[anigbrowl]

It's really a pity there's no way for people to sue Youtube for abuse of the commons. Many economists like to invoke the tragedy of the commons' as a justification for property rights (real, maritime, or intellectual) but they tend to sidle around the fact that it's almost impossible for anyone to get legal standing to advocate on behalf of the commons.

[jchw]

The blame for YouTube’s copyright system is largely not YouTube, lest we forget the parties that actually benefit from it.

Sadly, it seems like it’s going to be the norm now. I recall hearing the EU wants to legally mandate the mechanism of Content ID, just another nail in the coffin for the open web really.

[anigbrowl]

YouTube isn't a scrappy little startup with no resources left over after keeping the servers up and running 24-7. They absolutely have the talent, capital, and legal resources to innovate in this area and to assess things like public domain claims.

The concept of public domain resources is not a difficult one, you don't need special legal training or advanced math to understand the idea that copyright expires and that works whose copyright has expired are free to all. There is no mechanism to even assert public domain status on Youtube.

You have to wait and offer it as a defense if subjected to a copyright infringement claim, and the copyright infringement claim is presumed to be valid and the claimant is the first judge of the public domain assertion.

Youtube didn't invent the system, but they are far from being helpless victims as you imply.

[jchw]

I don’t think it can be made clearer: YouTube fought the battle and lost. This is the compromise. Sure, they aren’t a scrappy little startup. Can anyone please propose what they’re supposed to do after losing the lawsuit?

[stubish]

Sue the companies making false claims for damages. Time spend by employees sorting out the mess after fraudulent ownership claims has a measurable dollar figure. And then there is the damage to the brand and loss of business, which a lawyer with chutzpah would claim at billions. If they don't do this, they will just keep bleeding business to companies that do push back or are in better jurisdictions.

[kristopolous]

Somehow we can get draconian international agreements on copyright enforcement that the biggest corporations and countries have to bow down to but when it comes to things like child labor or climate change our hands are magically tied.

[moksly]

We have laws on those areas. They are both stricter and more harshly enforced.

Unfortunately it’s lucrative enough for companies to exploit loop holes by utilising subcontractors, paying the fines and so on.

The real issue is the proof, but it’s nothing new. When the banana industry first took off a “magical” amount of small banana farmers disappeared or sold their lands to militant groups in South America, these groups then sold the land to companies like Chiquita.

Chiquita tried to buy the land the normal way first, when that didn’t work they then made I known that they were buying the land in circles that could “get” the land. Chiquita never actually hired anyone to do the dirty work though.

Every piece of hardware I own is made immorally, yours is probably too, exactly because of companies using these methods of having other parties do the dirty work, but because they have more money than governments it’s impossible to come after them in a legal manner, at least without making some radically different legislation.

Maybe we should do that, but it probably wouldn’t be healthy for democracy.

[kristopolous]

Disagree. We have an almost Gilbert&Sullivan level comic opera where we theater consequences.

Some headline catching big fine that gets quietly reduced to insignificance. Some giant parading announcement of a commitment to zero carbon and no meaningful action taken after the cameras leave.

It's pure political theater.

After we landed once on a plane, air marshalls came on before anybody could leave and escorted a passenger off. What happened? He smoked a cigarette. That's actual consequences.

Nobody arrested Exxon or BP executives for their gross negligence in their extremely avoidable ecosystem destroying oil spills. They didn't suffer any personal consequences. There was no tribunal for lying about climate change through propaganda campaigns since the 1980s

The FBI never showed up at Phil Knights house on charges of child labor or call in to question the very peculiar legal acrobatics of subcontractor shell games Nike uses to create liability distance.

It'd be like if the guy smoking on the plane had one friend light it and another hold the cigarette as he puffed it and we were like "Well I guess that's too complicated for the law to handle so it's no longer a crime! Carry on!"

[incompatible]

It's a shining example of international harmony, where even supposed "rogue states" like North Korea and Cuba have signed up to life + 50 years.

[Mindwipe]

The notion that nations do not have international agreements that bind countries much more tightly with more rigorously enforced penalties on child labour or climate change than copyright infringement is flat out laughable.

If child labour exploitation was enforced as loosely as copyright infringement most of the world's children would be in workhouses.

[anigbrowl]

I missed the evidence of them having fought the battle. How do I file notice with Youtube of public domain or fair use assertion with regard to a video I'm uploading?

[jchw]

Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc.

[thaumasiotes]

> the week before the parties were to appear in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a settlement was announced in March 2014, and it was reported that no money changed hands.

That's not fighting the battle and losing. That's fighting the battle and surrendering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y...

They won every time their case was argued. When did they lose?

[howaboutnope]

That's not the "battle" for allowing users to tag Public Domain content, and to have moderators confirm that status where it applies in the case of legal disputes, because they never even fought that "battle".

[thaumasiotes]

> I don’t think it can be made clearer: YouTube fought the battle and lost.

Oh? When did that happen?

[beebeepka]

Well, they "tried" is more like it. YT is going to do whatever makes them more money.

[CamperBob2]

Keep fighting.

[sumedh]

Why should Google keep wasting money. If its that important then people can protest to change the laws.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Is Google presently restrained from helping users to organise alternative legislation and general protest?

[CamperBob2]

Because they aren't paid to enforce unreasonable copyright laws, yet they still have to do so. It's not just the users that are penalized by the status quo, it's the service itself.

[sc11]

Thankfully said EU law includes a part that it's forbidden to block content for copyright reasons if the copyright claim is invalid. It includes ways for NGOs and users to go after companies that overblock. How this will actually work in practice is unclear since it's obviously an impossible requirement but some NGOs like the German GFF are already collecting cases and are looking to take legal action (see e.g. https://freiheitsrechte.org/aufruf-illegale-sperrungen/ (in German))

[Aerroon]

That requirement is there so that YouTube can't just block videos in Germany again. It's entirely there just to make sure that Google and other platforms must make a deal with the copyright holders. It's perpetuating the same garbage system and removes tools to fight back against it.

[sc11]

How does it force YouTube to make a deal? They could still block all copyrighted material that they didn't have a licence for, they're just not allowed to falsely block anything.

[Aerroon]

Iirc the EU law requires platforms to negotiate with rights holders. Ie Google can't just block the videos and be done with it.

[moksly]

> The blame for YouTube’s copyright system is largely not YouTube, lest we forget the parties that actually benefit from it.

It’s entirely YouTubes fault. Their business model is automated moderation and it’s constantly proven faulty. Yet they haven’t made a decent support system around it.

Their automated systems is the primary reason why we would never consider using Google Cloud, even though parts of it would enable us of building apps that we can’t with Azure or AWS. Their support is just horrible though. When something goes wrong with our office365 or azure setup we can call Seattle (I’m not sure where exactly Microsoft is located, sorry) and they will give us hourly updates until it’s fixed. With Google the support we get, even as an enterprise organisation with 10.000 employees is the same you get, an automated process that likely won’t solve your issue until it gathers enough publicity to make a real human at Google notice.

The automated bans and takedowns work for YouTube because it’s content creators and it’s viewers are it’s products and not it’s customers, but I’m looking forward to when the EU puts their foot down on it.

> EU wants to legally mandate the mechanism of Content ID, just another nail in the coffin for the open web really.

The EU is slowly moving to making platforms responsible for their content and how they treat their users. I don’t see it as the end of the open web, however, because the web isn’t open now and haven’t been for quite some time as this channel getting wrongly banned shows you.

Google is an evil advertising company and the sooner they get broken down the better.

[randomswede]

So, start a video streaming site and show that non-automated moderation scales to whatever scale you would consider to be a successful streaming site.

I suspect (but cannot prove) that the bandwidth and server costs will be small in comparison to the wages for the moderation staff.

[Kbelicius]

So what you are saying is that if youtube cannot solve the problem of scale, those problems should be dumped on the general public instead of youtube decreasing their scale? That is some interesting logic.

[randomswede]

I am actually all for YouTube becoming less of the behemoth in the market. One way of accomplishing that would be to enforce human moderation instead of machine moderation. Because nothing at the scale of YouTube can (sustainably) use mostly-human moderation and I suspect even "machine-assisted human moderation" would simply require too many people.

If we take "you need about 3x the time of a video to make a considered moderation decision" as a baseline, and trust the numbers from https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/ as valid, we would need....

300 hours per minute * 1440 minutes per day * 3 moderator hours per day. Let's round that up to 1.3 million hours of daily reviewer time. Let us also assume we have super-human reviewers that can squeeze out 8 hours of solid reviewing a day. That means we need 160k - 170k reviewers. And then we need to account for illness and hols, so make that about a quarter of a million people, to keep up with the incoming and maybe make some inroads on what's been uploaded in the past.

That is actually less than what I expected, I thought the numbers would end up in the "low millions" (call it 3.14 million).

[feintruled]

It's the cleverest trick the social media companies pulled. "It's too hard!" So they don't do it!

I'm imagining a world where the answer was "tough luck, you have to or you don't get to do business". Imagine a Facebook where due to the enforced human moderation you were only able to make a single post a day. That actually sounds like it might solve a lot of problems!

[moksly]

> So, start a video streaming site and show that non-automated moderation scales to whatever scale you would consider to be a successful streaming site.

Why? I can want regulation of big tech corporations without building a competitor.

Are these humongous advertising companies even a net benefit to the EU? I doubt it, and if they aren’t, then why on earth should we keep them around as is?

[kevin_thibedeau]

It is explicitly for the benefit of YouTube.

It is possible to make a non-antagonistic system that complies with DMCA: Respond to the takedown upon receipt and give account holders an easy path to restore the disputed content under fair use or for invalid claims. Then the originator of the claim can use the normal legal process and Google is off the hook as a safe harbor. Google doesn't want to do that because they're in bed with the media companies to get favorable treatment on their paid services.

[wesleywt]

I might be naive but I think the overzealous copyright strikers are hurting their products as they are limiting the views these musical products receive. Essentially deleting themselves from zeitgeist. I have not heard main stream music in years. Yet I am listening to new music almost everyday.

[ipaddr]

This is a great point. Music use to be everywhere from tvs to movies to drug stores, elevators, etc. Everyone heard many of the top 40 so a common language and understanding existed.

I don't think there is a mainstream anymore. The only place to hear popular music is advertising and it is always from much earlier eras.

Shows like WKRP cannot work anymore. You can't even get it on dvd because of the music licease demands.

Todays popular music are highly profitable but only heard by a small group.

[Aerroon]

>I recall hearing the EU wants to legally mandate the mechanism of Content ID, just another nail in the coffin for the open web really.

It already passed. Now we're just waiting for the consequences.

[Kbelicius]

What are you referring to? There are many directives that were passed but none mandates the mechanism of content ID. In fact there was a directive, which you are probably referring to, that explicitly states that the mechanisms of content ID cannot be mandated.

[lmm]

> Many economists like to invoke the tragedy of the commons' as a justification for property rights (real, maritime, or intellectual) but they tend to sidle around the fact that it's almost impossible for anyone to get legal standing to advocate on behalf of the commons.

Erm, what? Aren't those just two different ways of saying the same thing? The tragedy of the commons happens because there is no owner of the commons who can regulate their use.

[hechang1997]

It's YouTube that's the perpetrator of the tragedy of the commons here. There must be a mandatory expiration of any intellectual property into the public domain after a set amount of time and/or after the owner died and the state should first and foremost protect the intellectual property of the public domain, that is, prevent any party from claiming it exclusively and punish any offenders.

[KarlKemp]

This has nothing to do with tragedy of the commons" except in that people find it sad and CC licenses used the metaphor of the commons.

[roughly]

Incidentally, “tragedy of the commons” is one of those things like “inventing money because barter is inefficient” that exists in the lore of economists but doesn’t seem to exist in the real world, and most societies at most times in most places in history seem to have done just fine managing “the commons” as a shared resource through social compact and peer pressure.

[elliekelly]

> and most societies at most times in most places in history seem to have done just fine managing “the commons” as a shared resource through social compact and peer pressure.

What? Clean water, clean air, deforestation, overfishing, noise pollution. There are infinite externalities that have been shifted onto the commons that social compact and peer pressure haven’t (and arguably won’t) solve.

[bscphil]

I think your parent comment is thinking about the world before privatization, where most resources are understood to be the collective property (and responsibility) of the community, and the community itself enforced rules intended to make sure that the resources were well managed.

Once you start talking about the modern, post-privatization world, things are different of course. Resources like water may be in theory community managed, but in practice private for-profit entities acquire the right to extract as much as they can. Think Nestle and water for example.

That said, I think privatization was inevitable. I don't think it makes sense to long for the days where community management was possible, because that was probably always limited to rather local resources and not to handling global problems like climate change. (Maybe a "global community" is possible in some utopian future, but thinking about that doesn't seem like a way to solve the problems we have now.)

[roughly]

> I think your parent comment is thinking about the world before privatization, where most resources are understood to be the collective property (and responsibility) of the community, and the community itself enforced rules intended to make sure that the resources were well managed.

Yeah, and I understand what we've got right now ain't that.

I think the two requirements for that kind of community governance are 1) relatively stable long-term relationships - ie, stakeholders are well known to each other and expect to bear the long-term costs of their decisions - and 2) relatively evenly distributed power, such that no one actor can ignore the will of the overall group.

Broadly, I think there are two changes in the modern world that put an end to that, both technological - 1) transportation technology increased to the point where it's no longer a given that people will effectively stay in one place for their entire lives, which affects both how people see their surroundings and what they can assume of others, and 2) mechanization increased both the scale of resource extraction we're capable of and the power disparity we can bring to bear if, say, the Crown agrees with us.

> That said, I think privatization was inevitable.

Broadly I agree. I'm not sure privatization as we have it was inevitable, but I think given technology progressing to even trains and rifles is sufficient to disrupt the social and psychological world in which most resources were held in common.

> I don't think it makes sense to long for the days where community management was possible, because that was probably always limited to rather local resources and not to handling global problems like climate change. (Maybe a "global community" is possible in some utopian future, but thinking about that doesn't seem like a way to solve the problems we have now.)

Part of why I push back on the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" is because it fosters a narrative of human beings as inescapably greedy and incapable of acting communally at any scale, and that's simply incorrect. I don't know what a "global community" would look like, but I think if we've any hope of achieving some kind of headway against climate change, we need more narratives encouraging us to be members of a community and fewer telling us we're "rational actors."

[freeone3000]

Because one side clearly isn't a peer. If, say, Microsoft decided to go full renewable, then there'd be pressure for everyone else to. If it's a bunch of unimportant people against a corporation with the money to obtain its rights, well!

[mucholove]

As you point out—there are also fantastic administrations of shared resources.

For example, many fisheries in the USA have recovered tremendously through smart limits. The Atlantic cod fishery is often cited. I personally have experienced the Pacific North West salmon fishery and can confirm that the fishing gets better up there every year while the Dominican fishery gets worse. The DR fishery has experienced the tragedy of the commons.

The DR also experienced fantastic forest preservation in the 1970s. This was after all the old growth was destroyed. There was a success of the commons following a tremendous tragedy. Still, in the last few years these old laws have been disrespected and so the forests have been decimated to make way for Haas avocado plants. Do not buy Dominican Haas avocado.

The tragedy of the commons is very real. Learn more about the success and failure of different shared resources through Elinor Ostrom’s work.

[ncmncm]

The Atlantic cod fishery is an example of massive failure. Any perception of apparent recovery has to limit its scope to the very recent past.

[marcusverus]

> Incidentally, “tragedy of the commons” is one of those things like “inventing money because barter is inefficient” that exists in the lore of economists but doesn’t seem to exist in the real world.

Could you elaborate on how "'inventing money because barter is inefficient' doesn't seem to exist in the real world"? The idea that barter's inefficiency drives demand for money seems to me to be self-evidently true, so I'd be interested to hear a different perspective.

[rsa4046]

David Graeber has argued persuasively that there is little real anthropological evidence to support the notion that money arose from the ‘inefficiency of barter’. [1—3]

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the.... 2. https://newrepublic.com/article/159227/david-graeber-changed... 3. Graeber D. 2011. ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years'. Melville House, NY

[Aunche]

This just shows that economists are poor historians. It doesn't change how money enables more efficient and sophisticated forms of commerce than than barter or a credit social credit system.

[roughly]

> This just shows that economists are poor historians

F*ck me, if that's the only thing you take away from this thread I'll have done my job. The problem is they keep taking that poor history and using it to spin tales about humans as greed-stricken robots who'd sell their grandmas if it would generate a dollar more value than whatever you want to price a plate of fresh-baked cookies at, and the bigger problem is we've built an entire society and economy off their collective delusions.

[Aunche]

I didn't read the book, but from the summaries I don't find Graeber's thesis any more convincing. It's not like people who lived in pre-money societies sang Kumbaya all day. They pillaged each other all the same. Sure, money was able to finance armies that did this with more efficiency, but you can say the advances in metallurgy were made with nefarious motivations. That doesn't make the advancement bad in itself.

[cool_dude85]

But that has cause and effect backwards. Nobody is claiming that money does not do that, but that it did not arise because of the inefficiency of barter.

[andrekandre]

i havent read the book yet, but i am surmising that the claim is that money originally arose in order to service debts, not because (at that time) it was more efficient?

[roughly]

> Could you elaborate on how "'inventing money because barter is inefficient' doesn't seem to exist in the real world"? The idea that barter's inefficiency drives demand for money seems to me to be self-evidently true, so I'd be interested to hear a different perspective.

Others point out Debt below, and that's the canonical argument here. Effectively, the kinds of small societies that most people lived in for most of human history manage exchange based on personal relationships and reciprocal exchange, not abstract or closed monetary transactions. Money arises in the context of either long-range trade, in which sustained relationships aren't guaranteed, or in the context of large states which actually require some form of bookkeeping to track things like taxes and tribute.

The "self-evident" nature of the "barter becomes money" story is the origin myth of Economics - it absolutely sounds like a way things could have happened and feels deeply plausible, but there's no evidence it did.

[rentnorove]

GP may be referring to anthropologist David's Graeber's book: "Debt", which refutes that idea: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt

[nanis]

> most societies at most times in most places in history seem to have done just fine managing “the commons”

You mean through exclusionary rules, investing in monitoring and punishment etc all of which divert resources from the productive activity solely by the existence of the incentive to overuse the "commons" or others' goodwill.

True, while the subgame unique subgame perfect equilibrium of most models is full free-riding, most lab experiments show less than full free-riding. That does not mean the incentives are not there.

Why are dorm bathrooms not as clean as bathrooms in your house?

> inventing money because barter is inefficient

That's a silly statement: No one decided to invent money in a similar process of invention like the lightbulb. Instead, coins, tokens, and other recognized mediums of exchange dominated over barter because barter is inconvenient and inefficient.

Even animals can learn to use a medium of exchange[1].

[1]:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090608095044.h...

[roughly]

> You mean through exclusionary rules, investing in monitoring and punishment etc all of which divert resources from the productive activity solely by the existence of the incentive to overuse the "commons" or others' goodwill.

No, I mean through collective policing and social pressure. In villages before privatizaton, free-riders faced social pressure, shame, and other consequences for violating the group trust. This is how most societies operated for the bulk of human history.

> True, while the subgame unique subgame perfect equilibrium of most models is full free-riding, most lab experiments show less than full free-riding. That does not mean the incentives are not there.

The lab experiments show "less than full free-riding" because humans are predominantly a social species, not a value-maximizing algorithm.

> That's a silly statement: No one decided to invent money in a similar process of invention like the lightbulb. Instead, coins, tokens, and other recognized mediums of exchange dominated over barter because barter is inconvenient and inefficient.

Except there's no historical record of that happening anywhere. The two things that look like money are trade goods between distant groups and coinage required by rulers for taxes or tribute. There's no record of money being invented de novo to replace barter in societies which didn't already have it.

> Even animals can learn to use a medium of exchange[1].

Obviously, but I haven't seen any record of chimps spontaneously deciding to coin money, so I'm not sure what the point here is.

Edit for the point I missed:

> Why are dorm bathrooms not as clean as bathrooms in your house?

Because my mother doesn't live in the dorm.

[tomcam]

How about rampant overfishing in the world seas right now?

[NeutralForest]

This is a very wrong take

[megablast]

Wow. You got your two main point completely wrong.

[olao99]

But people can sue YouTube for misapplication of copyright law. It would be extremely expensive and time consuming but they could in theory