Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by deckar01 2304 days ago
A copyright violation does not just remove your right to monetize the content, it also removes your right to determine if the content is monetized. The copyright holders who claimed infringement can decide to allow the content and force it to be monetized for their profit.
1 comments

It's worth noting that while this is the most common mechanism employed by youtube.. it is possible with the same system to just remove the right to have the video (or at least that segment) published at all.

But the general business youtube has pursued, which in fairness, is partly to make it possible for people to publish videos with such works in the first place, is that most copyright holders will allow the work to be use but instead the entire video (regardless of how significant that small copyright portion was) is monetized to the 100% benefit of the copyright holder.

There are some plusses to this, in that it's easy (and free) to actually publish a video containing copyrighted works. And that in general by working with all the publishers to do this, it has in theory prevented them from chasing YouTube harder to disallow any such content.

The downside is the entire system is one sided and the review and oversight process is clearly lacking. I could understand a little how this happens with small channels... but I frequently see channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers (who are typically full time youtubers) and sometimes even millions.. get the same lack of oversight to their claims.

To me it's crazy that the "3 strikes" rule applies just as equally to accidental and incorrect violations on an otherwise very active and largely original channel (that posts 1 video a day making it very easy to accidentally or incorrectly get recognised as having a violation) as it does to a 1 video channel with no subscribers that is actually violating copyright. It boggles the mind that there is no scale applied.

And time and time again I witness channels I watch have this same process of having to somehow reach out to someone at youtube by yelling on twitter or hacker news and then problems just "go away". Even those with millions of subscribers that have internal youtube partner managers.. often those channels still can't solve these problems. It's madness.