2) Upload to YouTube
3) File copyright dispute to YouTube for any (future?) uploaded video which contains the music which used to be in the public domain
4) Have Google reject the videos
5) Create a site or an app which allows you to license that public domain music for a fee.
6) Notify YouTube who has licensed this public domain music.
Ok. that's the way Google thinks is the way it should work. Or maybe they just recognize that their AI is causing more harm than good.
--
Two days ago I uploaded a video which was a screen recording to demonstrate a bug in the Android app "Komoot". It was unlisted, the link was attached to the bug report I sent to the company. It was just a short video showing how the caching (or something in that direction) of uploaded images in the app seemed to be broken. The content in the video was 100% adhering to all the guidelines, specially to those of "for all ages". The content was nothing else but scrolling photos of an MTB-trail with a bit of UI. If your video is flagged or you mark it as "for 18+", then it can only be viewed by logged in persons.
After uploading the video I got an email that it was not complying with the "for all ages" requirements, which is kind of bad, because now the support team must log-in with a Google account to YouTube in order to see the harmless but useful video.
But then again, videos related to Instagram celebrities or Chinese ASMR-binge eating are totally ok for them.
So if you submit white noise to a copyright database, it could match different white noise recordings.
You (probably) can't copyright white noise because US copyright requires authorship. So in the same way that you can't copyright a phonebook's alphabetical list of numbers, you can't copyright random numbers rendered as sound, unless you did something else unique to it to exert authorship. It's just not something protected by copyright law. So even copying someone else's exact white noise sample is probably just fine.
The problem is that YouTube's system can only apply simple content matching rules and it counts any sufficiently long content match as a violation with no consideration of the work or context of use. Thats not how copyright law works. Copyright is a complicated system with all sorts of issues like fair use, derivative works, public domain, and works that don't qualify for protection. It's not a database query.
Modern codecs don't encode noise - they remove it during decoding and then add back artificial "comfort noise" when decoding, e.g. for film grain or background noise in voice calls.
YouTube itself seems to rely more on webm for audio. That seems to be a container for Opus or Vorbis formats.
Vorbis and Opus themselves are lossy encoders (Ogg Vorbis).
How do they preserve or modify white noise?
Apple Podcasts are AAC. Spotify are Ogg Vorbis. That probably covers 90% of the market right there.
Sufficient to support the latter assertion was that lossy compression is frequently used.
YouTube's webm does in fact use lossy compression as noted. MP3 is, I assert, still significantly used in multiple contexts, including many podcast sites. I haven't specifically surveyed those, and don't use Apple Podcasts myself (never bought into the ecosystem, though as it happens, this specific response is coming from a MacOS system). I do make heavy use of tools such as youtube-dl and mpv, and find that those do in fact frequently find and extract mp3 audio from various sources, including podcasts and IIRC Soundcloud.
Verification is as simple as:
youtube-dl -F <URL>
E.g.:
$ youtube-dl -F 'https://soundcloud.com/danyork/tdyr-362-thoughts-on-wordpress'
[soundcloud] danyork/tdyr-362-thoughts-on-wordpress: Downloading info JSON
[soundcloud] None: Downloading webpage
[soundcloud] None: Downloading webpage
[soundcloud] danyork/tdyr-362-thoughts-on-wordpress: Downloading info JSON
[soundcloud] 637919466: Downloading JSON metadata
[soundcloud] 637919466: Downloading JSON metadata
[soundcloud] 637919466: Downloading JSON metadata
[info] Available formats for 637919466:
format code extension resolution note
hls_opus_64 opus audio only audio@ 64k
hls_mp3_128 mp3 audio only audio@128k
http_mp3_128 mp3 audio only audio@128k (best)
'Opus (audio format) - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Opus_(audio_format) CELT includes both spectral replication and noise generation, similar to AAC's SBR and PNS'
Does opus have a notion of bitrates similar to mp3 or ogg vorbis? If so, the white noise would vary among bitrates.
Copyright algos are not looking at the whole video, they are searching for pieces of songs.
Because if you use 30sec of someones song you have to pay up and youtube is enforcing that.
Now if you will take another 2h video cut it into pieces and start searching for similar patterns in other 2h video I expect you will find some matching ones.
If the random number generator's period is 2^32 and you use one integer per sample, then at 44 kHz, you would have about a million seconds, or twelve days, before the RNG has gone through a full period.
Most RNGs have periods much higher than this. xorshift128 has a period of 2^128-1 and the Mersenne Twister's period is 2^19937-1.
So you could push it out until practically forever.
But, there will still be repeated sections.
https://www.youredm.com/2015/11/28/soundcloud-finally-goes-t...
Not only this, but in the EU* it requires verifying your age with a credit card or ID photo: https://i.imgur.com/gP20dXi.png
It's not "racey content gets marked special" with "suitable for children" being a catch-all category.
YouTube's "content developed for children", is the special case. It's explicitly content meant for and marketed to children, or content that children would be particularly attracted to, like nature documentaries.
All other content should be marked "not intended for children", even if it's not "adult"--aka restricted to 18+--content.
This is stated pretty clearly in YouTube's documentation. They have a link to it in a contextual pop-up right next to the form field asking you to self-rate the video.
> We wanted to let you know that our team has reviewed your content and we don't think it's in line with our Community Guidelines. As a result, we've age-restricted the following content:
> Video: Komoot Bug
> We haven't applied a strike to your channel, and your content is still live for some users on YouTube. Keep reading for more details on what this means and steps you can take if you'd like to appeal this decision.
> What "age-restricted" means
> We age-restrict content when we don't think it's suitable for younger audiences. This means it will not be visible to users who are logged out, are under 18 years of age, or have Restricted Mode enabled. It also won't be eligible for ads. Learn more about age restrictions.
When I click on appeal I get a popup titled "Submit an appeal" with the body text of "Appealing this violation is not available"
----
EDIT: Ah. I see. I actually did set it to "Is made for kids" thinking that this means that through this option I express that it does have no content which would be against the community guidelines.
I've now changed it to "Not made for kids" but also "Not age restricted".
Thanks for pointing this out.
maybe times have changed, but you could not pay me to sit through a nature documentary back when I was 8.
nature content is a very weird gray area of content in terms of age ratings. It's technically just, well, nature. But then there can definitely be "just nature" content you don't want a kid to see.
Google recognizes that these flaws in their AI aren't worth caring about. Google doesn't have any mission or obligation to help the world share videos. Google cares about Google's profits. And they've found that the expedient way to do that is just let the AI be overzealous with rejecting, because the cost of a false positive is infinitesimally tiny and the cost of a false negative (real copyright violation) is so much higher.
How do we fix this? Competition. We need a Google/Youtube competitor so that users will choose the platform that does copyright recognition better.
TL;DR copyright becomes absurd surprisingly fast when you have a large population, widely-available authoring/recording tools, and a way to store/search all of them, indefinitely. Like, indefensible absurd.
Let's be clear. It is not Google that wants it. Actually Google is on the side of calling all of this retarded. It is the state of copyright laws, of the DMCA, of the lobbying by the RIAA. The day the whole copyright ecosystem is updated to accept that computers exist and that people share files on internet easily, Youtube will be VERY happy to unplug all these terrible bots that are there to provide a bad solution to a problem we should not have.
Can any of us initiate a case and it becomes a class, or?
So guilty until proven innocent seems like a perfectly reasonable, if very annoying, stance.
(And, there's no monopoly situation here in any case.)
Google has the means to make this stop.
Instead Google chose to evaluate "disputes" themselves, with algorithms and "AI", and reject disputes. Rejecting counter-notices is absolutely NOT something the DMCA mandates or even suggests. Moreover Youtube essentially used to allow (probably still does) alleged rights owners to reject disputes in essentially one click, while the DMCA would require them to bring a law suit. Some copyright owners therefore created bots doing the clicking for them.
They could also be more lenient to "established" players as a first step, especially when it comes to counter-notices/disputes. Factor in previous history google has with an alleged infringer (alleged by their own algorithm by the way, not even by a third party) when considering a dispute, like account age, channel age, number of previous videos without problems, "we do know the customer" e.g. to pay out ad money, etc. And then maybe not outright reject it, but leave it to the alleged copyright owner to file a law suit (as the DMCA states) or at least refer it to actual human beings for further evaluation.
Of course, Google could hire people to check up on their own algorithms and decide on disputes instead of machines. Youtube had $6 BILLION in ad revenue in the last quarter (not year), so they could certainly afford to hire some people. In the end it might even be a profitable investment, as fewer good content is pruned from Youtube for wrong copyright issues, leading to more ad revenue.
Youtube right now seems pretty content with their quasi-monopoly, to their own detriment in my opinion. As unlikely as it may seem that people will create competitors, it can happen, ask mighty MySpace about it.
Who is paying said ad revenue though? Could a large chunk of it come from the same companies/industries who currently enjoy the broken state of YouTube's DMCA process?
Go dig up a copy of the indictment. It includes a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other running his site where they talk about all this stuff. It was basically a site whose intent and business model was hosting pirated movies. That you could also use it to host your own photos or whatever was there to try to provide cover.
I made a video of myself playing my own unique interpretation of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats on piano. https://youtu.be/ZNfMZ6g9YWo
I got a copyright violation notice shortly after posting it, by some random Latin American music company. It wasn’t clear if it was legit or not, it could have been some holding company of song rights or some failure of the AI.
I disputed the claim, saying I used no recorded material, it was entirely my own styling on the song including ragtime and stride piano influences.
Frankly I’m not even sure how copyright works on covers, particularly if style is quite different.
The company never responded in the 30 day period so the copyright claim was removed.
My channel is so small that I probably would have just removed the video. I’m not even close to the levels that are required for monetisation (1000 subscribers and 4000 cumulative view hours).
But it was a bit surprising how quickly it was claimed that I violated someone’s copyright.
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...
After the Campbell v Acuff-Rose Supreme Court decision, 2 Live Crew licensed the song from Acuff-Rose music. (which is what they tried to do in the first place).
I love this quote from the classic The Manual: How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way by KLF:
...the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.
The book is from the UK, I'm in Australia, it didn't seem a ridiculous thing to say to either of us. Maybe the problem was...US sensitivities. I, like I believe the KLF also, am white and have dedicated most of my life to the music of "blacks of African descent". The issue is how much more important groove is in black music, and how copyright is in origin a white thing. Changing copyright would no doubt be a massive, heroic, lifelong task. Like the way it took Douglas Nicholls[0] 30 years work to remove a racist sentence and a bit from the Australian constitution! I just don't hear calling for a hero here as a negative thing at all, the way evidently some people do.
Did any black people have a problem with the quote? I am curious.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26980084
p.s. wow, it's you! I checked out your github and website (crucialflow) a few months ago, hehe small world. proof: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153386
Small world I guess, I used to be a random nobody, I guess now people have something to recognize me by. I also release music under the name Dream Scatter by the way.
..But I think no-one said "only black people would care about this".
Like also I think no-one said "We need black people to change this copyright system" or "this is an issue between black and white people".
I'm not sure the quote is 100% serious, if they really thought things can or will be changed in their suggested way. But if I think about it, which I didn't until people said stuff like "Making it about race is extremely ridiculous."—it just seemed a commendable but unremarkable sentiment, one I never dreamed anyone could have a problem with—suggesting a black lawyer seems apt, for reasons something to do with what could be called self-determination. It would be more awesome and appropriate if black people righted the historic wrong, than if white people did it for them because poor black people can't do it on their own. Etc.
Ok, thanks, I think I learnt something about what your and other peoples' problem was/is, and I hope you learnt something about "my side", where what is extremely ridiculous is someone having problems with the noble desire expressed in that quote. But I guess it's hard here where we don't know each other at all, and don't know about what it seems are the unshared assumptions and beliefs that made my quoting a few lines on fixing copyright from a classic book from the 1980s into something extremely ridiculous and annoying in 2021. ..Ok thanks again.
i am a big fan of film music. i made a small piano reduction of a favorite piece and uploaded it to youtube. i wasn't even mad when i saw the copyright claim within hours, since i run no ads.
i was however baffled and somewhat proud that my efforts were not in vain, and that the algorithm thought my poor interpretation was close to the real thing.
i do not defend the algorithm though.
I think putting such constraints on creative work is a cultural disaster.
> as soon as you start trying to write derivative works in the same vein as the original then you're damaging the original author's ability to market his existing work
That seems ridiculous. How would expanding literature hurt it? It would be like free PR for the original. Art (tales, legends, stories, music and potry) used to be orally transmitted, we forgot that too, with every retelling it was reinterpreted and adapted. Even Tolkien didn't invent the elves and Rowling didn't invent sorcery.
The more gray areas for derivative work is stuff like fan art, translations, and remixes. All are technically in the area to be copyright'd, but at the same time it also helps publishers in essentially being free, natural advertisement.
YouTube instead decide to act as jury and will allow claimant to counter the counterclaim, and here lies the crux of the issue.
YouTube isn't protecting poor youtubers anymore than what DMCA already allows; YouTube is instead actively removing youtuber right to challenge the claim, putting all the power in the claimant, far above what DMCA mandates or requires.
And that decision to act as jury and judge and final unappealable authority in the claim process lies squarely on YouTube shoulders.
If that went away the next easiest option (scary letters) would happen again. DMCA or not.
Would such a process be expensive? Yes, but you can't have it both ways, enabling copyright holders to lodge spurious claims at will, and not allow content creators - who the entire platform is built on! - to disclaim them.
Would such a process be expensive? Yes, of course - but YouTube can very well afford it.
Step 1: Someone files a copyright claim (or perhaps this is done automatically). This is free.
Step 2: Someone disputes the claim. This is also free, and automatically restores the video.
Step 3: The filer can re-submit the claim but they have to post a bond for the price of a professional manual review by a trained copyright lawyer; maybe $1000.
Step 4: If the video owner can re-dispute the claim; to do so they also have to post a bond for the price of a professional manual review. The trained copyright lawyer comes to a conclusion; whoever "wins" the ruling gets their money back, and the other person pays for the whole thing.
If the video owner doesn't go on to step 4, obviously the copyright claimant gets their money back.
Obviously the whole system is predicated on the lawyers being fair: but assuming the lawyers usually DTRT, then 1) there will be consequences for false claims, resulting in far fewer of them and 2) small channels can get a real human to look at their claims.
No situation is perfect, but I'm pretty sure it would be better.
This would get rid of all bots and most false claims
This is the crux of the issue. The DMCA needs to be amended so that filing an incorrect claim comes with some risk.
They seem to believe that only their own sanctioned releases should be allowed, and that they should all be paywalled so that every view is paid for.
Or we could fight the whole damn robber baron system and return to something resembling common sense.
Disallow the uploading of all content held by RIAA/MPAA-affiliated companies from the likes of YouTube, even if the owners thereof wish it to be there. Fuck them. Let them go build their own platform if they think their work is so god damn awesome. Save YouTube/et al. for works created by, well... You.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684
I have used it in the past and it works.
there's the rub .. in the OP's example, the strike wasn't cleared
Look at Peertube or other free as in freedom options.
I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale. Currently, about 5000 videos are uploaded to YT every minute. If just 0.1% of them have any potential copyright issues, that's 5 potentially complex cases per minute or 7200 per day.
No amount of human review will be able to decide this in a timely manner. The piano teacher's case is just the simplest of scenarios and you'd have to expect the vast majority being "fair use" cases, which are incredibly hard to decide.
Free an in freedom ultimately results in users being sued directly (see torrent networks) and I'm not at all convinced that that's any better.
It would scale because under the DMCA system the site is not responsible for finding violations. That is up to the copyright owners.
All the site has to do is:
1. Take down alleged infringing content when someone claiming to be the copyright owner files a take-down notice.
2. Put the content back when whoever uploaded it files a counter-notice.
3. Tell the former that if they want the content taken down again, sue the latter. The site is now in the DMCA safe harbor.
All the site has to scale up to handle is dealing with notices and counter-notices. For that, all they need to do is check that all the required fields in the forms are filled out. This does not require anyone with any legal training--it is just checking things like they have identified themselves, described what content they want taken down/put back up, stated a reason for their belief that this action should be taken, and similar things.
You could train in an afternoon anyone who can read at a pre-high school level to handle this. 20 people in a normal shift could handle those 7200 cases per day.
Heck, you could even speed that up if you wanted by doing even less review on the notices. There aren't really any legal consequences to the site if they accept a notice that wasn't quite right. It is only the counter-notice that needs a little scrutiny. You want to make sure everything is correctly filled out in that, because it is the counter-notice that gives you the safe harbor.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684?hl=en&ref_...
Let's say it takes 5 minutes to properly adjudicate a dispute. 5 minutes allows 20 per person-hour. An 8 hour shift could resolve 160 reviews. 7200 / 160 = 45 shifts per day to review all of the hypothetical copyright issues. I don't think that's required, and the number of requested reviews is going to be some fraction of that. Requiring google to spread out under 50 shifts over a 24 period in order to provide a fair review so that they may bring in billions of dollars a year from youtube doesn't seem like a large ask. This is call-center-esque work and even done in the US or Western Europe would be very cheap, particularly as it can avoid otherwise more cumbersome regulatory hurdles.
That's highly unrealistic, but review alone would take at least twice as long, since the average video length is about 12 minutes.
How would you find out in just 5 minutes whether a monetization claim is justified? Not every case is as clear as the piano teacher's case. Keep in mind that this isn't a DMCA takedown request either - it's about a party that claims the content in order to redirect the revenue.
So you seriously claim that on average you can find out in just 5 minutes whether one of the 6 license types [0] applies and the claimant actually has a case? If it was that easy, I doubt that court cases like [1] would take years. And that's assuming all the information is already at hand so no further communication with either party is required...
[0] https://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights
[1] https://completemusicupdate.com/article/song-theft-dispute-o...
> I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale.
Do you think that the scale of YT is achieved without centralization?
Given the reality that a lack of a centralizing force like YT would just shift copyright adjudication to actual courts and be more expensive and higher stakes for all involved and probably have a similar error rate and bad actors like Prenda, I’d agree that a relatively benignly uncaring Corp without access to police and prisons is better than the court route.
Only a judge acting in a court of law can decide if something is fair use. All else is speculation.
Is this where we must point out that the entire ContentID system was designed to protect bad actors, because it was written by them?
The “western” world lost a once-in-a-thousand-years chance to change how copyright works at a fundamental level, when the internet started getting traction. We’re now forever beholden to the whims of parasitical “industries”.
- APRA_CS
- ECAD_CS
- SOCAN
- VCPMC_CS
APRA is the Australian music copyright organisation (https://www.apraamcos.com.au/)
ECAD is the Brazillian version.
VCPMC is the Vietnamese equivalent.
Not sure about the others, but basically these are the people with whom a composer registers their work. These organisations work together by forwarding royalties collected within each territory to their rightful owners.
I am a member of APRA and very much doubt that someone got away with registering a Beethoven work as their own.
Very curious indeed. I have no explanation.
[Edit] You are only meant to register your work in one territory, so it is odd that this 'work' would be registered in four of them.
I've yet to hear of one of these nationwide registries vetting any of the work that gets submitted to them for novelty or whatever. That would be too much like doing due diligence.
APRA: Australasian Performing Right Association
ECAD: Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição
SOCAN: Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada
VCPMC: Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright
CS stands for collections society. In another age CS would stand for the Mafia.
All but ECAD were found from here: https://www.cisac.org/
They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).
They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).
Maybe I'm wrong ... counter evidence welcomed.
I think the three copyright strikes have to take place within 90 days. Unless I am confusing community guidelines strikes with copyright strikes.
1. Print rights protect sheet music etc. from being copied.
2. Performance rights control whether your composed music can be performed.
3. Mechanical rights control whether your performance can be copied (onto mp3 say). Also related to these are "synchronization" issues and licenses.
> video embed tags
> ffmpeg
> That's it
You're thinking like an engineer. To a non-technical person, that's a lot. I'd even go so far as to say it's prohibitively difficult for anyone outside of our profession.
I'll even say that it's going to be difficult even for folks within our profession. Finding someone who can launch and configure Apache properly (i.e. in a way which won't get it quickly reconfigured to serve porn or illegal files), not to mention keeping everything up to date, is getting more and more rare.
The difference between a technical person and a non-technical person is that the former has decided to learn what is needed to do what he or she wants to do. It’s not a secret club. All the information is on the internet.
I never went to Apache engineering school, I have been running my own sites and others for many years, and no one has taken anything over for porn. There is a lot to learn, but it’s not like going to medical school. Anyone can do it who is motivated.
For a musician, the learning and upkeep is a lot of time that would better be spent creating; making a living.
Way to go...
that feels overly reductive and conductive to the majority of trades and hobbies today. If a court ruled based on this concept, antitrust wouldn't exist as a concept.
"the difference between an artistic person and a non-artistic person is that the former decided to learn what is needed. All the information is on the internet"
"the difference between a Spanish speaking person and a non-spanish speaking person is that the former decided to learn what is needed. All the information is on the internet"
"the difference between a guitar player and a non-guitar player is that the former decided to learn what is needed. All the information is on the internet"
The more common case of this is :
1. most people aren't "motivated" enough to learn a new skill, especially one that is only indirect to their goal. I COULD learn HTML and host my own website, or I pay some template site $30 and get my portfolio up. Even back in my college days, $30 was worth an a few hours of my work time. well worth a few hours to let someone else keep my portfolio up. Paid off well in hindsight.
2. There isn't time to lean every sub step to your goal, which is why various scaffolding exists. I didn't need to understand how my OS, web browser, nor web server worked in order to send this comment. And I wouldn't send it if it wasn't convenient to do so.
You might be thinking that you don’t want to learn about all of that just to host some videos, and that’s reasonable. But there is a tradeoff. Either let someone else control your content and live under the threat of arbitrary takedowns, or learn what you need to control your own stuff.
If you get popular you will have to deal with bandwidth issues, because video is huge. That’s one reason even people who are capable of hosting on their own turn to platforms like YouTube.
You can look into Vimeo. For some reason it's not mentioned often as an alternative to YouTube, but it seems to be better in almost every way.
The "Vimeo better in almost every way" needs to be re-calibrated based on the typical reasons that content creators' such as this piano teacher use Youtube.
The many ways that Vimeo is worse:
- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)
- smaller audience : Youtube is ~2 billion users, Vimeo ~200 million
- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization
- less recommendations leading to discovery of your videos because less catalog of content from others to expose viewers to your video: Youtube has dozens of Beethoven Moonlight Sonata piano tutorials, Vimeo has none[2]
And btw, Vimeo also removes videos. Previous comment about someone following advice of switching from Youtube to Vimeo which didn't solve his problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347254
Vimeo is a good platform but it's not mentioned as often as alternative to Youtube because it doesn't solve the same problems for many Youtubers. Also, self-hosting with Apache web server and HTML5 <video> tag also doesn't solve the same problem. And Peertube+Patreon doesn't solve the same problem.
[2] https://vimeo.com/search?q=moonlight%20sonata%20tutorial
I'd take that bet. There's a lot the agorithm does, but there's also a lot of companies and people sharing links to the videos. Any new movie trailer or album drop would definitely be linked from twitter or some company homepage. And I wager those are what make up the most views.
But I wouldn't be surprised to be right or wrong on this. the recommendations certainly aren't a tiny portion.
And so many more created.
What happened here is a problem unique to Youtube. Nobody will get sued for the same reasons she's getting taken down. For other reasons? Sure, but that's also can happen in Youtube.
In the general case, someone (or some thing) can sue for pretty much any reason whatsoever. One of the unappreciated roles of publishers and distributors is that they also serve as a legal defence organisation. You'll often hear people talk of how the publisher of a newspaper, magazine, or books also have lawyers to deal with, say, libel or other claims. Copyright isn't the only consideration here. For any community-based activity, there are also the issues of inter- and intra-community disputes.
Peer-based publishing tends to ignore this question.
in the general case, copyright trolls aren't going to pursue Joe Schmoe over their indie band cover. you'd put hundreds in and barely make pennies back even if you win.
But in the youtube case, it's an easy profit with little consequence. Suing is easy, but costly. DMCA's is easy and zero cost, especially once you automate it.
It does help reduce the legal threat to YouTube itself. The company is more likely to be sued by a large copyright holder than its many small video uploaders. Though the latter have been known to show up in a disgruntled state of mind and with harmful intent at HQ. That risk is also shifted, from shareholders to employees and contractors.
YouTube from a risk perspective is grotesquely fascinating.
(The parent comment wasn't the best comment, ever, I agree.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html the "In Comments" part.
Why has no such thing emerged?
I'm just trying to look at the root problem here and how to overcome it.
- Pianist creates YouTube video demonstrating how to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata
- part of this video includes her playing Moonlight Sonata (of course)
- YouTube has a new ‘feature’ that scans submitted videos prior to publication to identify potentially copyrighted material
- her video is found to include copyrighted material. She is certain this is a mistake that will be rectified by disputing the copyright claim
- she agrees the only person who’s content she is reproducing is Beethoven himself
- her copyright dispute is rejected. She is found to be violating the copyright of a piece called “Wicca Moonlight”
- she can appeal the dispute but the appeal process is limited, and she risks getting a feared “copyright strike” on her account, wherein three such strikes would mean permanent closure of the account
- she says nearly anyone can file copyright claims against published YouTube videos, including bots, and is worried about all the time she’s putting in to create content being usurped by a few bad actors