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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

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.