My understanding is that copyrighted content on Youtube is often uploaded under the guise of anonymous users, but this is illusory. Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. One think you'll notice is that not just corporate sponsored content is region-locked; sometimes "anonymous" user videos get region locked. That is not a coincidence.

All of which to say, I expect this to be the same case on PH. There's the usual wackamole game of unauthorized content being taken down, but much of what stays up from unauthorized sources probably does so out of permission that is not apparent on the surface.

I think streaming companies place a premium on the appearance of content coming from users, and this is the result. If I'm right, then changes may not significantly alter the level of traffic to PH, which is what everyone is soothsaying about: that users will just go elsewhere. But I'm curious what's going to happen.

Like you said, PH's model looks to ape youtube's, and the latter does not appear to be entirely reliant on "stolen" content.

> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance, we see this happening to content creators all the time for no good reason. If these videos get the thumbs up to stay up, they're in cahoots with copyright holders somehow (most likely) or are deliberately ignored for some other reason. One think you'll notice is that not just corporate sponsored content is region-locked; sometimes "anonymous" user videos get region locked. That is not a coincidence.

This is all much less nefarious than you make it sound.

When a rights-holder finds their IP in a video, they have the option of how to proceed. They can choose to take the video down completely, run ads and receive all or a share of the revenue, etc.

If they choose to leave it up, it's almost always because they are receiving all of the revenue from the video now so they have no reason to take it down. There's no smokey back room deals going on here, this is just the rights enforcement tools provided by YouTube.

Rights-holders do not always hold global rights to content and if the video contains content from multiple rights-holders, there are several competing claims that all need to be resolved.

The reason the videos uploaded by users eventually end up resembling the videos uploaded by the rights-holder is because YouTube provides a mechanism for rights-holders to enforce the same restrictions they operate under on their content even when they weren't the ones to upload it.

Source: I work in a company that does this, though not directly on that side of the business.

There are account penalization i.e. a strike system associated with frequent infringement complaints, and it doesn't take many. While it's certainly the case that copyright holders will simply take over the revenue from unauthorized videos, my expectation is that most of these uploaders are not unwitting anonymous types: they actually represent the company. I had read an article years ago detailing that this can be the case but I can't be arsed to find it right now.

It's not a huge leap when you consider it's also been revealed that a good chunk of torrents at one time had been seeded by IPs belonging to corporates.

Not in the beginning. You could find whole seasons of various copyrighted shows no problem.

You still can, usually they take up like only 2/3 of the image though.

And they're sped up by like 50%.

Youtube has broad 'covenant not to sue' contracts with various rights holding organizations which allows them to safely leave up infringing works while the rights holders can avoid paying residuals to artists whos contracts lacked the foresight to anticipate this kind of fraud.

AFAIK porn performers don't generally get paid residuals, so there probably less interest in this sort of skulduggery.

This most certainly wasn't the case for YouTube in the early days either. Once Google took over they were WAY more strict about locking down infringing works.

> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance

This is not universally true. For example, you can go on YouTube right now and probably find all sorts of music videos not hosted by the actual artists, so long as it’s older or more obscure music. Plus at this point it’s kind of moot; they already gained their user base from the first several years of illegal new content.

No, dude. I remember back in college when Youtube was the source for copyrighted content. That's how they got their start.

If youtube user bigbubba420 uploads a music video for an 80s synthpop song he doesn't own, the copyright owner for that video informs youtube of their ownership claim and revenue from the video an anonymous user uploaded is redirected into their pockets.

Also if travel_vlogger happens to walk by a store playing the radio, the ownership of their video and revenue is given to the music company and you can't do anything about it. Just easier to steal from the little guy.

This is true, though now bigbubba420 gets a strike on his account for the complaint and inches closer to a ban. And music uploaders throw on a ton of content, so I don't see how it can merely be a case of ad revenues taken over and continuing to do the same with impunity.

Be aware you're comparing Google to a much smaller company. Of course they had the ability to do full DRM search much sooner. I'd look through the lens of technical hurdles much before I'd look through the lens of moralism.

This is a good point. I don't think MindGeek is as sophisticated in detecting and taking down infringing content. However, complaints do get filed and videos do get taken down for infringing.

> videos do get taken down for infringing.

After a Lot of suffering. I believe there was an incident recently in which Pornhub refused to take down videos of a minor in what was an obvious situation of revenge porn.

I mean in the case of infringing on copyright. It's near instant. As far as revenge porn I don't think they gave it much thought.

Yeah, well that means they got their priorities reversed badly, for this kind of business.

I think the current model should have been the default from the start - if verified, paid content creators were the only ones allowed, they would get a much bigger share from their videos.

Thank fuck Ryan Creamer was verified.

> Unauthorized videos are taken down with vigilance,

Yeah, right. Tell that to the flood of channels which will take cut single scenes out of tv series and twitch recordings and upload them to YT monetized.

Isn't there some limited amount reproduction fair use?

I would expect it applies to the separate cases, but not to an account which exists only for that purpose. There are cases where whole episodes / movies are split into pieces and posted in a playlist.

Despite people complaining about how draconian DMCA take down notices are, the DMCA safe harbor is incredibly generous. Service providers have no affirmative duty to police user uploaded content unless they have actual knowledge of infringing materials or "facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent."

It's basically a don't ask/don't tell system.

Courts have been reluctant to require any active investigation even when faced with very large number of valid take-down requests.

Youtube is more proactive than most (CotentID) due to settlements and agreements with its major partners.

I mean, they were facing down a bilion-dollar lawsuit and only avoided that on a technicality. Then spent a huge amount of money (and reputation) on ContentID.

Is that even really true? Movies ETC that are aggressively removed and don't stay on youtube for long if at all. Maybe it used to be more lenient, but I can't remember the last time I saw something on youtube like that.

That's the story for every publisher or platform. Even the United States didn't take copyright seriously until it was big enough and had something worth protecting.

It probably didn't have much to do with the law, clearly. I don't know why non-lawyer HN commenters are so obsessed about litigating the law.

People just really like it, including lawmakers themselves.

It's probably like with Uber - its riders ended up enacting the law that made the cheap prices possible. Or Airbnb. Or a lot of other stuff. Operating in a legal gray area for years.

Or maybe its more comparable to the difference in punishment between doing cocaine and doing crack. Although that Toronto mayor did do crack, so I don't know if cocaine is strictly the drug among lawmakers. Certainly preferred rich people, including rich politicians.

The really twisted thing is, what does that say about porn? Sure, Nicholas Kristoff might be reprinting talking points by a few purity crusaders. But for some things, like the unverified content being not just pirated, but sometimes abusive, they might be right?

It is still very much so when it comes to Facebook videos.

I believe YouTube could get away with it due to a lucky right time purchase by Google which made content owners put back the swords they were starting to pull because "scary money monster that sends us traffic might get bad".

> how Youtube could get away with that

Lawyers, plenty of them.

Not to mention, that likely it has an overall positive effect on the old school "content industry".

After all, if there are old songs on YT then people can send them to others (see RickRoll), listen to them (playlists), keep them in the collective zeitgeist. So copyright holders have avenues to profit from these activities. If YT purges content likely those tracks would just disappear fast from the minds of folks who mostly listen music on YT.

Absolutely. In the olden days, the industry would make direct revenue off of this discovery/remembrance through sampler or collection albums/CDs. Usually cheaper than regular media, but not free. What they lost in revenue with YouTube, they gained in the frictionless process of a potential customer tasting or revisiting new material, and the social networking gains through instant sharing to new audiences. I assume the industry has seen this as a net win, and a win-win with their customers. The formal legal protections get in the way, and so they are in practice ignored unless the releases get out of hand. Seems to be working...

Same dynamic with archive.org and used book sellers, although there everything is PD. Would be nice for the not-yet-PD-but impossible-to-monetize book content from, say 1930-1980, had the same scheme in place for online content. I suppose the books-to-borrow function on archive.org or the online lending platforms in local libraries provide that function.

Same for Pinterest.

Pinterest is even worse because it hijacks image search with their stolen content pretending it's the only available source and the source, while at same time forcing browsing users to register.

I don't think Pornhub behaves in same way neither YT or more comparable imgur.

Content ID and agreements with major publishers?

That only came after quite a while, after Google acquired them.

Section 230 + lack of resources by the owners to sue, right?

The relevant law here is the DMCA, which gives safe harbor to anyone hosting 3rd party content if they respond to timely takedown requests, which YouTube does.

My understanding is YouTube technically doesn't deal with many DMCA take downs. Their reporting system is technically a voluntary system in front of DMCA.

Large IP holders are happy to use it because it heavily favors them. Large IP holders also don't have to worry about repercussions for false or incorrect DMCA claims.

Yes, that’s true now, but that really got going after YouTube used the DMCA to beat some copyright lawsuits, most prominently by Viacom.

It became obvious to big copyright owners that they would get more if they played ball with Google instead of fighting them in court.

I've been in a few discussions on Reddit where people said this is a half-truth. Perhaps someone can confirm?

From Wikipedia[0]: § 512(c) also requires that the OSP: 1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, 2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and 3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.

This is an 'and' which I take to mean safe harbour takedown (the 3rd clause) only applies if the other two are also true. So the host must not know it exists (plausible for YouTube) and not receive a direct financial benefit (does Ad revenue count?).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...

Don’t forget giving a slice to the biggest copyright holders (who otherwise do have the $$$ to sue) to keep them on your team.

That is basically it from what I understand. It is impractical for most entities to track down violators and issue takedowns, so the content stays up.

DMCA safe harbor (copyright) instead of section 230 (moderation for content), but yeah, that sounds right. Before Content ID existed, they could convincingly say they didn't have automatic means and they were taking all commercially reasonable efforts to respond to manual reports, and meanwhile their staff couldn't keep up with people uploading new infringing content.

Legally I'm not sure. But ethically, stolen TV show clips are way more justifiable than stolen porn.

Why is one more justifiable than the other?

Oh come on, don't make me spell it out for you. Revenge porn preys on women, child porn preys on children. Having these videos up, and allowing people to upload them, actively hurts people. Nobody is getting hurt if people watch Family Guy on youtube.

They said stolen, not anything of what you mentioned.

Individual humans are not directly demeaned and violated by copying TV shows.

They are by non-consensual porn.

I personally believe strongly that porn demeans, dehumanizes, and violates the people in it, even when it's consensual (and my understanding is that consensuality and non-abusive working conditions are much rarer than most porn consumers think).

I realize that opinion would be quite unpopular around here.

you comment on "non-consensual porn" may be what the GP meant, but s/he used the term "stolen porn" which I took to mean simply a copy that the user was unauthorized to upload, i.e. I download a movie then share it, not so-called revenge porn. I'd say in the first case, they are roughly equivalent wrongs, but in the case of revenge porn, I'd say distributing that publicly is an much higher moral wrong.

Ah, maybe I misunderstood the original post. Thanks for clarifying.

Hmm. "Non-consensual porn" has nothing at all to do with the question being asked.

> that was exactly Youtube's recipe for success

Disagree. ContentID was a proprietary tech for content recognition that made YouTube not get inundated with copyrighted material. YT is successful because they handled the issue, not because they didn't.

YouTube was successful long before ContentID. Perhaps they managed to stay successful by handling the issue, but their initial success was certainly not due to handling the issue.

I think we agree on the fundamentals here. YouTube was able to keep growing past a certain point due to contentID

Youtube in the mid-to-early 2000s was famous for being the place to get anything. Times have changed.

Before 2005 youtube wasn't.

Was that because of policy? I thought it just wasn't popular enough then.