Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices
eff.org
eff.org
If we don't punish these false claims when they happen, then they will continue.
An alternative approach based on civil disobedience would be in the form of a large group of individuals filing claims against large swaths of content (basically using the same broken rules of DMCA against the people who advocate them).
They told me that to contest I had to provide loads of legal documentation and essentially escalate it to a serious claim. It wasn't worth my time or worth risking actual legal trouble. I decided to just never upload a video to Youtube again and felt like it was a case of guilty until proven innocent. I'm sure it mentioned the DMCA in the request, though.
But the term "copyright notice" as I understand it applies to less serious flagging, mostly done automatically by some kind of content fingerprinting system.
They are a Youtube copyright notices. The difference is that a DMCA will tell Youtube to remove content from Youtube, while a copyright notice is Youtubes way of telling you that they are giving partial control of your content to someone else, because Youtube believes that someone else have the rights.
The Content ID system is a private arrangement between Youtube and various rightsholders, and it allows them to assert control without the legal repercussions involved in DMCA claims.
The EFF has another article[0] which goes into more detail on the two systems, but I found that to be a bit confusing as well - it seems to conflate the two systems at times.
[0]: https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-yo...
Those provisions in the DMCA were about the only good thing in it, providing a way to sidestep the consequences of this kind of action has been immeasurably toxic and the fault lies squarely with YouTube and Google
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2018/3/7/17087668/steem...
It’s built on STEEM and IPFS.
> DTube is an application fully written in javascript, that runs in the browser, that allows you to upload and watch videos on top of the IPFS Network. Moreover, it uses STEEM as a database and enables earning [...]
https://steemkr.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-...
Although I'm still not convinced that the crypto is necessary here...
Which... I mean in some (rare) cases is a good thing but is usually - as far as I can see - just a way to get VC money or buzz by saying "we use crypto".
For lbry itself it looks like they're using coins for actual payments to creators, which seems like it's a worthwhile project (and definitely has the double-spend problem), but it's not clear to me that it needs to be connected with the content distribution problem.
This is similar in that Google goes beyond what the law requires to appease certain content providers. People should start boycotting YouTube in the same way they have started boycotting Facebook. We won't see a major shift overnight, but eventually enough of us will do it and Google, like most other companies, will only notice when it's too late to do anything about it.
Vote with your feet/clicks and plead with indie creators to switch to a different platform (such as D.tube, for instance, but any would work).
The problem is the law.
This was one of the good details of the DMCA, although other countries implementing the WIPO Internet Treaty may have done a less hoster-friendly job.
Unless the problem was lawsuits outside the US or they wanted to make the US lawsuit nuisance go away (both entirely possible!), I imagine they started playing nice with the media conglomerates so as to be able to offer Google Play Music, Movies, and Books, for all of which they need licenses.
Note for anyone who looks at my profile and sees Google among my former employers: I never worked for YouTube, Google Play, or Google legal and had no involvement with these decisions. I'm not speaking based on inside information or otherwise speaking for Google here.
But you have a great point, the media conglomerates could with-hold cooperation which Google needed for Google Play, so Google needed to make them happy anyway ...
The attestation that the use is unauthorized is merely a "good faith belief", which is a standard of evidence so low as to be meaningless. I don't believe there has ever been a successful case going after someone for filing frivolous DMCA notices.
(As others have said, YouTube has their own inhouse process that does not actually use the DMCA in most cases, but I wanted to elucidate this point, because lots of people seem to think the DMCA takedowns have some repercussions for fraud. In my opinion, they don't.)
Given the scale, I think that automated solutions are required to have any reasonable enforcement. However automated (and non-automated) solutions will have false positives. Right now it seems like there is no cost to a false positive (claiming that a video is copyrighted when it is not), and so systems are happy to be aggressive with these notices. Likewise, the cost of a false negative (missing a copyrighted video) is high to the rights holder, as they are losing revenue.
Since these systems use machine learning, it seems that it’s easy to add noise and fool them. I’ve seen videos that are flipped, slightly skewed, and have audio sped up or slowed down, presumably to get around the system. So I would assume that the system would have to be a bit aggressive to catch added noise.
I think it’s ultimately an economics problem though. Since there’s basically no cost to the person making the claim when there’s a false positive, there’s less incentive to avoid false positives. However, it seems hard to charge fees here - if you’re charging people to take down content that they hold the rights to, that’s basically extortion.
Any thoughts on what could be done to improve it? I think long term, we have to evolve our understanding of copyright and licensing, but given the current regime, is there even a solution?
This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.
There's no cost when you have bots sending emails. You'd have to fix the law first.
Can you find a single entity that has ever been hit with these "legal repercussions"?
The issue, as other commenters noted, is that the only claim made under penalty of perjury is that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, of a copyrighted work.
The claim that someone has infringed your rights (or the copyright holder's rights) is not made under penalty of perjury. The only way to get someone penalized for it is, essentially, to get them to admit in court "Yeah, I knew it wasn't infringing, but I sent a notice anyway out of malice". Which is, well, pretty much what happened in the Diebold case. Other issuers of mass automated takedown notices are dumb, but not quite that dumb.
Edit: And Viacom sued them for a billion dollars because YouTube executives knew most of their money was coming from straight-up movie rips anyway. Viacom only lost the lawsuit because the memos didn't name specific videos.
* Copyright holder fills a copyright claim, video is not taken down or demonetized, ad revenue is held in escrow
* * If content uploader agrees with claim - video is removed/demonetized/ad revenue directed to copyright holder
* * Content uploader fills a dispute *claiming fully original content*, under potential monetary penalty of false claims
* * * Copyright holder does not dispute the dispute, ad revenue is released to video uploader
* * * Copyright holder fills counter-dispute, under potential monetary penalty of false claims
* * * * Content is reviewed by human, decision awarded, false claim party penalized, human reviewer expenses paid from penalty
A good start would be having appeals handled by an impartial party, though I'm sure everyone involved would be loathe to pay for that.
Well, it may not be a “good, fair” solution, but the process provided a safe harbor by the DMCA is a better, fairer process than the actual process used by YouTube.
The problem is that, as it stands, YouTube likely has no liability to users for taking content down without any good justification, and do has no incentive to follow the part of the safe harbor process that provides protection against liability to the accused user.
Along with bird song, <s>children smiles, and joy?</s>
I'm just sayin'...
So this probably also holds for copyrighted works.
[0] I don't think corner case is appropriate terminology in this discussion. I think it should be edge case. But even still, I don't think Google would think this is an edge case.
It may be common knowledge by now, but Warner copyrighted this song from the 1800s and profited for years until someone challenged it in court.
I've been waiting for someone to post one of those "this was way more complicated than that and this is why it wasn't as outrageous as people make it seem", but nothing yet.
This in a addition to the Micky Mouse laws really makes the system feel flawed, even though it has its clear benefits.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...
It's one of the reasons that makes me self-host videos, which is actually very easy to do with HTML5. Check the examples section here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
It's just a few lines of HTML and you're done. Try it with a test video -- it's surprisingly easy.
That said, I've seen a few stats of top-page HN links generating 10,000 or more unexpected visitors, and a 1TB cap with a 20MB video would easily handle that.
But if that weren't the case, if I were making professional videos intended for a mass audience, then I would just add more servers with appropriate bandwidth. Scaling for your own content is vastly different and easier than scaling for everyone's a la Youtube or imgur.
Wonder what Youtube can do here, except speed up dispute resolution. With datasets of their size, false-positives seem inevitable.
Do copyright-owners just set the system to auto-monetization or -takedown? If so, maybe Youtube should change their policy to require more manual action from copyright owners.
This is fair, how?
Why should the other party automatically start getting revenue? Why can't that money go into escrow and whichever party prevails gets that money?
The problem is Google has no incentive to make this better.
What you can't do is stop others copying your idea (as long as they don't copy your implementation), nor stop others implementing the same thing who don't copy you.
Now, a work needs in most jurisdictions to be distinctive, but IMO the length of the work would inter alia be enough to make it distinctive, or perhaps use of a specially designed noise generator. But when you release "10 hours of noise" and I copy your idea and make "9 hours of noise" there will be no tort there.
Refusal letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.inf...
That logo is, within the field of logos, indistinct, boring if you will, if you sat down 100 logo designers I bet you'd get a few that look very like it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it but having copyright but for a logo RTM is probably a stronger right anyway.
In short I don't think just being white noise is sufficient, but I don't think it excluded a piece of itself.
in the early days of the do not call list, you could make quite a lot of money off of bad actors who ignored it. there was incentive to get your number on both the do not call list, and cold calling registries, and very quickly made malicious telemarketing untenable.