A TV company came to our office doing a report. They gave us the video, and I uploaded it to YouTube as a private video to share it internally. After a week the private video has maybe 20 views. Months later I receive a copyright claim from the TV network. Their contact email obviously didn't work, and since I'm not a content creator I don't really care about my YouTube channel. So my account ended up being locked/limited during 6 months for a private video that had 0 views since several months...
What a mess.
Most people didn't notice this until G+ hit the net, and some kids used their gmail account (set up with parental knowledge and support) got closed because G+ found out they were under 13.
Others have discovered that if their app on Google Play gets into trouble, bye bye gmail etc.
It is a downright hamfisted system, and likely an outcome of Google's drive to automate all the tings...
You know a company is mismanaging things when they're doing things that are against their own interests.
Can't you just make another account for videos?
It’s an extreme example, but if that account is true, google definitely have automated tooling to link distinct accounts.
I can’t actually imagine any reason why they wouldn’t. It feels like something they’d need at their scale.
Sure, in some ways, the fusion is very convenient.
But I've read a few too many credible stories about how a loyal Google customer does some innocuous action that happens to set off one of Google's triggers, and is instantly banned from the entire ecosystem.
Google's complete lack of customer support, and indeed hostility to the concept of ever being reachable by or accountable to a user just makes it worse.
Bottome line; Google is ok for casual use, but as a biz, I'll never touch them, and advise others to avoid like the plague.
Google's drive... Had to read that twice, for a moment I got really confused about my cloud storage subscription!
Knowingly making a false DMCA claim is perjury, and IMO it should be treated as such. Instead companies send out automated claims in the thousands and then come back with "but we didn't know it was wrong, it was the bot!" and get away with it.
That's exactly what it is used for. It's a multibillion dollar industry that will always ask for more and more power to police their imaginary property. They even coerce other countries into adopting similar laws as part of trade agreements. I'm convinced that copyright infringement is moral and akin to civil disobedience.
If a group of us formed and we did this to all of them and gunged up the system, google would be forced to improve it.
This might work between rival game streamers or something but the law offices of Dewey, Cheatem & Howe likely do not have a YouTube channel for you to retaliate against.
Even better if you created a "burner" corporation. Ie P.O. box in Delaware and act on their behalf. They have to take you seriously because corporation, amirite?
IMO the way to go is to get their contact details out of the copyright claim and sue them in small claims court.
Apart from classical music, bird noises and ambient noises are common cases of inaccurate YouTube takedowns.
It's notorious for false positives and how impossible those false positives are to resolve.
There's lots of them. The most notorious one I had to deal with was Adrev. There are reports of people getting notices from AdRev for videos that don't even have any music in them. [1]
[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/42xLe...
Seems like this is a great way to do copyright trolling - it's highly scalable and exists within a walled garden which means it's a legal grey area for things like this, much like how free speech on YouTube/Reddit isn't really a thing.
It's all automated. They don't verify if the claimant actually has the rights, this is left to the "dispute" process.
Sometimes multiple companies upload the same files. Sometimes the algorithm has false positives because the section of audio used is too short.
I have to wonder why anybody still uses YouTube. It can't be the community.
Now, they probably care more about other types of censorship (for example, taking down offensive videos to avoid their brand being associated with them).
This issue needs special attention, and classical videos ought to be treated as a special case, IMHO.
Worth noting that the reverse is also possible, i.e. recordings being altered only slightly, being able to fool human listeners into hearing them as being different, see for instance the fraudulent recordings attributed to Joyce Hatto.
Does this include any linked Gmail accounts? Because that's heinous if so.
I have used commercial tracks on videos I've posted and YouTube has authorised saying the copyright owner allows me too in exchange for me accepting adverts on my video.
I know they don't check copyright much, as I once got locked out of an old YouTube account I had, forgot the password and didn't have access to the email I signed up with. But I wanted the only video on the channel taken down, so I did a copyright complaint against myself, YouTube accepted it!
IMO YouTube ought to be regulated the same way as broadcast media used to, with things like the equal-time rule, but that's not the rule as it currently stands.
There's got to be a good way to get Google to stop censoring one side of the political spectrum, but if we have to resort to legislation or regulation, we're doing it wrong.
If we can't, then I guess Google really is too powerful.
Edit: Google is evil. But Google is also free. If we can't counter the first without eliminating the second, then we have failed as a society.
You could satisfy it, by discussing, say, gun control, and presenting two contrasting viewpoints: One that all guns should be banned, and one that all guns, except for ones used by police and security guards should be banned. A distinction without much of a difference (That is well within the scope of very limited political orthodoxy) is a contrasting viewpoint.
Really, what we need is the web back. That is, the web as I remember it in the 90s, before Google came along, when groups of people who shared similar interests would link to each other and form webrings. [1]
To every political question, there are more answers then "A" or "B".
Are you going to give equal time to someone who wants to ban all guns, someone who wants to ban all guns in cities, someone who wants to ban all guns for people with criminal records, but not mental illnesses, someone who wants to ban all guns for people with mental illnesses, but not criminal records, someone who wants to ban guns for non-citizens, and someone who wants everyone to have a state-provided machine-gun? What about the other permutation of these viewpoints? Or are you just going to dump these questions into a 'left' and 'right' bucket, and say you're done, when the buckets weigh the same?
Relatedly: it's also much easier to come up with factually incorrect bullshit then it is to refute it. Any insights on how you want to deal with that problem?
If you were a developer at YouTube, what do you think could be done to fix this? Personally, I think a starter is only suspending a user from the specific service they "violated" the TOS on instead of their who freaking account. I don't know how content-id works, but preventing double jeopardy for a flag sounds like a good starting point. Obviously getting human support is a train-wreck and it goes without saying that needs to be fixed.
False accusations should be given the same punishment as the accused would have faced. The "flag" and "report" buttons are abused on every single platform, as any mod can tell us.
I'm not saying this is easier than yt, but there are some trade offs worth making if you want to really have that level of control.
If you or someone else has some suggestions for cheap media hosting, I'm all ears :)
The one thing I miss from Youtube was all the commenters and people who enjoyed me playing. I got a lot of satisfaction from that and it kept me going and posting more videos (it definitely wasn't the money since ad revenue was abysmal).
It's a different enforcement mechanism. DMCA requires by law that YouTube affords people a way to report things. If it gets abused that's on the government to correct, YouTube hands are tied.
I had to close the channel because my account was locked for one full day and I couldn't do a thing. I had too many emails inside of Gmail and didn't want to lose them so I gave up. I'm still pissed about it and how Youtube and Google run things.
I always found it interesting that under YT rules content creators have the "3 strikes and you're banned" rule hanging over their heads but those who falsely claim copyright can do so with impunity. I still remember one company that ended up falsely claiming copyright over 10+ of my videos and they did so against one or two videos per week. Nothing was ever done about them.