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.
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.
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...
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).
The servers running in AWS are mostly metadata.
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.
I would wage most people won't even know they are being served by the web torrent mechanism when you hit the page. The video player looks like a regular html 5 video player.
You can just point youtube-dl at a video. However the vast majority of viewers just use the site / phone app.
“Gotta hurry past this café so the music won’t get my video copyright striked, lol!”
I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims.
To me that's $1/year lost revenue (no big deal, right?) but that company now gets the revenue from this video—and millions of other videos... so they're making mint and gambling that most users won't even try to appeal.
Obviously the problem is that it's completely unbalanced. Do people making copyright claims have the same threat? "By disputing this counter-claim, you agree that you could have your right to file any copyright claims revoked."
If not, then yeah, it's absolutely unfair.
It would be entirely reasonable for Youtube to block them from submitting the current style of claims and require them to submit actual, proper DMCA claims which open the claimant to all kinds of counterclaims, require the claimant to assert under the penalty of perjury that they own that content, etc.
But yeah, maybe requiring claimants to actually go through the official process would be better (albeit more work for YouTube).
Filing a claim automatically and conveniently is not protected by law. They could just as well say, "We have an automated system with a convenient interface for good-faith actors. If you show yourself to be acting in bad faith, you can exercise your legal claim in writing by sending it to this address: X. The postal system to that office is pretty bad, loses stuff all the time, so you'd better send it FedEx."
Remember, they don't have to be true.
edit: And as others have mentioned in their stories, people might get angry if you destroy their radios to evade a frivolous claim.
I expect that even toggling off Fortnite's "licensed music" setting can still run into audio copyright claims against other Fortnite videos which have the same audio.
AFAIK in that case it's at least not malicious, it's just the content ID system completely failing to handle this category of content, where a big chunk of the visuals and/or audio are guaranteed to match with other videos because it's a recording of interactive media.
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.
It says who did it, what they object to and gives you the choice of fixing it or filing a complaint. But if you lose the complaint, you get a copyright strike and can lose your channel.
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?
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.
"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." is the followup process for a DMCA claim - but that's not what's happening here. Youtube is not requiring claimants to submit a DMCA claim (with all the associated process) and they are not submitting DMCA claims. Youtube could make their copyright claim process following these rules if they wanted to be on the side of users, but they have not. They can also choose to have a process where any complaint simply causes content to get removed with no recourse, and this is pretty much what they have done.
Because people don't know about it.
Also, for many people, even doing something like "sending an email to counter claim" is too much work for them to bother doing it.
You'd be surprised how many people won't follow through on something when there is even the smallest barrier to them doing so.
> And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics?
Things can get to be pretty technical, when people are talking about the minutia of a counter claim to DMCA. It does not surprise me that info like this is not well known.
It is provided on the official copyright.gov website.
All this stuff is in a searchable database that is helpful provided by the US government, and is required by law.
Ex for Google:
https://dmca.copyright.gov/osp/publish/history.html?search=G...
But it's more likely that you get a Youtube takedown, which is not related to DMCA. There's a UI for that in the mgmt. console.
> This is not a reasonable expectation to place on average users.
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.
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.
The easiest solution would be to create penalties for false takedowns of legal content, but this would likely just result in Google being sued for trillions of dollars by the media cartels to remove such restrictions under the argument that Google is aiding in piracy.
That's when ContentID and the non-DMCA takedowns started happening.
You hit on this in your first sentence. And this whole arrangement with Google is specifically to side-step those penalties. Your 'easiest solution' is for Google to return to DMCA takedown requests. I agree. I want that. I think most consumers and content creators would.
But Big Media doesn't.
I mean, how fast would Google move if a non-responsive take down resulted in the youtube.com domain being seized?
Instead, Google would rather have made their own job easier by standardizing 'requests.' There's nothing in the DMCA specifying that some standard, machine-readable format be used. To get the media companies on board with keeping the takedown request process as automated as possible, they compromised.
Even if Youtube was in the right, it would take years and multiple appeals to get to that conclusion and then Viacom still appealed so at some point Youtube just decided to settle, it was cheaper.
I believe that means that in the current legal environment it is not cost efficient to provide free hosting of third party videos, ad supported, without draconian/significant number of false positives content identification system that is made available to the biggest potential "suers". Thus, even if a competitive service would appear, if it needs to be profitable using the same format it would likely end up implementing a similar (or worse) system. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Whoever is in charge of this situation dropped the ball out of fear. It cost Google plenty because all videos should have ads unless you are on a paid account.
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.
[0] https://blog.pex.com/introducing-the-attribution-engine-19ec...
>> 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.
Maybe we just need better advertising standards enforcement to fine these guys into the ground whenever they talk about how their platform "enables open communication on a global scale" and other marketing BS.
> 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.