Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-62133768

by ddpunicorn • 4 years ago

204 125 4 years ago

mirashii3• 4 years ago

From a tweet: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1546419223466999809#m

& thx for your patience as we sorted it out

But they haven't really sorted it out, have they? False copyright strike claims have been plaguing creators for years. This is just another case of someone needing social media and a huge reach or an inside connection to Google employees to get human eyes on a situation and "resolve" it, with no recourse on the lost revenue from the time it was down and no real guarantee it won't happen again.

code514• 4 years ago

Exactly.

Google is not paying my Admob money even after 5 months has passed (no violation, self-close of account)

Through the Kafkaesque maze of non-existent Adsense support, my case (they say) finally got escalated to a payment person at Google. Yet, I didn't hear update for the past month.

You can't ask anything about your case and you can't get any time projection on when you'll hear anything back.

If you don't have big traffic or huge social reach, you are expendable and can get stuck in a never-ending hell.

duped• 4 years ago

Have you tried hiring a lawyer to send a letter to their legal team?

somehnguy2• 4 years ago

Adsense held my funds for 6+ years in a never ending loop of bank account not valid->can’t edit this bank account. Same kafkaesque maze of non-existent support. Beyond frustrating. One day it just suddenly let me fix the issue. No idea why.

Your point is spot on, if you don’t have a huge social media following you might as well be invisible. This has to change, hopefully via law. Because it isn’t just a google problem.

derefr7• 4 years ago

In the old days, bigcorps just wouldn't engage with ISVs directly at all. Instead, as an ISV, you'd engage the services of an 'integrator' or 'reseller' — a smaller-scale but still-large entity that you'd have a support contract with — where the integrator would then have a support contract with the bigcorp. If you were having an issue with the bigcorp's product, you'd complain to the reseller, and then they'd complain to the bigcorp. And because the bigcorp only had a few such resellers as clients, each reseller would actually be able to get the bigcorp on the line.

This was (and still is) the IBM model for B2B software; and it was also the industry-standard model for game developers (interacting with the platform owner through a "publisher" — essentially taking the role here of an integrator.) It's probably still the industry-standard model for musicians to engage with big record labels.

I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for this model. Their focus on "scaling services as much as possible using as few human support staff as possible" means this model is essentially perfect for them. But they ignore it. Maybe because they think it'd make them look like a dinosaur?

(I know they do do it in some places — we use GCP, and apparently, to be able to switch from card-based billing to invoice-based billing, we're required to also switch from direct GCP support, to a support-contract with a GCP reseller. So we'd be paying the reseller — the invoices would be riding as accounts-receivable on the reseller's books, rather than on Google's!)

aliqot• 4 years ago

I have the opposite problem. I changed my payment info without telling Adsense so they send menacing paper letters that threaten the process of escheatment if I don't claim my funds. I decided I don't want their services in my life, and when it came to accepting their money I was fine with leaving that behind as well. Apparently when enough monthly checks stack up it causes problems. I've moved since then, so I hope the new tennant was wise enough to just send them some new payment info.

ticviking2• 4 years ago

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't advice... but it seems to me that kind of non-payment is probably the kind of thing you can resolve pretty quickly with appropriate legal action. A simple letter to legal saying, "your terms say you'll pay me X, it hasn't been paid. I'd like you to do so or I'll have to look at taking all appropriate steps to get paid." Will often get the right person to look at the issue. And if that fails actually filing the appropriate action almost always does.

aetherson• 4 years ago

They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out. They have a legal responsibility to respond to these copyright claims, with major penalties if they don't -- this is from DMCA and its successors, from an era of... I don't want to say "copyright maximalism," but something closer to copyright maximalism than the balance is today.

We need to reform the legal responsibilities of sites like Youtube to enable them to take a more considered approach.

jerjerjer• 4 years ago

We just need to fine copyright holders who abuse the system. Currently they are free to file as many false DMCA notices as they want, with zero drawbacks or consequences or costs for the filer and the burgen of proof on their victims.

If every false DMCA notice resulted in a fine for copyright holder, or even better, filing X false DMCA notices resulted in a copyright holder's ban from filing more DMCA notices, then I think the problem would resolve itself in short order.

richbell2• 4 years ago

They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out.

This isn't really true. The main grievance people have with Google is that they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person. They enable this type of abuse because they make it easy for people to abuse the DMCA system with impunity.

Even massive channels and companies have a hard time fighting back. A recent example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/bungie-slams-you...

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

They can sort it out readily simply by implementing the part of the DMCA they don't support yet. If the falsely accused were allowed to submit a counternotice with instant restoration none of this trolling behavior would be happening

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

Yes they could, hire a team to review every individual claim to a high standard. They just don’t want to pay the costs of running a service correctly.

shkkmo• 4 years ago

They have a legal responsibility to respond to these copyright claims, with major penalties if they don't -- this is from DMCA and its successors

This wasn't just a DMCA take-down of specific material (which for it's faults, does have an appeal process and some legal remedies.) This was a complete account ban imposed by Google, where the only functioning appeal process is going viral on twitter. While we do need to change the DMCA to hold issuers of fraudulent or abusive take requests more responsible, in this instance we also need to hold Google responsible for choosing to create an automated copyright strike/ban system that is clearly ripe for abuse and that does not have a functional appeal processes for the average user.

bluGill• 4 years ago

What we need is the ability to face our accuser. YouTube is more or less doing the right thing execpt they are not giving anyone the legal contact information of the accuser. If I post something, and it is reported I should have the option to take my accuser to court for a false accusation.

mirashii3• 4 years ago

Let's pretend for a minute that Google's DMCA system is actually necessary to comply with the law (other commenters below poke a number of holes in that claim, I don't need to repeat them here), and that it's the DMCA that's the primary method by which copyright strikes happen (also questionable and discussed in other comments).

Even given those things, Google is complicit in the legal landscape being what it is today. Google has regularly defended the DMCA, and claimed it's working well. They're the largest lobbying organization in the tech world. They've even spent time and money defending other providers (e.g. Hotfile) in court for not implementing filtering, arguing that it's not necessary to receive DMCA's safe harbor provisions, but have implemented content identification and filtering in-spite of that.

tpoacher• 4 years ago

why do they have a legal responsibility to respond but are somehow exempt from the legal liability from acting in a harmful manner while failing to assert the legality of the claim?

akhmatova• 4 years ago

They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not really something that Google can sort out.

Sure they can. They choose not to, for obvious reasons. If they were able to confirm, after the outcry, that the takedown claim was "abusive" -- by whatever criteria -- then there's no reason they couldn't have done that before they outcry. But the cost of doing that would start to chip away at, well, you know what.

codewench• 4 years ago

Also, a DMCA claim has (in theory at least) some recourse for filing false claims. Google's ContentID system however doesn't, at least not in any material sense, so why not file false claims? There is no legal repercussions, and the damage which can be done to your competition is well worth the minor bad press

guerrilla2• 4 years ago

I saw a whole long thread on Twitter of screenshots of (big) creators themselves getting copyright strikes for their own work and being like WTF. It seems a lot more rampant than people may be aware...

visarga• 4 years ago

Just a couple of days ago there was a Noam Chomsky interview on the Machine Learning Street Talk channel. The whole video is almost 4h long, including a long intro. The MLST crew worked for months on it, posted it, and it got promptly banned.

https://mobile.twitter.com/danbri/status/1545760855052193792

The reason - they quoted a small Richard Feynman clip from an archive BBC show. After fixing it took 12 more hours to unblock the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q

Way to go BBC, protect your rights, make sure nobody cites any of your precious videos. /s

diob• 4 years ago

I'm absolutely convinced that copyright is holding back progress at this point. It's only ever wielded by giant corporations, despite folks arguing it's to protect the little folks.

SapporoChris• 4 years ago

Yes, they absolutely have not sorted it out. However, currently when you're working for a social media company this sort of behavior while not normal, has to be accounted for.

I wish I could be more sympathetic, there are people sharing information and entertainment on youtube that is priceless. But they're working for a faulty employer with a poor history of worker rights. Worker beware.

metadat2• 4 years ago

(1 day ago; 94 points, 16 comments)

buildsjets• 4 years ago

Not dupe. That article is about the stream being taken down. This article is about the stream being restored, and YouTube's reaction.

metadat2• 4 years ago

Oh, thanks! I've updated accordingly.

lucakiebel• 4 years ago

There has to be a way to make copyright takedowns less harmful to creators. It’s crazy that mostly anyone can take down a stream like this that easily

the_third_wave• 4 years ago

There is: don't rely on a single hosting provider for your material. Use Youtube as a CDN for material originating from a self-hosted Peertube instance and you're protected. Add some patronage/sponsorship/subscription options to replace or enhance any lost income from Youtube and you're set on that front as well.

Centralised services are fine to use as content delivery networks but they are not reliable as single sources for your material. Self-hosting - i.e. where you own the domain through which the material is distributed, you can choose to leave the actual hosting to a hosting provider since you always have the option of redirecting the domain to another address should the hosting provider fold in some way - gives control over a far larger part of the distribution chain, if the copyright police wants to block you they'll have to move down in the protocol stack to take down your internet access. We're not there yet and should it ever come that far there are ways around that as well (IPFS, I2P etc.).

tmountain• 4 years ago

It's a pretty terrible situation for folks that build their livelihood curating a channel to have to accept the risk that their channel could be taken down at any moment due to a false positive regarding copyright violation. Making matters worse, it sounds like there's no real recourse beyond taking your grievance onto social media and hoping your channel has enough clout to get Youtube's attention.

In this case, it sounds like it was a malicious action by an actual human being, but I've seen a lot of great content creators say things like, "I'm only going to play you 3 seconds of this song to avoid having my channel removed." Seems like there's gotta be a better way.

corrral12• 4 years ago

Seems like there's gotta be a better way.

Video "channels" should be like podcasts: hosting and discovery largely separate. Subscription, client-side.

YouTube shouldn't exist.

deltree7• 4 years ago

Only a seriously out-of-touch elite dude will claim that something which organically became popular shouldn't exist.

By your brilliant logic, Hacker News shouldn't exist.

selfhoster114• 4 years ago

[para removed due to tone]

Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.

slillibri• 4 years ago

In theory that would be great, but video is in general much larger than audio. There would be no way for many channels to even get started, given the costs involved. I expect most people getting started on YouTube would be driven out of business simply by the bandwidth costs alone.

mrkramer3• 4 years ago

In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they offered better services because they were centralized commercial services which were constantly updated and improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions.

Bitcoin is an exception to this and it was most likely made by one guy as a FOSS payment solution which would compete against Visa/Mastercard, commercial banks and central banks all at the same time. On the other hand Satoshi could've patented his ideas and go straight to the VISA and try to sell them the Blockchain story but he decided to make it FOSS and truly decentralized.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

Yeah I don't like your solution. Not everyone has plenty of money like HN commentors tend to have. Some are fine with ad supported channels. They just want youtube to cut the funny business and require those who are claiming "copyright infringement" actually show real, concrete proof of their claims.

kzrdude3• 4 years ago

In established society, the defence should be that some of the aggrieved channels take Youtube to court, right? Has that ever happened?

buzzwords• 4 years ago

YT couldn't care less if creators are unhappy with anything at the moment. There is no real competition, so creators have to just deal with it. I hope for a real competition, where there will be a mass exodus.

BudaDude• 4 years ago

This is becoming less true, TikTok is a major competitor. Yeah there is Youtube shorts, but its largely just reuploaded TikTok videos.

sillysaurusx2• 4 years ago

I’m delighted to see that people are recognizing what a threat tiktok poses.

I don’t blame people for being skeptical. It’s easy to forget that big companies die due to being transcended, not replaced. The YouTube killer won’t look anything like YouTube, and tiktok fits that bill nicely.

Case in point: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR2KUDn8/?k=1

Google is realizing how bad it is that they can’t index TikToks, the same way they realized how bad it is they couldn’t index tweets in 2015 or so.

ziddoap2• 4 years ago

Maybe for certain segments/formats, but TikTok doesn't do long-form videos, does it?

Most of my YouTube watching is things like Anton Petrov's 15+ minute science videos, PBS Space Time, hour+ live streams, DefCon/Blackhat/Other Conference talks, and a hundred other things that I don't think are available or desired on TikToks platform (and maybe not even supported? I'm not sure what the max video length is on TikTok).

selfhoster114• 4 years ago

Tiktok is not a competitor to YT. It's much more focused on shorter-form content, and it's much more addictive. For those two reasons alone, it's not a 1:1 competitor to the Youtube monopoly.

corrral12• 4 years ago

That's just trading one master for another. It'd degrade to be similarly bad. A podcast-like model would provide a lot more freedom—host anywhere, promote anywhere, with clients, not monopolist web platforms, controlling "subscriptions" and such.

post_break• 4 years ago

Let me know when I can learn how to fix the radiator fan for my 2008 ford on tiktok, then I'll agree with you.

bob1029• 4 years ago

YouTube is such a hard market to crack. 99% of the problem is simple information theory and getting bits from A to B. The actual software isn't that difficult.

I honestly don't think something like YouTube ever could be profitable without destroying the product that exists today. I don't believe the primary purpose of TikTok is to make money.

antifa2• 4 years ago

Yeah there is Youtube shorts

You could already upload short videos, why would a shit UI for short videos be a plus?

kzrdude3• 4 years ago

Nebula is the competition, right? But it's used as an add-on, not replacement of youtube right now.

nmz• 4 years ago

There's plenty of competition for music streaming, internet radio is easy to find, the only impediment is installing VLC and finding a stream. which if you know how to google is easy enough.

kzrdude3• 4 years ago

Wendover's video from today looks a bit closer at the ecosystem as it is now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoWcQUjNM8o - says Youtube is the best option for creators right now

gravitate• 4 years ago

I downloaded this with YouTube -DLP which is a (working) fork of YouTube-DL, so I have a local copy I can play when coding & can play it in offline environments without needing a YouTube tab open in my browser which gets in the way of web development. It plays in VLC which isn’t as distracting. I love that kind of music for getting in the zone. It’s clear that many people have a tab open listening to this due to the way YouTube shows all the active listeners in the stream. I prefer my local copy though.

ComputerCat• 4 years ago

Isn't the saying "innocent until proven guilty"?

ProAm• 4 years ago

This isnt a court of law, it's a third party platform and you are subject to their whims and TOS.

npteljes• 4 years ago

In this current context, it's the claims that are innocent (valid), until they are proven guilty (fraudulent).

rasz• 4 years ago

Here is a video capture of recorded apology: https://imgur.com/gallery/i2NpK

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

That's not at all accurate.

It was more like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

deelowe• 4 years ago

yep. A big WTF from me when this happened. lofi streams have replaced SomaFM for me for several years now.

toolz• 4 years ago

I wish these creators with other social media presence would use their platforms to move their audience to something besides youtube (they can even keep their youtube presence).

Content creators are the only ones with the power to build up a competing platform such that youtube has to stop hurting the creators or risk losing their monopoly status as the de-factor video hosting platform.

Imagine if this content creator chose an alternative and linked to it in this tweet and everyone else started doing similarly. At the rate youtube is harming content creators, doesn't seem like it'd take long before users instinctively checked the competitions site anytime content gets taken down which might eventually turn into overthrowing their monopoly if they don't fix their issues.

StewardMcOy2• 4 years ago

I think it's a really, really tough sell to move people off YouTube. The network effects are just too good. I might be projecting my preferences onto the masses here, but I suspect this is a common feeling.

I've been watching quite a few videos from a fairly popular Youtube channel, tldrnews. At the beginning of a lot of their videos, they've been advertising an alternate video platform, Nebula, with exclusive and more in-depth videos. Thing is, even though I might want to watch those videos, I've never been tempted to even click on the link.

It's not that Nebula costs money. Even if it were free, I don't really want to be watching videos on other services. I hate the way YouTube is run. I hate ContentID, I hate the copyright strike system, I hate the recommendation algorithm, I hate how difficult it is to get a real human to deal with the issues on the site. But everything's there, and that's what I want most of all.

It's a strange position to take, especially when I wish everyone would go back to having their own sites rather than just post on social media, but when it comes to video content, I want it to be like Star Trek. I want to be able to search in one place and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for.

I know it's greedy and irrational, but I want everything centralized into one service so I don't have to think about where to go to watch a thing. I want a monopoly, but without the problems that come with a monopoly, and I suspect a large enough percentage of users feel the same way that other platforms just can't get off the ground.

corrral12• 4 years ago

I know it's greedy and irrational, but I want everything centralized into one service so I don't have to think about where to go to watch a thing. I want a monopoly, but without the problems that come with a monopoly, and I suspect a large enough percentage of users feel the same way that other platforms just can't get off the ground.

Podcast model. Client handles discovery and "subscriptions" and all that. Hosting is separate. YouTube's immense control comes from controlling all of that, but there's no reason you have to have a single provider to get the everything's-in-one-place effect—you can instead empower client programs. That kills the "ugh, but I don't want to go to another site..." effect because it's simply not an issue. You click "subscribe" and it's in the same "app" as everything else, regardless of where the videos are hosted.

corrral12• 4 years ago

I wish these creators with other social media presence would use their platforms to move their audience to something besides youtube (they can even keep their youtube presence).

Coupling discovery and hosting means you're either killing your business by trying to do this, or finding temporary refuge with another soon-to-be monopolist that'll start abusing you in the same ways before long.

_23sd• 4 years ago

The abuse of this system is only going to get worse as high profile cases like Bungie's [1] highlight how exploitable it is, even against big companies. It seems to me, as an outsider to YouTube's systems, that the system of "copyright strikes" (which is not prescribed by the DMCA, it's a more recent demand concocted by MPAA and RIAA lawyers) has caused a lot of harm to good faith creators while determined infringers simply make a new account when one gets banned. Is there any real helpful effect of using strikes that copyright owners couldn't get from just taking action on individual videos?

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/digital-trails-how-bungie-identifie...

lom888• 4 years ago

The company I work for builds websites for small and medium sized businesses throughout the US. For a period of about two years we would host a copy of a video that we made for the customer on YouTube and use it on customer websites. There came a point where a handful dissatisfied customers claimed infringement for some of these videos and our YouTube channel (thousands of videos) was terminated without appeal, even though the customer had always provided authorization and the contents for these videos. Fortunately we'd decided to self-host our videos before the channel was terminated but there were cases where we lost content that we'd created.

judge2020• 4 years ago

the system of "copyright strikes" (which is not prescribed by the DMCA, it's a more recent demand concocted by MPAA and RIAA lawyers)

The Bungie case was regarding actual DMCA takedown requests.

So was the Lofi girl stream given "takedown notice" and how it contributes to the 3-strike system: https://twitter.com/lofigirl/status/1546058721792507906?s=20

batmaniam• 4 years ago

The DMCA has provisions that is supposed to protect against copyright false claims. But every article I read about false claims always ends with some kind of definition of copyright. Like in this article, 'What is Copyright?'.

It never goes beyond that ever. What about restitution to the people who were wrongly taken down? Why is false DMCA takedowns so prevalent if it's illegal per DMCA? Turns out NO ONE has ever been convicted of a false DMCA claim, and that's by design. In fact, the phenomenon has its own name: Copyfraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud

That's what happens when we let businessmen write our laws. A fix to how Google handles DMCA isn't enough, DMCA is fundamentally user hostile. We need to fix this at the political level.

econnors• 4 years ago

Bungie is seeking damages against false claims: https://www.engadget.com/bungie-sues-destiny-2-youtuber-lord...

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Great, Bungie is a big corporation that can pay lawyers for things like this. Individual creators are not in an equivalent position and cannot reasonably seek damages for false claims, unless additional legal framework is added to support them.

nafizh• 4 years ago

There should be remuneration for people whose material is wrongfully taken down, even if temporarily. I bet that will force these platforms to deliberate more before taking any action.

Cyberdog2• 4 years ago

That poor kid has been studying for two and a half years now. I really hope she's able to pass that test; it seems like a real nightmare.

That aside, do we know the claim was really bogus? The article doesn't seem to mention that. It does seem like a rather easy grift to just nab a bunch of MP3 files plus some artwork from DeviantArt, throw them into IceCast or whatever, and go live on YouTube. I've listened to a few similar streams (not this one in particular since the "lo-fi hip-hop" genre isn't my thing) and just kinda always assumed the whole YT meta was basically a bunch of pirate radio stations.

cjbconnor• 4 years ago

Lofi girl is part of Lofi Records (https://lofigirl.com), and I think they only play their own songs.

Cyberdog2• 4 years ago

Oh, okay, interesting. I didn't realize there was a whole record label behind it.

mrkramer3• 4 years ago

After all this publicity Lofi Girl will become even more popular.

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

YouTube screws content creators over, and content creators complain, and then go right back to YouTube, so that YouTube has no incentive to fix anything.

"Oh, you don't like it? Are you going to leave? No? K then."

YouTube makes its money because there are eyeballs on screens. As long as somebody is making content for those eyeballs, and the eyeballs remain on YouTube, there is literally z e r o incentive for them to change.

spaceman_2020• 4 years ago

Lofi girl legit had a massive community. My teenage cousins use the live chat as a hangout zone.

Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream

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