Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmix 2488 days ago
Still sounds like a Youtube problem, not with copyright.

The amount of false positives Youtube's copyright system has generated is crazy. It's clearly broken and wide-open for abuse by bad actors.

Even with the complications of copyright there are so many examples of people having entirely fair-use videos taken down. It goes well beyond just the difficulties of two works one copyrighted/one not matching.

2 comments

This is a side effect of having onerous copyright laws. It takes quite a bit of engineering effort that could have been spent on other projects. This means economic loss and frustration for consumers.

As an aside, without copyright, we could have both Disney and Sony Spiderman movies. The consumer wins, and there's more than enough money to go around for competing studios.

>> "As an aside, without copyright, we could have both Disney and Sony Spiderman movies. The consumer wins, and there's more than enough money to go around for competing studios."

Wouldn't that be trademark, not copyright?

The problem is fair use isn't something that can be algorthimically determined. All you can really do algorithmically is say 'this bit of content matches this bit of content' determining if that match is part of fair use requires determining the context in which it's used which will be a hard problem until we either figure out uploads (and some poor schmucks' uploads have to watch and filter YT videos all day) or general purpose human level AI.

There are some heuristics that could be used but so many of them break down in pretty common cases. Eg: If we say using a small portion of someone else's video in a larger video won't strike it leave out some types of videos like Destin from Smarter Everyday or the Slowmo Guys where the most interesting shot could be 3-5 seconds total or if we just measure by length of copyrighted material vs the whole video we'll wind up with bit 10 hour compilations of copyrighted stuff from different places maybe. It's a hard problem and unfortunately Google (pushed somewhat by the law and somewhat by their own internal decisions) take a flag and contest approach that favors the 'original' creator.