Youtube claims I don't own my own film

http://www.mdotstrange.com/2012/06/youtube-claims-i-dont-own-my-own-film.html

by angrycoder • 14 years ago

281 72 14 years ago

daimyoyo• 14 years ago

Upload it to Vimeo. I know the audience is smaller, but they seem to be much more friendly toward content creators than youtube.

gee_totes• 14 years ago

I disagree. Uploading to Vimeo is a treatment for the symptom, not the problem. I'm rooting for an internet uproar over this.

ewillbefull• 14 years ago

Actually, the problem is definitely YouTube in this case. BMF didn't file a claim, YouTube's automated detection flagged it improperly. It's a question of both the accuracy of automated content detection systems AND why YouTube -- despite having no legal obligation -- is bending over backwards for giant record companies.

token782• 14 years ago

I don't know, market forces can be quite persuasive sometimes. If YouTube keeps up this heavy-handed approach, it's bound to lead to a climate of anxiety and resentment amongst its uploaders. In an environment like that, it wouldn't take that many prominent content producers making the switch to Vimeo to trigger a mass exodus.

It's never a bad thing to vote with your feet and no product or service provider should ever take its market prominence for granted.

dhughes• 14 years ago

This reminds me of the war on terror where it seems everyone is considered a terrorist as if that will solve the problem.

Regular law abiding people are accused of being terrorists and resources are used to chase shadows.

It's the same thing in this situation everyone is guilty unless you can prove you're not, meanwhile the real crooks are nowhere to be found.

droithomme2• 14 years ago

It's not accidental, they make money doing this and there is no penalty when they get it wrong, so doing this makes "business sense".

Previous cases:

http://njnnetwork.com/2009/10/associated-press-and-fox-news-...

http://c4sif.org/2012/02/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copy...

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/youtu...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/megaupload-youtube-...

In addition to these media covered cases, I have noticed cases of very old public domain works being seized by corporations with no involvement in their original creation.

rdl• 14 years ago

So the solution to this, as with anything where getting caught and punished is infrequent and high costs are imposed on the victim, is to set damages high enough to make the expected return from this strategy non-positive.

If they owed $100k every time they made a false takedown, they'd probably be a lot more careful in the future.

droithomme2• 14 years ago

I agree with you that harsh penalties for blatantly false copyright claims done in bad faith would help greatly. However there is a much larger problem in that the victims of these scams are small regular guy artists and content creators and the scam perpetrators are multi-billion dollar media organizations that control the media that advocates for new laws and have the congress, who ignores "small person feedback" in their back pocket with their SuperPAC and other bribery schemes/"campaign financing". How to solve that problem is the one that keeps coming up. Despite many realizing what a problem this situation is and discussion going on about it for many years, things only get worse, such as with the Supreme Court's Citizen United Ruling in 2010.

sp3323• 14 years ago

This isn't a DMCA takedown, it's a system Google put in place to avoid being sued by lots of copyright holders. $100k is nothing compared to the $1B lawsuit Viacom already filed, and other companies will have no problem filing similar lawsuits if Youtube doesn't toe the line.

veyron• 14 years ago

Does the DMCA have a provision allowing BMF to be sued for improper claim? If so, someone should actually challenge them.

ben0x539• 14 years ago

I believe youtube's takedown process isn't strictly a DMCA feature. From the submission it looks like it's not even a takedown, it's just a thing where google is letting someone put ads on other people's videos if they claim copyright and possibly bully them, but it doesn't look like they're serving DMCA notices.

Edit: The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4122258 was posted while I was typing this post and is a lot more informative. :)

steve8918• 14 years ago

I would try suing for damages, especially if their claims are denying you the ability to make money. I think you might be able to sue for slander as well, since they made the claim that you are stealing licensed material, which will affect your reputation as a producer of original content.

peeters• 14 years ago

I don't see how one could consider this slander/libel, since the allegation was completely private until publicized by M dot Strange. Obviously reputation would not have suffered if the claim remained private.

rmc6• 14 years ago

Their reputation with YouTube might be damaged. Prior claims against his account might negatively affect him.

rprasad3• 14 years ago

Slander? Not a chance. I do not think you understand what the requirements for a slanderclaim are.

Tortious interference with a contract, perhaps. Copyright violations, perhaps. But not slander.

gareim2• 14 years ago

Did BMF actually make a claim? The creator seems to imply that he uploaded the video as a private one so far, which means that BMF can't have made a claim unless corporations are allowed to scan even private videos?

Could this possibly be a case of YouTube mistaking something in the video as similar to something registered to BMF?

Mdotstrange• 14 years ago

When I disputed the claim I learned that BFM is claiming a wind sound from a "Sounds of Nature" CD they own the rights to has been infringed upon-so apparently they own the wind, all wind. So beware when recording the wind with your digital recorders, those evil copyrighted natural content devices!

Thanks for all the tips! I'm reading through these comments now.

gareim2• 14 years ago

Wow, that is just pure evil! They're making a total mockery of the copyright system and I'm relishing the idea of someone exposing them for who they are. If they don't resolve this reasonably, would you consider taking them to court? Is it financially feasible?

EvilTerran• 14 years ago

It seems to me that algorithms for identifying similar sounds would be likely to find an lot of pretty generic noises similar to a sample of wind -- other wind, distant traffic, etc etc.

As such, BFM giving such a sample to Youtube's automated infringement detector strikes me as copyright trolling -- it's inevitably gonna get lots of false positives, and they get to make a bit of money off each before the YT appeals process works itself out.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

BMF violated his copyright. They claimed ownership and tried to exercise rights over the distribution of work that wasn't theirs. There are legal remedies for this. They're pirates.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Indeed. If this had a been a private citizen as opposed to a corporation, you can bet the heavy handed "justice" system would have its wheels turning already.

slapshot2• 14 years ago

I do not work for Google/Youtube (or BMF), but I have experience with their systems. The short version is that YouTube has an automated tool that scans for duplicates of copyrighted videos that have been uploaded by verified creators. It looks at every upload and compares it against a library of known videos for video and sound issues. When it gets a hit, it automatically classifies the video as containing potentially copyrighted content. Sounds like this got hit by the automated scanner.

Nothing in the notice means that BMF made a claim against this video in particular (in fact, it sounds like it's a private video, so there's no way BMF could review it). It's not a DMCA issue at all -- this is a system that YouTube chose to put in place completely unconnected to any DMCA claim system.

Sounds like this automated scanner result is wrong. I believe there is an appeal process, where a human will look at the video. Also note that the video is not being blocked in the meantime; it's still available.

The bigger problem that comes up is how can YouTube deal with the flood of video copycats (ever notice how every popular video leads to 20 copies of the same thing?) without stifling independent artists whose work gets a false positive in the scan system? It's an interesting challenge to get the right mix of false positives and negatives.

Please post what happens after you try the appeals process -- this could be a simple fix and I'd be curious to know.

Edit: Here's an overview of the automated "Content ID" system: http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid

X-Istence• 14 years ago

It is still available alright, but someone, not the content creator, is making money off the video due to the ads being placed on the video. That is unfair to the content creator.

How long will it take YouTube to review the video? What possible actions are there? I understand that YouTube provides video hosting free of charge (and makes money from advertisements) and that this stuff can happen, but it seems entirely unfair... how can I get my content added to their content ID system so that people don't re-upload my stuff?

sophacles• 14 years ago

Ahh, I think I see the confusion you have. In America, the term "content creator" does not in fact refer to people who create entertaining or informative things (aka content), but to legal entities which have enough money to buy laws, bribe law enforcement to do their bidding, and extort large and small companies into absurd revenue share schemes. It has nothing to do with people actually doing work. The quaint notion of "artist" and "copyright protection" are just abstracte technical terms with clever misnomers, that exist to excite and confuse the masses into supporting this arrangement.

slapshot2• 14 years ago

> how can I get my content added to their content ID system so that people don't re-upload my stuff?

There's a signup form here: http://www.youtube.com/content_id_signup

szopa• 14 years ago

I DO work at YouTube, and for some time I've been working on CMS, YouTube's frontend to ContentID that allows copyright owners to claim their content, set automatic policies, etc. I can confirm that what Slapshot wrote was essentially correct.

This case was an automatic audio match. Somebody from BMF has looked at it, and the claim has been released. Note that this happened around 5 hours after the dispute, and less than 8 hours after the automatic claim was created, which I believe is a pretty great turnaround time on a weekend.

msg• 14 years ago

I hate to break it to all the people that failed to read, including the OP, but the hated acronym you want is BFM not BMF.

http://bfmdigital.com/

As for judgment on the actual issue, I think ContentID bends over backward to big content to forestall more heavy handed moves, at the expense of bad mistakes like this one.

It looks like it's profitable for BFM to claim or create lots of media clips so they get paid for these ads, in the interim period before the creator appeals. To fix it the incentives would have to change.

Here's a prior example where BFM erroneously claimed a license to a classical performance, which messed with ContentID.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/VdWWVV...

Youtube should punish BFM's mistake.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

I'd be interested to hear (both from Youtube and from people caught by ContentID) about how hard it is to fix these problems.

I also want to know what happens to the ad revenue - do Youtube just keep it; or do they still pay it to the original company; or do they attempt to claw it back at some point; or do they pay it to the real creator of the work?

beedogs• 14 years ago

I'm honestly starting to think this planet would be better without any copyright protection at all.

stevewillows• 14 years ago

Nice thought until you spend a large sum of money to create something personal and someone copies it and starts stealing your potential audience.

Peaker2• 14 years ago

If there are no copyrights, who would be stupid enough to continue acting as though there was?

aviraldg• 14 years ago

In turn you'd get other things people spent large sums of money creating.

token782• 14 years ago

It's funny, when you pour your blood sweat and tears into creating something you certainly feel a sense of ownership over the damned thing; it's your baby. But at the same time, witnessing much of the absurdity emerging out of the current state of copyright law, I'm starting to wonder whether you might be right.

I just have no idea how such an economy might operate and still remunerate creators for their work.

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Humans created way before any one invented money. What you mean is, the high end wont get filthy rich. Real creators and innovators rarely think of the money, yet still create.

If it really is your "baby", then keep it to yourself, keep it safe. I wouldn't let any baby of mine out in to any marketplace alone.

l0gicpath• 14 years ago

Fair thought, but here is another one: Don't hate the game, hate the players. Yes there are problems with copyright protection laws, just like anything man-made. Except, the bigger problem is in people, their ideologies and cultures. Those who think it's okay to rip someone's work and put their name on it, that's where the real problem is.

The game rules are in place, some abide by them and some don't.

unicornporn• 14 years ago

O boy, I don't think there's anything that looks worse than the new Blogger themes in Opera Mobile. Unreadable, unusable.

icebraining• 14 years ago

It's not much better on the desktop, in my opinion.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

This has happened to a band I was part of - we posted a self-produced video for an original song a few years back, and it was denied for monetizing because I "couldn't prove I had all the rights necessary".

cromwellian2• 14 years ago

YouTube has been sued several times in both the US and Europe, and if it didn't offer this system, far worse more draconian systems would be legally mandated. YouTube recently lost a case in Germany where the judge imposed a less accurate filter on YouTube: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120420/11573918587/huh-to.... This is a regrettable situation, that the OP got caught up in a detection system, but YouTube must do this kind of stuff, otherwise, the courts will mandate it. Not having it just lends more ammunition to SOPA/PIPA backers as well.

jeffool• 14 years ago

I wish you the best of luck Mdotstrange (if you didn't see it, he posted in this thread claiming BFM actively claimed copyright over the sound of wind.)

Yes, piracy and copyright infringement is rampant, but by both individuals and corporations. A great example is the Amen Break. If you've got 20 minutes, I can't suggest this video enough for everyone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

It's in everything from old hip hop, to Oasis' "D'You Know What I Mean?" to the original Futurama theme song!

And all used with, according to the creators, absolutely zero royalties. (And they're fine with it, having been told. They get it.)

sp3323• 14 years ago

Sampling happens a lot in music. Using a few seconds of someone's performance in your very different song probably falls under fair use, or it might even meet the "transformative" criterion for being a completely different creative work. There's another discussion about this issue going on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4120691

angrycoder• 14 years ago

Could the moderator who changed the title please explain why? Normally I would not care, but now it reads as if I am the film creator.

If the titles on HN now have to match the article title, you should just change the posting guidelines. Coming along 12 hours later and changing a post title is just power tripping.

rivo• 14 years ago

One of my music videos on YouTube is blocked in Germany with a note that it infringes copyright. I wrote the music and the lyrics myself. I shot the video myself. I'm the sole copyright owner. The appeal didn't lead anywhere. It was detected as such because it's likely registered on Content ID because it was published by Sony, the record label. But Sony does not have the copyright. Still. Nothing I can do. (Even calling up Sony to resolve this didn't lead anywhere.)

Youtube claims I don't own my own film

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