[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!"

[moksly]

How do you figure that we disagree? Seems to me that we agree quite a bit.

[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?

[jchw]

They had been facing lawsuits and legal scrutiny since 2007; the only parties that ever won were the legal departments. Until relatively recently, YouTube wasn’t even profitable, and Content ID itself was, according to Google, over $100 million of investment to develop over the years. Given the scale of YouTube, I actually think it’s fair to take this at face value.

Ultimately I am not a lawyer and I can’t analyze how and why the case ended the way it did. However, I do think it is obvious to anyone that Content ID is a key component of how YouTube managed to escape further lawsuits and legal scrutiny. And as can be seen in the Oracle case, fighting something all the way into legal precedence can backfire in enormously painful ways, like having APIs all be eligible for copyright.

[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".

[jchw]

That is absolutely the battle YouTube fought that lead to Content ID and the claims system that doesn’t have the leniency you wish that it did. It’s not even ambiguous; this is the system that we got. In fact, the system actually improved vastly since it was initially implemented.

Really. It was all a direct reaction to the lawsuits: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118161295626932114

When I say it has improved, I mean it genuinely has. Back in 2008 the usual outcome of copyright strikes were deleted videos and deleted channels. Copyright cartels monetizing videos they didn’t make due to dubious Content ID matches may seem like an unreasonable response, but it is still a better compromise than content flying down blackholes.

And yes. It would be great if all of these problems could just be solved. I’m sure they’ve heard every idea imaginable. There is no one obvious way to solve everything. So asking “why don’t they just do this?” is not productive. What we could ask is “how did we get here?”

And the answer to that is that copyright is broken. And if we could fix that, or at least make it less broken, some of these problems would literally disappear.

And if you don’t believe me, there’s tons of backup from people more persuasive who have perspectives of being in the direct line of fire. Like Tom Scott: https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU

And yeah YouTube could do better, but all too often you get the perspective that this is all their fault because they could solve it with one easy trick. It’s easy to say that when none of the competition managed to stick around to prove it.

Instead, the opposite happened instead, when Twitch had its own copyright reckoning.

We knew copyright on the internet was fundamentally broken in the Napster days. Did we forget?

[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?

[sumedh]

The question is, why should Google do that?

[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.

[adrianN]

But they already implemented a system to do this and have contracts with the relevant rights holders. This gives them a competitive advantage over other video platforms who don't have the resources to develop a Content ID clone and an army of lawyers to write contracts.

[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.