How about this: your copyright claim accuracy becomes a multiplier for monetization payouts. E.g. if 100% of claims are correct, you keep all monetization. If 10% of claims are correct, you only get 10% of monetization.
Also, if Google can show that the copyright claims are incorrect, then they get to keep the difference.
Now copyright holders are incentivized to make accurate claims and Google is incentivized to find inaccurate claims.
That doesn't make sense for the unambiguous cases of copyright violation. The copyright holder never agreed for the content to be monetized by Google and under their terms. Google can't just make up some revenue sharing policy and act like that's the law.
The content owner should be able to negotiate a rate with Google or choose not to, not have to be forcibly entered into it.
The 'content owner' can always choose to opt out and file DMCA requests instead of using ContentID, though. If they don't like Google's system... They don't have to use it.
But of course that just means that things get taken down - and no revenue goes to the claimant. Great for protecting your copyright, good for trolling, really shitty for extracting money from the works of others.
The DMCA may be rough on active content creators, but it is far worse on inactive ones and on the public interest in having that material available. ContentID has the same trouble. Consider:
* creator is in the hospital
* creator is dead, and the heirs know nothing about dealing with copyright claims
* creator is hiking the Appalachian Trail for the next year
* creator is in jail for something unrelated
* creator got deployed on a submarine
* creator now has Alzheimer's disease and can't remember the internet
ContentID becomes a trivial way to steal money, and the DMCA becomes a trivial way to suppress the creator's work.
Or just ban the channels of the networks that abuse the system. Would be hilarious if disney got their channel banned for not understanding fair use laws. Why can't google be more like that :/
How about every time a company files a frivolous claim they lose their ability to claim anything for an ever-increasing amount of time? An hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, etc up to a year.
since the ability to make copyright claims is required by law and there are requirements as to how platforms must respond to claims then any fix to the system that imagines ignoring the law in favor of its fix is bound to fail.
A three (or ten, or even 300) strike plan, where they lose the right to make copyright claims in a "guilty until proven innocent" fashion - the company must provide sufficient evidence to YouTube that the content is infringing.
They would still have the DMCA process, but they lose rights to use the copyright strike process until they prove their competence.
I completely agree with this. There should be enormous consequences for false reports, and there should be an AI that is designed to understand fair use (It's not fucking impossible).
True. If I was google I'd spend millions getting lawyers and lobbyists to try to change how fair use is applied and interpreted in the U.S. so it is as clear cut as "an excerpt of up to this percent size of the total work is fair use regardless of context" combined with "excerpts are not permitted to be pieced or packaged together in such a way that the entire or most of the original work can be consumed". So you wouldn't be allowed to just make a playlist of 30 second clips on youtube that equals the entire movie, but a stupid script could figure out if a clip counts as fair use.
To clarify, this would work the same way classified information works in the DoD -- many small pieces of information can be one classification level (or even unclassified), but if you aggregate them, they can become a higher classification level in aggregate. Similarly, small fair-use clips on an individual level would retain fair-use status, but if you start aggregating them, via a playlist or some other method, the playlist would not be fair use and would count as infringement.
The ballsier move than simply lobbying forever would be for Google to just go ahead and do this -- go ahead and write a script/AI that rejects infringement reports and/or DMCA requests on excerpts that are less than 5% of the total work on the basis that such a small excerpt necessarily must be fair use no matter the context because of the small size of the clip, and then battle each case out in court on behalf of the infringing user. I think they would win every single case, and once they have won a few in a row, precedent would take care of the rest and predatory media companies would stop trying.
This isn't impossible. Google is in a position to clarify / influence how copyright law is applied, and they should do it.
Sure, but YouTube doesn't have that option. Any of the suggestions given here would almost certainly lose YT their safe harbor status.
YouTube's policies are as Draconian as they are because that's literally the only way to comply with the law. I can't for the life of me figure out why YT doesn't have some kind of messaging strategy around that.
The point is though, they aren't fighting it at all. There are all kinds of ways they could penalize copyright claimants that wouldn't affect safe-harbor status, but they aren't doing it. They are in bed with the movie and music studios.
They do have over $100 billion in savings, so maybe that number should actually be $90 billion and that other ~10% dedicated to the boring stuff like supporting their users. It's no accident that Amazon, Comcast, AT&T etc can support 100m+ people by phone... and pure accounting chicanery that Google does not.
Why not say "no" to more people? Allowing the automation of this is really bad and heavily favors people with big bucks- would requiring a different written statement per video make sense at all?
Creators go where the consumers are. You can move to a different platform or start your own but you won’t get any viewers. It’s the equivalent of not liking the taxes in a city retail space, and moving your store out to the desert in protest.
What will end up happening is the major content creators, the ones that have massive followings will treat YouTube as the "advertisement" to the other platform they are on. "Hey guys thanks for checking out my video, here's a small preview. To view the full version, check me out at <some_other_platform>.com!" It's similar to what the big ones did with monetization (turned off all monetization, and now do in-video ads or some donation platform). Once that happens, there will be enough traffic on the new platform for enough medium size players to test the waters, then the whole thing will topple down. The only thing YT will have left is existing content, of which the only task remaining will be a race to archive what is currently on there.
Unlike a real desert, everyone can still reach you in your internet desert, and eventually it can become an internet oasis.
Then again, maybe once that happens YT will actually start to become content-creator friendly again.
If creators were smart they would always publish on two (or more) platforms - Youtube and Vimeo for example. It doesn't cost them much in terms of time and effort, it gives their viewers a choice (given the choice, I would rather watch alternative), and if enough creators do that, it keeps Youtube on their toes. Which means that they might care a bit more about the creators.
On a related note, Google should clean up their customer support. Everywhere.
Also, if Google can show that the copyright claims are incorrect, then they get to keep the difference.
Now copyright holders are incentivized to make accurate claims and Google is incentivized to find inaccurate claims.