BigMedia: "Your Honour, we select This Cheap Crappy Z-List Movie We Made Just To Serve As Ablative Armour In Disputes Like This."

robotnikman• 6 years ago

Back in July I saw an article[1] which mentioned Youtube will introduce a new system where copyright holders would have to specify specifically which part of the video had the copyright infringing content.

This seems like a good solution since it makes it harder to just sling copyright claims left and right, and make it so entire videos don't get taken down.

Unfortunately it looks like either it was never introduced, or did not end up working as hoped.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/10/youtube-copyright-claim-...

jagged-chisel4• 6 years ago

...or did not end up working as hoped.

Or media companies found it onerous.

Izkata2• 6 years ago

Some commenters here seem to know which part of their video was flagged, so it sounds like it was implemented and had no effect.

gnopgnip3• 6 years ago

The root of this problem is that copyright lawsuits in the US are solely handled in federal court, and it typically costs $100k+ to pursue this kind of lawsuit. As a result of this there are significant penalties for infringement, with statutory damages of up to $30k per work infringed, and up to $150k for willful infringement. This means that maintaining safe harbor protections is essential, and a platform has no choice but to err on the side of caution because of the damages at stake. If there was a small claims court, or some other venue where copyright cases could be heard the law around statutory damages could be changed, and it would be less risky for platforms to decide in favor of content creators more often.

matheusmoreira• 6 years ago

You know the law is broken when even legal experts can't exercise their right to the fair use of copyrighted works for the purpose of educating others about copyright litigation.

jagged-chisel4• 6 years ago

Ah, but they did exercise those rights. Oh, it was expensive; too expensive for the average creator to have exercised those rights. I think that's the message: the cost of making sure you and your content are treated correctly.

stubish• 6 years ago

I don't think they got to exercise their rights. They only succeeded by using private back channels, and they only succeeded in making the problem disappear. If they had been able to exercise their rights, they would be able to sue for costs. They demonstrated that the processes provided by Youtube to exercise their rights do not work, and for people not in the inner circle your only recourse would be to sue for damages.

ineedasername• 6 years ago

TLDR: You need to be a world-class legal research center in order to ensure IP rights holders don't squash your right to free speech by overly aggressive flagging of fair use material. And even then, it's an uphill battle.

raverbashing2• 6 years ago

Another recent copyright abuse was this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8 and this was even manually stricken.

Basically this was a critique of aggressive copyright lawsuits that was manually copyright claimed... for the wrong song.

zadokshi• 6 years ago

The problem is the legislative framework in the US. The definition of fair use is not clear enough. You need to get together and amend the laws to make it much clearer what is fair use. If the law stated (for example) "a song playing in the background in a coffee shop for less than 10 seconds is fair use" then youtubers wouldn't be joking "Better hurry past this coffee shop so I don't get a copyright strike".

Less whining about the problem and more work on a legally helpful definition of Fair use would help everyone.

(Consider other countries which have clearer fair use policies where they clearly indicate "how many pages of a book can be copied" etc. This needs to be updated to include video, i.e. "How many seconds of a video can be shown/sampled" with no subjective test of "if deemed in the public interest, or newsworthy etc". Just a simple blanket rule. "People can clip up to 10 seconds of video" or something like that.

joelg2• 6 years ago

A simpler definition of fair use would definitely make automation easier! But is the simpler definition one we actually want or intend? Lots of laws are complicated because they’re the product of years and years of iteratively modeling a problem with lots of feedback and edge cases accounted for - why should we prioritize Google’s ease-of-enforcement over _the thing we actually want to be the law_?

robbrown451• 6 years ago

I don't see that sort of thing working. Too much relevant gray area.

For one thing, something that is playing in the background, where it doesn't sound good as music and where there is talking over it, isn't the same as having music edited in with good quality. Using 10 seconds of a song, in high quality, for your opening title sequence is probably a lot more of an infringement than having 30 seconds of dialog, where there happened to be music from someone's car radio faintly audible in the background.

I'm not arguing for the status quo (I think it is very broken), but I don't think such simplistic solutions would actually work.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

Even with a clear definition, private entities don't have to honor fair use privileges. Their server, their rules.

a1369209993• 6 years ago

The (well, a) problem here is that the legal system is misclassifying youtube as a private entity, rather than as the public common carrier that it in practice actually is.

joshspankit2• 6 years ago

While that is technically true, in practice the private entities are beholden to the creators themselves, and the viewers stand up for those creators.

If creators and viewers knew definitively what was legal and what was not, they would choose to fight back loudly and publicly. My proof? Despite that solid footing, they already do.

jcranmer4• 6 years ago

Fair use is essentially a codification of the common law principle that "some copies no one cares about." The problem isn't that it's not clear enough; the problem is that fair use is contextual and automation of contextual discovery is not really possible.

partiallypro• 6 years ago

Slightly off topic...but I recently had a Facebook page removed from Facebook for copyright violations. Though I had an agreement with the copyright holder to use their content/logo, etc. I reached out to that copyright holder...and they didn't file the complaint. So I made an appeal to Facebook, with the paperwork showing I had an agreement (in this case with a German soccer club) to use their logo, etc and they (Facebook) didn't even reply to me at all. Incredibly frustrating experience. I've reached out multiple times, through the appeal process, and through emails. No one even cares, and worse I created a new page similar to that page...and Facebook unpublished it. So, now I am stuck in limbo or can likely never have that page back or similar pages...all because Facebook is black hole and doesn't care even slightly. I get that they have billions of users, but so do a lot of companies, and they will at least reach back out to you and give you a status...even if the answer is "too bad." This happened almost 3 weeks ago now. Nothing.

BTW, the page is non-commercial and doesn't profit from anything.

sleepytimetea• 6 years ago

Thats not off topic, in fact it actually helps add depth to the original post that this is an automation problem common to Google and Facebook and potentially other mega cash-generating corporations who would rather err on the side of the copyright holders than risk getting themselves sued for not being strong enough with their automated protection.

miohtama• 6 years ago

Sounds like the EU bureaucrats should sharpen their knives again, otherwise there is no justice for the little guy.

sampo• 6 years ago

Sounds like the EU bureaucrats should sharpen their knives again, otherwise there is no justice for the little guy.

Au contraire, the EU is demanding automatic copyright filters (also known as censorship machines). Don't mistake EU doing one good thing – GDPR – for EU always taking the side of the little guy.

https://edri.org/censorship-machine-takes-over-eu-internet/

niij• 6 years ago

Government intervention (draconian copyright laws) is how we got here in the first place.

cgb223• 6 years ago

I think at some point the owners of pages who have been wronged like this need to band together and form some sort of lawsuit for the damages the copyright system caused.

Facebook will start caring if there’s the potential for a legal precedent to be set against their copyright filtering software

__jal• 6 years ago

Why keep yourself in a position where you have to ask FB for permission to speak?

Vote with your feet. Build a website FB doesn't control.

kensai• 6 years ago

This unfortunately is not the case for most poor users. No such muscle and resources.

“This would have been a dead end for most users. Unable to understand how the already opaque dispute resolution process might impact the status of their account, they would have to decide if it was worth gambling their entire YouTube account on the chances that their some combination of YouTube and the rightsholder would recognize their fair use claim.

Since we are the center at NYU Law focused on technology and innovation, it was not a dead end for us. We reached out to YouTube through private channels to try to get clarity around the copyright strike rules. While we never got that clarity, some weeks later we were informed that the claims against our video had been removed.“

rickety-gherkin• 6 years ago

A couple things I'm confused about here. Was NYU monetizing this video? Is that where the grounds for dispute are? If that's true, would demonetizing the video clear out the disputes? Even though this clearly falls under fair use, it's still something that was unclear to me.

I'm surprised there's not a serious case against Youtube/Google for denying people the right to Fair Use. Is this because people don't have to use Youtube? Is this in the Youtube contract somewhere? Is it because Fair Use doesn't work like that? If you provide a platform like Youtube for people to use, are you not held legally responsible for protecting Fair Use laws the same way you'd be held liable for copyright infringement if you didn't give corporations/people the ability to dispute?

If Youtube allowed all videos to exist regardless of copyright infringement, and didn't lay out any paths for claims, would they be in legal trouble? Is this not the same as automatically removing obvious Fair Use content?

deckar01• 6 years ago

A copyright violation does not just remove your right to monetize the content, it also removes your right to determine if the content is monetized. The copyright holders who claimed infringement can decide to allow the content and force it to be monetized for their profit.

lathiat• 6 years ago

It's worth noting that while this is the most common mechanism employed by youtube.. it is possible with the same system to just remove the right to have the video (or at least that segment) published at all.

But the general business youtube has pursued, which in fairness, is partly to make it possible for people to publish videos with such works in the first place, is that most copyright holders will allow the work to be use but instead the entire video (regardless of how significant that small copyright portion was) is monetized to the 100% benefit of the copyright holder.

There are some plusses to this, in that it's easy (and free) to actually publish a video containing copyrighted works. And that in general by working with all the publishers to do this, it has in theory prevented them from chasing YouTube harder to disallow any such content.

The downside is the entire system is one sided and the review and oversight process is clearly lacking. I could understand a little how this happens with small channels... but I frequently see channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who are typically full time youtubers) and sometimes even millions.. get the same lack of oversight to their claims.

To me it's crazy that the "3 strikes" rule applies just as equally to accidental and incorrect violations on an otherwise very active and largely original channel (that posts 1 video a day making it very easy to accidentally or incorrectly get recognised as having a violation) as it does to a 1 video channel with no subscribers that is actually violating copyright. It boggles the mind that there is no scale applied.

And time and time again I witness channels I watch have this same process of having to somehow reach out to someone at youtube by yelling on twitter or hacker news and then problems just "go away". Even those with millions of subscribers that have internal youtube partner managers.. often those channels still can't solve these problems. It's madness.

jcranmer4• 6 years ago

Fair use is an affirmative defense against copyright infringement. Broadly speaking, this means that it is legally irrelevant until you are accused in court of copyright infringement, at which point it becomes relevant.

What happens in Youtube is probably covered by the terms of service (like most people, I haven't actually read it in detail, so I don't know the specifics of how it will play out, but the idea should be generally correct). Terms of service is basically a contract, and contract law totally lets you prohibit one party from doing things that are otherwise legal. So fair use doesn't matter, unless it's written into the contract, which it almost certainly isn't.

The other dimension to bring up is DMCA. This absolves Google of any copyright infringement so long as they expeditiously respond to takedown notices and forwards them to the respective user. The user can object, at which point the original copyright owner must file a lawsuit. Only in the lawsuit will fair use be considered (this is one of the criticisms of DMCA). However, the ContentID system at play in Youtube is not a DMCA takedown system; it is completely independent, and thus DMCA does not apply here in the slightest.

gnopgnip3• 6 years ago

Fair use is an affirmative defense against copyright infringement.

This is a misnomer.

Fair use is an authorized use, and consequently is “distinct from affirmative defenses where a use infringes a copyright, but there is no liability due to a valid excuse, e.g., misuse of a copyright.” Id. Lenz, 815 F.3d at 1152

korethr• 6 years ago

If current copyright laws and the processes built around enforcing them prevent educating people about those laws and processes, then, IMO, said laws have become overgrown, and need to be cut back.

thirteenfingers• 6 years ago

Classical pianist here. I've been through youtube's broken copyright enforcement system several times. I'll post a video of myself performing some composition that is in the public domain and it'll get "identified" as a copyrighted recording by someone else. Of course youtube doesn't give you an option for "mistaken claim", you have to choose between "this content is entirely my work" (which isn't quite true in my case, since I didn't write the music) or "this video counts as fair use". I typically select "this video counts as fair use" because it's the least untrue of the available options. Nineteen times out of twenty the claim disappears immediately. (I don't even monetize my videos. I just don't want ads on my videos at all, and I especially don't want ads on my videos if the revenue is going to some completely unrelated party.)

There was, however, one time when I had to deal with an escalated claim. The piece in question was the slow movement of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. The Symphony has long been in the public domain. However, the slow movement was adapted into the song "Goin' Home", which is still under copyright, and there is a long-standing myth that the song was the inspiration for the Symphony rather than the other way around. Thus when I challenged the copyright claim on my New World video, the claimant came back and insisted their claim (on "Goin' Home") was valid. This notice was of course accompanied by the scary warnings about how if I persisted it could count as a strike against my youtube account.

I called their bluff. I responded with links to every online source I could find showing that Dvorak's work came first and was in the public domain.

I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels. Happily, they ended up releasing the claim - days before their claim would have expired anyway - with no elaboration. I'd be curious to hear from anyone else who stuck it through the scary youtube warnings and what the outcome was.

[EDIT: thanks for the clarifications on "own content" and "fair use". I never thought of it that way, but now it seems obvious.]

true_religion3• 6 years ago

Actually a performance piece of a public domain work counts as its own copyrighted work. So the least true option would be claiming that the song is your work.

jcranmer4• 6 years ago

He says he's posting videos of himself playing the piece, which means he owns the copyright of his performance.

dredmorbius• 6 years ago

Um, "least true"?

Do you mean either "least false" or "most true"?

autarch• 6 years ago

I think you mean "most true", not "least true".

ikeboy13• 6 years ago

I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels.

Either they would sue you or the claim would go away.

tempestn4• 6 years ago

No, the video would be taken down and he would have to sue them (and probably Google) to get it reinstated and the strike reversed.

leviathant• 6 years ago

I don't know what I would have done had they continued to dig in their heels.

My wife's a choral composer and runs into similar nonsense with almost every video she posts to YouTube. There was one piece she posted that got taken down hard with a claim by Sony Classical within minutes, citing the applause - I think the video might have been part of a submission for a grant application or something to that effect, and if it was offline by the deadline, she was S.O.L.

Fortunately, her extended network is such that after some frantic tweeting from her verified account, the claim was reversed in under 48 hours. IIRC, both the Sony Classical twitter account and the composer of the work that the video was mistakenly flagged as tweeted back the equivalent of "We're not sure why this is happening, sorry!"

(I may be conflating two stories here, because there are so. many. But it doesn't lessen the absurdity of the situation, particularly for folks in the classical world)

StreamBright• 6 years ago

Imagine that this has become business as usual for people. What is somebody does not have the right friends? It is quite obvious that the current Youtube copyright system is flat out broken.

c3534l2• 6 years ago

You definitely own the copyright of your own recording and playing of a tune in the puplic domain. It's not fair use at all. You own the copyright a recording of a classical composition, even if it contains non-copyrighted elements. Fair use implies you're using a copyrighted work in a manner that is protected by the first amendment.

Polylactic_acid• 6 years ago

The "this is entirely my work" would apply here since nothing else in the video was legally owned by anyone else. If the option meant quite literally everything in the video was entirely created by me then it would apply to nothing since you could use no language or literally anything inspired by anything.

iomintz• 6 years ago

This comment is true up to the part about the first amendment. It's 17 U.S.C. §107 that lays out the exemptions. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

dublinben• 6 years ago

You may also like to know that the composition of Goin' Home is now in the public domain as well, being published in 1922.

https://imslp.org/wiki/Goin%27_Home_(Fisher,_William_Arms)

MikeGale• 6 years ago

Why isn't there a successful distributed alternative to YouTube and the like?

krapp2• 6 years ago

They solve problems that the mainstream doesn't care about, are more complicated to use than Youtube, and hosted alternatives to Youtube already exist.

grecy• 6 years ago

There is a monetized YouTube video with thousands of views made entirely of my hi-res photos and the captions I wrote on those photos.

I've tried to file a takedown request, and the process is so onerous, and they require all kinds of proof they're my photos I've never been able to actually complete it.

<sigh>

SpelingBeeChamp3• 6 years ago

That is not true. They have to honor a proper takedown request, which does not have to include any explanation of why you feel your takedown request is valid, Elise they risk their safe harbor. I don’t know what you tried to do, but it wasn’t ‘file a DMCA takedown request’.

xster• 6 years ago

Adam Neely (YouTube music educator) had an absolutely farcical run-in with this situation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM6X2MEl7R8) where he made a video defending Warner Music and Katy Perry's Dark Horse against Flame's Joyful Noise plagiarism suit. He lost the claim from Warner Music even though:

1- he was defending Warner Music

2- he didn't play any recordings, he just played 3 notes on a synthesizer (which is his whole premise that it's un-copyrightable)

3- Warner Music lost the actual suit (which implies they don't have copyright on those 3 notes?)

4- someone at Warner Music manually tagged the "infringing" part of the video, except the person tagged not the Dark Horse part of the play through but the Joyful Noise part of the play through (*^∀^)ノ彡┻━┻

changelog: improved ascii art

RandomTisk• 6 years ago

It's pretty simple, Alphabet/Google make it far too easy for mistaken, false or frivolous claims. It's obvious why, usually the claimant has the heavy bags of money to use as a bludgeon, but it's not right.

Mirioron• 6 years ago

The interesting thing is that one idea behind the copyright change in the EU is to alleviate this point. I don't think it'll work, but that's what the politicians touted it as.

LeoTinnitus• 6 years ago

It's also because US law requires companies to excessively defend their trademarks in order to enforce them as a rightholder otherwise they lose it. So really US law has just been interpreted in a way that is absurdly annoying for everyone. Companies have no choice but to defend and actively seek out even minor things because it can all be used against them in court eventually one day. As long as they actively suppress that stuff, it proves to a judge they are protecting their IP. It's really a precedent set by the US government to force companies to waste this time and annoy us.

guramarx11• 6 years ago

somehow that explain some other issues on yt, like not only demonetizing the corona virus tagged videos but also other videos on the channel involved

Veedrac• 6 years ago

It's not just that it's easy, but that the theft is legal and profitable. You don't even need to be rich to do this, you just need stuff you can claim; see How to Break YouTube (Copyright Claim your own video).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo

jonathanstrange• 6 years ago

IANAL but it seems to me Alphabet/Google can get in serious legal trouble for it if they continue the system. There are a number of companies who massively submit false copyright claims and YouTube let's them do their business, even though it's easy to check in particular cases that the claims are false. These bogus companies get at least part of the monetization from videos they falsely claim.

Doesn't that mean that Youtube is knowingly facilitating fraud and in some cases - when legitimate content is taken over - even commercial copyright infringement? It seems to me that the only reason why Youtube has gotten away with it so far is that nobody has systematically collected the evidence and sued Youtube in a country like Germany, for instance.

Edit: On a second thought, fraud seems irrelevant. It's about commercial copyright infringement.

mcv• 6 years ago

There really needs to be a class action suit about this. Google allows Big Content to claim other people's content. Instead of fighting copyright violations, they assist in copyright violations on a massive scale, and deprive artists of income from their content.

rebuilder2• 6 years ago

It's not a copyright system. Sure, YouTube are required to take down copyright-infringing material as defined by law, but AFAIK they are not required to apply considerations for fair use etc. I'm not sure there's any requirement for them to consider the truthfulness of copyright claims at all.

IOW, YouTube's system may be a response to copyright legislation, but it does not apply that legislation. Appeals to the fair use doctrine are missing the point. The doctrine does not apply since YouTube's actions are not constrained by copyright law.

IANAL, as you can probably tell. I may be wrong about what YT are required to consider, but in that case, I don't see how they can operate as they do.

andykx• 6 years ago

From another non-lawyer perspective, might it be different since there is money involved? I view it as potentially infringing on some people’s livelihoods.

Again, just spitballing. I have no idea what the reality of the situation is.

unlinked_dll• 6 years ago

It's not simply that they don't have any requirement to consider fair use but that there's no incentive for them to do it. If they defend users content that may infringe or may be fair use (the distinction is up to a court, mind you) they open themselves up to secondary liability. If you're a service provider you're probably going to err on the side of claimants and never reject a single one.

afiori• 6 years ago

part of the issue is that fair use is something that needs to be proven in court

ajsnigrutin• 6 years ago

If youtube's automated system detects a copyrighter (eg.) song, the user should be given an option to say "no, it's not copyrighter, or it's fair use, etc", after that, the claim should be forwarded to the copyright owner.

The copyright owner would then verify if it is indeed a copyright infringement, and if they believe it is, and the user still believe it isn't, the case should be brought to some quivalent of "small claims court", where both sides would present their sides, and the loser has to pay some fine (not too large, but still high enough to deter pointless cases.. eg $1000 (to cover the court cost), and damages up to eg. $1000 due to lost views, or damages due to unlicenced distribution).

Basically, make it worth fighting for, if you're sure you're right in what you're doing, and not too expensive, when eg. Sonys lawyers build a multi-year case, destroying you financially, even if you're doing the right thing.

adtac• 6 years ago

There should be a strike system against claimants falsely claiming videos, just like the users have a strike system. Three incorrect claims and every claim you make will be reviewed by an independent third party (billed to the claimant, of course).

ralusek• 6 years ago

That is so, so hilarious. Any one of those things individually is funny. Together; glorious.

norswap• 6 years ago

The situation is now so silly that some people are circumventing the system by copyright claiming their own videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieErnZAN5Eo

This enable them to at least get some of the revenue of their video (by sharing with other (often bogus) claimants), and to monetize re-uploads (something normally available only to big channels).

Why Google doesn't do anything about this mess is beyond me.

chx• 6 years ago

The situation is all the more interesting because these are not DMCA claims. This is an internal YouTube system and you have zero neutral avenues to fight it.

user94294502• 6 years ago

I'm a hobbyist musician. I put some of my work on SoundCloud and license it CC no-commercial. A fan made a video to my work using public domain footage of various DNA processes. It happens to resemble the background of an old Bjork video. It was auto-striked as containing content belonging to her label due to the similarities in the video content. In reality they are violating MY copyright if the video happened to ever generate any revenue. I made an account just to post this. It's a sad situation.

gnopgnip3• 6 years ago

Generating revenue alone does not make it commercial use in the context of copyright

user94294502• 6 years ago

Correct, perhaps that is arguable, especially given the grey area this is all taking place in. I was speaking to the reality that if you're a popular YouTuber, and your content gets striked in this way, all revenues from that video go to them instead of you. This is especially terrible for music related content creators, fair use essentially does not exist for them.

masswerk• 6 years ago

A point could be made, given that a false claim is a vioalation of the DMCA, that an automatic system must recognize fair use context, erring in favor of the accused. If it fails to do so, it's not ready for production.*

(A possible salvation by the party inflicting the harm onto the falsely accused by allowing a disfunctional system to raise these claims, may be providing funds required for taking the case to court. Else, the entire situation is essentially disproportionate, since, to all probability, the accused party may lack the means to rectify the situation.)

* ) Read: I know, detecting this kind of context is prohibitively complex and probably not in the practical scope of the state of the art. Meaning, the technology is not ready for production.

moron4hire2• 6 years ago

YouTube has a feature where you can add a soundtrack to a video from a list of free-to-use songs. These are supposed to be songs that are in the clear. I got a copyright infringement strike on my account from it.

SpelingBeeChamp3• 6 years ago

Proof?

moron4hire2• 6 years ago

You're either going to have to take what I say for what it is, or call me a liar to my face.

bane• 6 years ago

The correct answer of course is for a mass protest where a great many people flag Google's own content as violating copyright...and keep doing it month after month after month until this nonsense ends.

Here's the channel, get to flagging. https://www.youtube.com/user/Google

mullingitover• 6 years ago

Fun fact: Youtube's revenue in 2019[1] was just slightly less than the combined revenue of all box office ticket sales[2] for the same year.

They should be under severe antitrust scrutiny.

[1] https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/alphabet-youtube-ad-re...

[2] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2019/

justlexi93• 6 years ago

And this is why humans can’t and won’t ever have anything nice

ehnto2• 6 years ago

That was disappointing, I was expecting more insights into the law and YouTube's system, rather than someone at YouTube thought it pertinent not to help scam NYU Law school.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

If you upload a white noise video you will get many random copyright claims.

lemax• 6 years ago

The automated copyright filter isn't going to pass revenue onto the artists YouTube and the rights holding giants want to claim that it will. This is a system that Youtube essentially poured $100M into building to keep the big licensors on its side (and avoid any surprise bills from them) and, with Article 13 in the EU under proposal, ensure any new entrants struggle to meet the technical demands and costs of more misguided regulation. Of course, Youtube would prefer to avoid the burden of this sort of moderation altogether, but it will be convenient when it costs around 9 figures to build anything close to what they have just to avoid the copyright regulation landmines. Pricing power will be further concentrated among the few big platforms and the share going to creators will continue to dwindle.

garaetjjte• 6 years ago

with Article 13 in the EU under proposal

It is not under proposal, it already passed :(

(member states have 2 years to implement it in local regulations)

doh2• 6 years ago

Well, not really. For instance our Attribution Engine [0], which is much more advanced than YouTube's Content ID is free to all rightsholders and platforms. We make money from taking % from all licensed content, but that also means both platforms and rightsholders generated revenue in the first place.

[0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...

xg15• 6 years ago

After reviewing your dispute, IMG has decided their copyright claim is still valid (response to a dispute)
The claimant can request that your video be removed ... if they believe their claim is still valid (response to an appeal)

Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims?

This seems like a court in which the plaintiff is also the judge. How can this possibly work?

If I were a troll and just wanted to make life for people needlessly hard, could I submit claims for random videos and simply reject all disputes and appeals - and if someone tried to sue me, say I was just playing by the Content ID rules and didn't invoke actual copyright law at all? What would happen?

rurounijones• 6 years ago

Question: Does it seem strange that YouTube has the copyright claimant decide on disputes and appeals of their own copyright claims?

From a very cynical perspective: Not really, it makes perfect sense as it is the cheapest option that also empowers the people who can make youtube's life a misery. (The big corporations that file these claims).

Hiring third party people to decide these or whatever mechanism you can think of would be more expensive for youtube than what they have now.

Yizahi• 6 years ago

Then Google will ban you. And by "you" Google means a person, not and email account. So they will carpet bomb all your accounts what they think may belong to you, across all their services. Some people even report bans of work accounts where fallback linked emails were personal account which was the source of the ban.

jMyles2• 6 years ago

Why hasn't anyone just started a YouTube competitor in a jurisdiction with no copyright law whatsoever?

It seems like such jurisdictions can quickly become havens for innovation.

jwilk• 6 years ago

What are those jurisdictions?

jMyles2• 6 years ago

I don't know - do none exist? If not, why not? Can't some small state gain a huge advantage by adopting an IP-free legal framework?

mamborambo• 6 years ago

Reading through the article the appeal process was shown to be highly fuzzy and uncertain even for a group of highly trained legal experts.

This Kafkaesque situation is similar to the way the legal process works inside a totalitarian state like China, where the citizen caught in a sticky legal situation, could not use the appeal and defence mechanisms, because nobody knows what is the actual mechanism.

And similarly the Youtube user has no natural rights or protection, even if the entire misconduct lies with the Youtube copyright strike process.

It is times like this that I start to agree with the way governments have begun to scrutinize Facebook and Google.

Clearly they do have a responsibility beyond a commercial term of service, to provide not just a utility but also to ensure that some degree of fair play, truthfulness, and consistency is applied.

greendestiny_re• 6 years ago

YouPorn is a great Youtube alternative.

annadane• 6 years ago

But I thought all that was required is a cartoon video explaining copyright to YT's users because they're just stupid and don't understand?!

jhallenworld• 6 years ago

I remember when Youtube was created, and then bought by Google I thought how can these people make so much money on what is basically a file server. But this right here is it- they did not solve any kind of technical problem, they solved a legal one. The automated copyright system is the main value add of Youtube, do not doubt it. It allows Youtube to make more ad revenue than it loses from lawsuits or from having to hire an army of people to deal with copyright claims.

type0• 6 years ago

And, in the end NYU Law don't learn their lesson, at the very least they could've pointed their visitors to watch said videos somewhere else and not on yt. So long yt doesn't loose users this will just continue and likely will get much worse.

Explaining copyright broke the YouTube copyright system

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