YouTube CEO calls EU’s proposed copyright regulation financially impossible
theverge.com
theverge.com
This is the entire platform vs publisher argument that tech companies have been hiding under for years. No one is responsible for content, and look what that’s gotten us. I would shed no tears if YT ended operation in the EU, where I live.
[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-prob...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-youtubes-far-right-radi...
Anyone who takes the AIN report seriously either hasn't verified the claims, or agrees that these people should be misrepresented and smeared.
Your view of YouTube is myopic, and ignores the immense cultural resource that exists there. You have no idea what would be lost if the EU chased it away, but you're willing to find out just to spite some people you resent; and you resent them based on false information you accepted because it fit your lens.
> No one is responsible for content, and look what that’s gotten us.
I suspect your views are coloured by the kind of things you watch. YouTube's algorithms have adapted to your viewing profile. Most of my recommendations are for science, math, and music pedagogy. From where I stand, YouTube has gotten us to a great place.
Not all video players are created equal. It's really hard to make a good video player. Case in point, look at all the crappy video players created by news sites that don't want to embed the YT player. Some can't even pause properly using the space bar or even let you select your preferred video quality.
I've watched plenty of Youtube, even the now cliched defenses of DIY home improvement stuff (sink de-clogging and drywall patching for me). But for as good and helpful as the pedagogical content might be there is still the other side that subsidizes all that, that fosters some crazed asshole shooting up a yoga studio and killing two people (YT ref'd in first paragraph)[1].
Is YouTube good? Sure. Is YouTube a societal net good? Absolutely not.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hot-yoga-shooting-tallahassee-f...
edit: spelling
Connect the dots for me. How is the existence of crazy people uploading videos to YouTube subsidizing educational content? Advertising is subsidizing educational content because that's how the money flows.
If you were to put everyone literally in a straitjacket, you'd cut down on the number of crazy people shooting up random strangers too. If you want to build such a society, I will help you build it, and help you move there. I'm staying out. I think freedom is a societal net good.
At the end of the day, I can't help but atleast partially agree with the reasoning behind the proposal; copyright is broken on the internet and it's nearly impossible to have it enforced on even larger sites if you're not one of the bigger players like music labels or hollywood studios or high profile game studios. And the current DMCA process deployed by most platforms is broken as well since all of the burden of proof lands on the creator with no repercussions for those who send them if it turns out to be fraudulent.
That needs to be fixed somehow, though the EU proposal is likely not a perfect approach.
EU's proposal would only end up making the already flawed ContentID system more aggressive. Heck, I'd go in the opposite direction. I would be in favour of penalizing those who falsely claim copyright for works that they don't own the rights to.
And yet there doesn't seem to be any punishment for that. I'd rather see the EU protect the rights of independent artists and regular citizens, than those of large corporations with a tendency to abuse their rights.
We've spent enormous resources creating a miraculous machine that does one thing: it makes unlimited copies of any information and distributes it all over the world, almost for free. But we can't use it to its full potential because we're stuck in a mindset that dates back centuries.
The good old "think of the children" argument used by authoritarian puritans.
> and how YT radicalizes viewers
As opposed to TV? Cable news? Newspapers? Or any other media?
> No one is responsible for content, and look what that’s gotten us.
Where has it gotten us?
> I would shed no tears if YT ended operation in the EU, where I live.
As an american, I feel the same way. Why don't you guys create your own youtube and stop trying to censor everyone else? Oh you can't because of the EU onerous regulations. How ironic.
I hate the pro-censorship lobby that has reared its ugly head on hacker news. Everyday, there is a barrage of comments sneakily supporting and defending censorship. Strange.
And your "sources" are highly biased at best and "fake news" at worst. It's like asking the telegram company what they think of telephones or the horse what they think of cars.
Crown molding was an amazing thing to learn from YouTube.
It's got plenty of entertaining stuff also, but the fact that YouTube allows anyone to share anything they know with anyone in the world in a simple, visual format is amazing. Other platforms can do that too, but YouTube is obviously the biggest player in the space right now and there is value in having everything together (see: the Walmart effect).
If you give your children unfettered access to youtube, that's your own fault as a parent. Youtube should be better about handling this but I think it's more of a communication issue.
Youtube is essentially a medium unto itself. A LOT of people use it so there's going to be good, and there's going to be bad. You can make the case of "radicalizing people" for just about any other medium that people consume.
In the end, it's basically what you make of it. You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel.
It isn't any different than the trash on tv or in pulp novels, except that individual people have more power and freedom to create things. If you think differently then you're just looking at older mediums with rose-tinted glasses.
Most of them have other revenue streams. Patreon, or being a division of PBS, or day jobs. I’m not worried about their survival.
One of those videos was “This Video Will Make You Angry”. Meme-based economics are not your friend.
For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone.
This Video Will Make You Angry was a good video. No idea why it specifically is being discussed here.
> For extremist or propagandist content, unfortunately both those things mean it will continue even without YouTube or a clone.
Yes, this has nothing to do with youtube. Again, you can propagate charged content via other mediums, especially on the internet.
If your primary concern is searchability, that is a surprise: YouTube is the second largest search engine after google.com, and I didn’t perceive any suggestion that the latter would be harmed by the copyright proposal. Even if it was, even rubbish search engines like iTunes’ Podcasts doesn’t stop me getting vastly more content than I have time for even if I took early retirement and listened at double speed.
Unfettered access, or maybe you turn your head for 5 minutes and your kid clicks a recommended video next to the one you set them up to watch and now mickey mouse is running around cutting everyone's head off oh god what is happeni...
Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either. There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively.
Why do you put so much trust in random recommended videos? What makes youtube so trustworthy? I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand this mindset at all.
By YouTube; the choice to make the recommendation and the choice to use an algorithm (both in general and the specific algorithm chosen) as part of the recommendation process are human decisions made yb YouTube employees in the course of their duties.
> Youtube does need to address these videos, but they're not omniscient gods either.
While the second half is true, it magnifies rather than mitigates the firall it does is call out the hubris and irresponsibility at YouTube behind the current status quo.
> There is too much content to humanly (or algorithmically, seemingly) to police effectively.
The quantity of content on YouTube, and the fact that it is not constrained by their ability to effectively police it is also a product of human decisions made by YouTube employees in the course of job duties, not some kind for natural occurrence with which YouTube is beset. And the fact that any part of that corpus is subject to recommendation algorithms without being policed is also such a human decision.
You are putting way too much trust in an opaque corporation to provide adequate content for young children. Just because it's "Youtube" does not guarantee anything. In fact it makes it much more dubious of a site, knowing exactly how youtube functions and how google manages it (very badly—at least for children's content).
No one is forcing you to put your kids in front of youtube. Please stop shifting blame when it's your fault for trusting random recommendations from an opaque, broken algorithm to filter endless random content, run by an uncaring corporation.
FWIW, my brother and I grew up on old tom & jerry cartoons. I think they're great, other than the few episodes with plainly racist stereotypes.
Stop right there. You have no idea what you're conflating here. If you have a strong stomach and no history of being abused, look into it. If you don't, please, read good accounts of people who did... or at least have no opinion about it, but not "meh, it's prolly fine". It's not.
I checked the wikipedia page as the other poster suggested and doesn't look that bad to me.
What do you feel is so much worse about them that the coyote being crushed under a huge rock?
It's hardly a full list of the themes that are repeated over and over and over again. It involves rape, pregnant infants, (there was one live action thing with Spiderman drugging and raping Elsa and her little child (played by an actual child, though with Elsagate you will also find plenty of adults in diapers or with pacifiers, or otherwise playing a child) as they are unconscious, then delivering both their babies in the form of plastic dolls, and Elsa and her child and Spiderman all being super happy and clapping in delight at the end), a LOT of kidnapping and bondage, children left behind, parents being evil for denying them sweets or staying up late or other things, parents getting hurt by their children or even murdered so children can get something they want, people generally murdering each other out of anger, including with automatic weapons, hands coming out of mirrors or mobile devices, children crying at a graveyard, hands coming out of graves, getting injections to get "made better" regardless of how silly that is (like eating a toy truck and getting an injection because of that), generally eating things and that having some kind of effect, a lot of binge eating, objects or people being crushed underfoot or under cars, a lot of leering at someone who is in danger, throwing people off roofs, jumping off roofs or committing suicide, a lot of confusion or anxiety about pregnancy (e.g. what gender it is, or whose kid is is), a lot of adultery, people forcing others to do things via hypnosis, drugs, violence or even poverty vs wealth, product pyramids, objects floating in swimming pools (god knows why), and of course the whole "color learning", "daddy finger" (jumping on the bed, wheels on the bus) stuff, the same song repeated 20 times while persons swap heads or colors.
All these themes repeat across various cartoon themes, live action and 3d animations, including Minecraft-style animations, and modded GTA 5.
Even all that isn't an exhaustive description, it's a joke compared to the content. But already I need to stop because hey, "who wants to read all that". Welcome to Elsagate, that's exactly what it is.
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
https://www.reddit.com/r/elsagate (as I said in another comment, there's a lot of crap there, but historically also posts that offer real information, compilations, reports of parents, and so on)
https://i.imgur.com/MziRRQw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/HfsdvWo.jpg
That's just thumbnails, very few in comparison to what is there, not the millions of hours of video, the countless demented 3D animations. Plenty of those involving syringes, too.
And that's not even taking the deceptive stuff into account, how they describe everything as family friendly (I remember channel names with phrases like "day care" in them), and all about learning, also offering unused social media accounts as contact address, to seem all above board to anyone who doesn't actually look. Just how the the vile content is often padded in a lot of harmless content, so parents that just take a short glance (or you) might not notice, and so on.
Who knows, if you enter "learn colors" or "minecraft monster school" and click around (and I don't just mean once or twice), you might find a lot that's currently being uploaded, or never even was deleted. I genuinely don't want to look because I've seen enough.
Among other things it's a DDOS attack on our attention, it exploits our desire to ignore such things, or rationalize them -- so that it looks fine at "first glance", or similar to something benign you already know and therefore benign, especially when watching zero of the X thousands of hours that make up the body of Elsagate; that's in the nature of the subject.
How do you propose to prevent the disasters described in this thread? YouTube have loose standards and virtually no demonstrated ability for enforcement. I'm specifically worried about giving locked down PC to kid with my best effort and still kids getting exposed to content that they are not yet ready to process. How does YouTube enables me to to make sure that kids are protected?
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/youtube-kids-adds-a-whitel...
I use OpenDNS and I have a few custom scripts so I can learn how often certain sites are being used. "Too much of a good thing is still too much."
I use history on my daughters YT account with a quick script that compares her computer's history on her computer. I don't run it all the time but I tell her trust but verify a lot. She is doing her school online and our biggest issue is she will watch videos and not do here work for a few hours.
It doesn't. I don't know why this expectation exists; youtube has not shown itself to be trustworthy in this sort of thing. Clearly an alternative needs to be used, like downloading youtube videos beforehand or using something else entirely.
YouTube Kids presents itself as specifically for kids. You don't expect weird fetish porn on daytime kids TV and it's completely reasonable to expect a similar level of moderation for an app that positions itself as an equivalent of that.
Blaming the parents really understates how much YouTube has fucked this one up. YT relies on a wonky algorithm and crowdsourcing to moderate its content at scale but their dirty little (open) secret is that this is error prone and exploitable. In a typical Google way they thought they could eliminate paid humans from the equation and still deliver quality -- they can't, and it's entirely their fault.
If a company misrepresents a product in a way that results it to cause harm when used exactly as advertised, it's the company's fault.
Not everyone wants their content censored by dogmatists.
YouTube Kids is from YouTube and is advertised as a kids-friendly filtered version of YouTube. YouTube Kids however failed to filter tons of disturbing and inappropriate content. The entire raison d'etre of YouTube Kids is to provide a filtered YouTube experience -- it failed hard.
EDIT: I can't even begin to comprehend how you think any of this is about "dogmatists censoring YouTube". YT Kids only providing kids-friendly content is no different from YT Music only providing music. It's not censorship, it's filtering. You can still go to YouTube proper and watch everything.
Your entire argument is the filtration they tried failed. We agree. Great.
My point is that the conclusion you draw is that everything needs more censorship. We disagree. I think parents need to take responsibility and not blame a company for providing a product they don't like.
Its the equivalent of censoring the radio because think of the children. It was a dumb idea then, it's a dumb idea now, because everyone knows that's not where it ends.
Not sure what part of that you disagree with.
That claim about their conclusion I do not understand, since I don't see where they are saying anything like that.
My argument is that more censorship won't help, because not everyone agrees on what is, and is not, kid friendly. So the entire enterprise is doomed to failure. The only solution I see is parents taking responsibility.
> This is basically the all-American argument of "sure, the advertising is a complete lie but it's the consumer's fault for being gullible".
No, it's your fault for believing advertising in the first place. I only judge youtube through my personal knowledge and experience of using it for the last 6+ years.
Just because someone, or a PR team, says "it's for kids!" does NOT mean it's quality programming or acceptable content. That is your responsibility to determine, as a parent or guardian. Do not blame youtube when you know that it is a website where anyone can upload anything. And it's run by a company that thinks ML algorithms can filter videos adequately.
No, this is lazy parenting, just blindly trusting a corporation to actually do things right, when they're not even regulated adequately.
Nothing is stopping you from downloading videos beforehand, or finding better content platforms or content producers, like PBS. This is you throwing up your hands in the air and wanting to shift blame to a corporation when you didn't take the time or effort to screen things before putting your kids in front of a screen + opaque algorithm.
This would allow a marketplace of editors. Someone who was making, for example, cooking videos, probably wouldn't have a couple of million dollars sitting around. Instead, their videos would be syndicated through an editor. An editor could make their own decisions on revenue share (if any at all) based on their own judgements of legal risk vs revenue opportunity. This could mean live streamers all have to go in to a closely monitored studio instead of doing it from home.
In a way this is similar to how the old network TV or print periodical marketplace worked, but adapted for the internet. Network TV had to pay big fines if someone said fuck or a nipple was broadcast live. Thus, they assumed legal liability for their guests behavior.
This still doesn't solve the core issue that the Youtube CEO described, which is when a bunch of people claim copyright on the same video. Solving that probably requires clawback provisions over lost revenue from making fake claims.
I don't think this approach would be ok in the United States, but it seems reasonable for the EU, China, and so on.
That cannout outweigh Elsagate stuff. Educational content could be on smaller platforms, and there even could be platforms to find it on those smaller platforms.
> In the end, it's basically what you make of it.
No, it's thousands of channels and hundreds thousands of videos designed to mentally abuse children, and for months and months, while parents begged YouTube to even take notice, autoplay beelined to this stuff from cartoons. That's what you get from algorithms designed to maximize "engagement".
> You can find a wealth of diverse channels to watch and grow from, or you can watch drivel.
We're talking about things aimed at toddlers. Oh, and initially also YouTube for Kids. When you talk about "unfettered access" and simply blame it on parents, it just shows you are downplaying something you might not even have looked into.
Apart from the Elsagate subreddit, which has a lot of crap but also important posts buried among it, you probably can still enter "learn colors" or "Minecraft Monster School" or a lot of other things into YouTube, and maybe click on some related videos of videos in the search results. I promise, it won't take long to find something that can ruin your day.
I still blame the parents, especially after Elsagate. It takes some mental gymnastics to allow children to watch random videos on a site where anyone can upload anything, and a site run by a company that thinks algorithms can work by themselves to filter content correctly. There are other platforms that have content for kids. Youtube never was a correct option, unless you yourself download videos beforehand to ensure their quality.
Please don't blindly trust things just because they say "it's aimed at children". Its still up to you, the parent/guardian, to actually make sure that it's acceptable content. Trusting an internet titan of a company to actually care or get it right is an enormously stupid idea, in my opinion.
Heck, even the "trash pop" part of YouTube (e.g. drama channels) don't seem to primarily rely on ad revenue anymore. And most of the gaming channels seem to actually prefer Twitch (but either want to editorialise their content rather than upload raw streams or only still use YT because they want a more diversified revenue stream).
YouTube's initial appeal was that it was a "marketplace of ideas" and everybody could upload videos of pretty much anything and build an audience and (eventually) earn a few bucks from advertising. Recently that marketplace has increasingly shifted to promote what's already popular and YouTube has actively brought in established content producers from TV while also algorithmically demonetizing "lesser" channels (note: this doesn't mean less-viewed channels or channels with fewer subscribers) with little to no means of appeal. The gold rush when it was actually financially viable to make a living off the ad revenue and fund your video production are long gone for the vast majority of creators.
What makes it different is a recommendation engine that is deliberately designed to maximize the amount of viewing time and has no moral compass about doing so.
When a kid finishes reading Ranger Rick magazine, nothing prompts them to read anything else except their own interests and the pile of books their parents have purposefully made available to them. You don't have strangers popping in the window, tempting them to read something nasty, and if you do, you get that person arrested.
Youtube bascially played a major role in democratizing creation of content :educational, creative etc. And by the way, it's still not clear how much profit YT makes. The infra costs etc are huge. It's Google's $$$ which subsidizes YT content. personally, when I see the amount of value I am deriving, I think I owe a decent amount of money to YT. I am a student right now, but will start giving creators money asap.
Of course, it would have been better if Youtube had started their Donate option sooner. I think they have failed to creatively monetize users and compensate creators. (i know about ads, not creative,but it works)
There's an election in May. Maybe if we threaten to vote out everybody who supported this, they may change their opinion. It's going to be hard to mobilize that many people about such a complex issue, though.
Sadly, I'm unable to find a good overview of which parties or MEPs supported this and which didn't.
I use YouTube all the time to learn to do things around the house. My wife and I recently completed a bathroom renovation and the only thing we didn't do ourselves was the plumbing, including completely replacing the tile and patching the walls. It looks fabulous.
Sure, I could probably have eventually found that information elsewhere, but it was almost all on YouTube and very easy to find. I looked up multiple videos on each task and figured out what the best advice was and even got to see it done multiple ways.
Losing YouTube at this point would be a huge loss.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...
This is a general problem with many public efforts. Reality is that the only way to make everyone equal is to make everyone equally miserable. And this is generally what we do.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill...
That is because you haven’t watched grubby playing Warcraft 3!
If YouTube is actually lobbying against this both in public and in private, then I would personally consider that extremely strong evidence this is really bad. However, I have no inside info on their private position.
Profitability and growth aren't dependent on market dominance, even in tech.
Vimeo aims for $100mil this year: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac...
YouTube Could be a $15 billion business this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a...
Even in your article it talks about how Youtube isn't exactly profitable, and is dragging down Google's average CPC for the business.
"The market" is a statement about demand, not supply. The market can still shrink if the legislation goes through, because the legislation can have secondary effects that cause people to be less interested in consuming content on a tube-style platform.
I think you'd be surprised at the reach of educational resources like Khan Academy and MIT's Open Courseware. These things aren't 'necessities' only if you don't consider it important to educate yourself.
Or in this case, 80% of a large market more than 100% of a small one.
If the proposed law actually is too expensive for them, I could see them attempting to weaken it to a sweet spot where it's affordable for them, but expensive enough to still keep others out of the market.
(Curious. Really.)
A guaranteed adserv on every CDN delivery (and again over a certain number of minutes) is more than the content and serve cost. CPMs for video are net 3$, at least. I don't know who's doing the math, but a link would be interesting with someone demonstrating how they are upside down.
Netflix might serve more gigabytes to users, but netflix's content library is tiny in comparison, so edge caches have a near 100% hit rate keeping infrastructure costs a fraction of youtube's costs.
Edit--Found this quote from an article[0] written in 2013, so I'm sure it's much larger now. Also, the Open Connect Appliances[1] have about 240TB capacity each, but they just tail the current popular content.
The master Neflix catalog takes up about 3.14 petabytes of cloud storage space, which is converted and compressed down to about 2.75 petabytes, consisting of 100 different versions suitable for watching on more than 1000 different devices.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/how-netflix-makes-3-14-petabytes-of-vide...
Only if you assume YouTube's business model is the only feasible one. You could have a video hosting service that operates like a traditional web-host, letting you pay a standard rate or fee to host and list your content rather than relying on ad revenue and algorithmic curation.
Twitch has an ad driven model where the content creators get paid based on subscription counts rather than data harvesting. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a big data harvesting component as well).
Just a note though, the video example on the homepage comparing YouTube with SmartVideo (SpaceX launch). I can see compression artifacts on the Smart Video. If I'm honest, that really put me off which obviously isn't your intention.
So wouldn't Twitch be liable for that content under this proposed copyright thing?
With the proposed law, the right holders can sue Twitch for hosting that video, unless Twitch ensured they have permission from said right holders to host that video.
If anything, these companies probably welcomed these regulations and now have more power over politicians who have used up much political capital in getting this done. It's unlikely that any corrective actions will be taken anytime soon.
Oh, they'll find things. There are already active formal investigations by GDPR authorities in various countries against Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The companies do like GDPR, as the fines will be nothing more than a small tax on their massive revenue. It's a win for both the companies and the politicians: the companies get a monopoly in exchange for a small tax in the form of fines, revenue hungry EU nations get multi-billion dollar windfalls, and EU politicians get to look like defenders of the people who will be tough on US companies. Everybody wins, except for would-be competitors and the consumers that don't get any choices about the services they use.
But of course, most adtech services do make use of a multitude of private data for profit, and that's why they are having a hard time.
The company I work for (Teachable) is a specialized site builder for course content. We make all of our revenue from people either paying us directly for a plan, or transaction fees on people buying from our customers, no ads or data selling. Nevertheless, complying with GDPR still took well over a month of some of our best engineers time. Even if you don't sell data, the odds you had a plan prior to GPDR for how to handle right to be forgotten - how do you delete PII (which is defined broadly, including ip addresses) from db backups without ruining their integrity? If you use something with an immutable log, like Kafka, how do you remove the data there? Etc, etc
1 - google is the only company (bing to a much much lesser extent) with access to primary search data. If you believe that the original pagerank algorithm is too easy to fool and that it has been massively deprioritized in favor of gathering intent data created by user actions on google, this makes them a natural monopoly. Any other attempt to gather the data to make intent targeting work will be hindered by the lack of consumer touch points.
2 - see consumer touch points above -- very few companies have them. Eg the new eprivacy law (depending on which draft -- there are conflicts between Council / Commission / Parliament), will be a virtual monopoly guarantee for FB / Google / yahoo. One of the features is that company 1 can't ask for consent on behalf of company 2, so, again, only companies with an end-user touch point can get legitimate consent. Thus all 3rd party adtech dies. This seems in direct conflict with pro-competition rules in the EU.
3 - Adsense also becomes much harder to compete against. Google does intent extraction -- buttressed by the data from search -- better than anyone else. You can, of course, attempt to compete algorithmically, but you lack the data.
4 - GA allows to extract behavior post click from within the site. No one else has this. You don't even really need personal data for this to be amazingly useful; merely aggregate is very powerful.
Meanwhile, all other marketing companies are further blocked from interacting with users because of the lack of consent and direct relationships. This makes the existing monopolies even stronger, and makes it much harder for newer companies to even attempt to compete.
I get that it would massively reduce the 'new content stream' but for their commercial clients things wouldn't change all that much. It would also eliminate unlawful video completely since everything would be pre-screened.
They, YouTube, keep mentioning science videos and such but I can't work out what they mean, why would that be any more blocked than cat videos, or videos of people falling over, or whatever else YouTube is hosting -- is quality content somehow more at risk or is that just YouTube's attempt to spin/market their opposition?
This means you not only need a ContentID system in the first place, you also need to be ready to handle the financial & legal consequences of inevitably not being perfect.
They mean then they can't afford the system if their anticipated penalties are imposed && if they fail to catch unlicensed works && are subsequently sued successfully for large amounts && can't recover those costs from the uploader.
How many microseconds would it be after such a regulation passed that media mega corps would pull the trigger and kill the goose-that-laid-the-golden-eggs.
>you not only need a ContentID system //
How does the Directive specify that, I'm afraid I haven't read it yet.
> (a) it demonstrates that it has made best efforts to prevent the availability of specific works or other subject matter by implementing effective and proportionate measures, in accordance with paragraph 5, to prevent the availability on its services of the specific works or other subject matter identified by rightholders and for which the rightholders have provided the service with relevant and necessary information for the application of these measures;
So basically if the rightsholders can convince the courts that they could have done more to proactively prevent copyright infringement, they're liable.
I am not particularly big on the overreach our copyright system has. Chasing down people supporting orphaned works or trying to fix stuff for personal use, or whatever else is not cool, and our copyright system has a lot of problems, mostly because of the House of Mouse.
But things like posting current, paid content does hurt the businesses that create that content, and short-term, relevant copyright is there for a reason, and beneficial. Without some form of copyright, the movie and TV industry would not exist. And YouTube channels commonly post full episodes of Game of Thrones or Last Week Tonight the same day of, and often go unchecked for months or years before YouTube takes action.
We don’t actually know if that is true. (Or if it would be a bad thing, heh)
Basically today you have two models: paid content and ads. Without copyright there would be only one model.
You also have publicly funded television. There is no reason you couldn't also have crowdfunded television. Budgets would be much lower, in all likelihood, but something would be there.
It's actually hard to discuss counterfactuals like this because there is such a strong bias towards assuming that the world we got is the world we would/should have wanted. If things went differently creative outlets might have been different and our preferences would have been shaped differently.
Sort of. The accounting is complicated but public funding is something like 20% of PBS and local station revenue as I understand it. Most of it is membership, foundations, etc. So most of public TV already is crowdfunded.
For example, once upon a time it was fine to have people in all-black leotards walking around a stage production picking people up and carrying things around to simulate poltergeists. People were fine just ignoring them. Now people expect wirework in stage production to maintain the same level of suspension of disbelief. It's just about what you're used to.
The value of the medium of video is such that it would have been used no matter what type of copyright exists and people would have found ways to make money in that industry.
A different form of copyright or a complete lack of copyright would certainly result is a significantly different move and TV industry that produced different types of content, but it would almost definitely still exist.
Edit: Two clear examples of types of business models that are much less reliant on copyright are BBC and PBS.
The general sense I get is that people are completely indifferent (at best) to the interests of creators. This leads, unfortunately, to rather shallow discussions. You may, for example, see complaints about "artificial scarcity", and I actually share their opinion that the deadweight losses of copyright are rather terrible.
What you won't see is any appreciation or consideration or even interest in the reason for the existence of copyright, except for lazy clichés of all politicians being corrupt.
That's a shame, because it precludes this community (and most of the wider tech community) from being a meaningful source of improvements. It also renders its opposition somewhat meaningless, because reasonable people who may be open to arguments tend to stop listening when they encounter the first platitude.
I think if people were less entrenched in this mindset, you'd see far more ideas for better solutions being generated in the comment. Just imagine a threat like this, but with an obtrusive law trying to prevent, say, lawnmower-related accidental deaths: You'd see a litany of ideas, some of which may actually not involve the blockchain.
One example very close to this copyright law is, well, this copyright law's other well-known provision establishing a new sort of IP for news publishers. It's similarly broad, and full of practical difficulties. But when/if it becomes actual law, the tech community will shoulder (part of) the blame for it. Because over the last decade or so, it has watched, or even cheered, the destruction of journalism. The early 2000s' glee of a future of independent bloggers replacing professional journalism has thankfully passed because nobody can still cling to that fantasy with straight face, except Clay Sharky (or whatever his name is; the self-appointed expert that looks like Tom Hanks). Today most seem to have adopted the alt-right's propaganda against "mainstream media", or at least lost interest in anything beyond oneself's short-term comfort.
Case in point: I think you could make an ad blocker that blocks 100% of ads that are annoying, dangerous, or tracking you, yet let unobtrusive ads pass. Something like that would likely block maybe 20% of ads, leaving 80% (and journalism's business model) intact while almost completely giving the users what they want. But the tech community sees no possible value in such a compromise, and ad blockers singularly compete on their ability to hurt creators (see, for example, the ad blocker that proudly proclaimed they would remove affiliate codes from amazon links: absolutely no difference for the reader, except possibly the joy of seeing others suffer).
It's quite obvious that the "other side" of the copyright debate isn't blameless. Perpetual extensions of copyright are a travesty, and so is the loss of appreciation of the value of "fair use". Personally, I believe copyright of maybe 5 years on movies, 10 on music, and two days on newspapers would, once again, deliver 80% of the upside (incentive to create) while also activating the potential of re-use, and generally making these works available for a far larger audience.
Sure you will. In the US, at least, copyright exists for the sole stated purpose of encouraging the production of more works by temporarily granting some exclusive rights over those works. In other words, the public wants both more works and a rich public domain; that's a tradeoff. Now, how much exclusivity, for how long, do you need to grant to generate more than enough revenue to justify almost any work ever produced? What incremental additional works will be produced by the umpteenth new expansion of copyright?
As you said: > Personally, I believe copyright of maybe 5 years on movies, 10 on music
If that, yes. And no more than 5 years on software, either, possibly less.
> I think if people were less entrenched in this mindset, you'd see far more ideas for better solutions being generated in the comment.
I've seen many good ideas, not least of which: make copyright shorter (5-10 years), and permit all non-commercial usage from day 1, limiting only commercial use for that duration. The problem is not in having ideas, it's in getting those ideas adopted.
> Case in point: I think you could make an ad blocker that blocks 100% of ads that are annoying, dangerous, or tracking you, yet let unobtrusive ads pass. Something like that would likely block maybe 20% of ads
You have a very different conception of what "annoying" means than many users of adblockers.
If my adblocker is blocking less than 100% of ads, it has a bug and will be fixed or replaced.
These experts of yours must be illiterate, because the law couldn't be clearer. Quote:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers [obscene/harassing/otherwise objectionable/etc.]
> Many, who are experts on the law
Name one!
Here's a pretty good summary how the provision in question came about as a response to exactly your 30-year-old flawed reasoning. Plus the site design even fits with how 90s retro this debate is: http://www.cybertelecom.org/cda/samaritan.htm
And even newspapers use the latter approach for some things. I doubt the New York Times wants to be held responsible if someone posts a link to pirated content in an article comment, for instance.
YouTube tries to automate curation with the use of algorithms that cater content to who they think their visitor is.
That doesn't have any effect on which videos they're hosting. All the ones that aren't featured are still there. It's not as if Hollywood would be satisfied for YouTube to be hosting infringing content just because it wasn't featured.
It's not the kind of curation we're talking about, no. We're talking about whether it's allowed (or at least publicly visible) on their website at all, not what is shown on the front page to each user.
[0]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/05/19/1-percent-youtub...
Should we allow companies to skip out on laws just because they scaled their business up?
This board is usually in agreement that patents that are effectively of the pattern of "were doing something that's been done before, but it's on the internet so it's different now" are complete bullshit.
Why are we giving a pass to internet based companies when it comes to copyright, just because they are making a lot of money?
If Youtube profits directly from whatever they are hosting it is not that farfetched to say that they might also be liable for what is shown
If it's Youtube's suggestions that are the problem, I suppose Youtube could be more careful in what content they suggest for you without banning other content to exist. It's just going to be harder to stumble upon when it's not what you're looking for.
That distinction is no solace if your copyright is being violated or you are being defamed in an unaddressable way.
Then send an individual takedown notice, or file a defamation lawsuit. Why should you get a special process that bypasses the legal system?
Ok. So how is copyright policing scalable? I argue that a general copyright filter is much harder than a copyright filter targeting your specific works.
Also, the big copyright holders have automated this process, unless you think they employ thousands of people to send individual take-down notices?
> People can upload illegal content faster than lawyers can issue takedown notices for them.
Why is a massive copyright-owning organization's failure to scale a problem that anyone else should help with?
I'm aware of the original lawsuits against YouTube to that effect, and the arguments are just as wrong now as they were then.
(Also, I fully believe that filing an incorrect takedown notice should have legal repercussions, which today it never seems to.)
Filing suit against the publisher is not bypassing the legal system, it is addressing the one that causes harm.
I am a fan of the DMCA approach for this problem, but saying that Youtube's business model doesn't work with this rule is... kinda the point? It defnitely would be the point for sites like Megaupload
Many people here seem to take the notion of a content loss in Europe as bad for granted. I see it as quite positive. If we can replace generic, low quality content with more space for people who do not just ride on copyright but provide genuinely new content, I would consider this to be very positive. Maybe this opens up a space to have more European content on Youtube instead of just having the same generic content dominate the website that is subject to these copyright battles.
The incentive for Youtube is clear, they want to make as much money and generate as much content as possible, with little attention paid to the fact whether the content is educational, regionally relevant, authentic, or original. It seems obvious to me that a Youtube that might be smaller, less profit or attention oriented, and less commercialized is not in their interest.
The one exception I would make here is scientific or academic content, which should be granted strong protections.
When you put up guardrails (so many that people can't even keep up to date with what the automated system detects), that's exactly what you get. The words and images of countless properties would have to be filtered and pulled.
Regardless of what we would hope to happen, people simply ride whatever bland waves generate the most views. This is partly why we have streams of people eating and such, although the "newsy" channels would be hamstrung by this, you can imagine even the "food" streams would be impacted if they dared to say or show the icon of the food they are eating!
This is the technological culmination of capitalistic corruption of freedom vis a vis intellectual property.
So what's wrong with creating a new space for savvy internet users who appreciate the freedom of a decentralized web?
And professional systems are simple things too like web hosting, on top of content creation.
Really, I just want to see the internet of the early days recreated. I doubt it's ever going to happen, though.
because detecting nudity is a much much easier problem.
Tortuous not criminal. It's not an offense against people in general it's an offense against the creator to not seek their license to duplicate or modify the work. Why is it an offense, because we the demos (or our predecessors) have supposedly agreed to grant that right in exchange for works eventually entering the public domain.
This deal has been supremely perverted by lengthening copyright terms in the face of ever lower costs of publication and dissemination. _That_ is criminal.
[Aside: what's the Fair Use Act you mention? The only USC of that name I know of wasn't passed.]
Yes, there is, the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000.
Article 13 of the new proposed regulations specifically strips the "mere conduit" regulations of that directive.
Many want these behemoths to get less power but these EU guys give them more.
Now this.
One answer it to ghettoise Europe and block them from receiving your content. For one thing that would get rid of those stupid "we use cookies things".
Absolutely infuriating. Most every site uses cookies, I know that, I don't need to be told that, and your average user doesn't even care.
The problem is that the law is not being enforced.
And to some extent, my browser already does that: I refuse third-party cookies. Only now I get popups telling me to accept third-party cookies because otherwise they won't be able to remember my choice to reject their cookies.
It's a mess. I want smarter browsers that give me more control over this stuff.
However I have seen plenty of shows get constantly reuploaded with new accounts. They usually crop or put some padding animation etc to get through content ID. With HBO' content you can search for example John Oliver's non free segments which are not available on the official channel
First result for "HBO movie".
My guess is that those companies didn't even bother to submit them to Content-ID, considering that Google had no problem detecting a bunch of copyright songs in those movies, for which they're paying royalties.
If submitting stuff to Content-ID is the "challenge" that alanlamm was talking about, then fine, color me unconcerned.
Another Brazilian feature film about 6yo - 3.4M views on a profile whose name translates to “watch films online”, with a FOX intro at the beginning. https://youtu.be/r8KGMyfXXHo
1h old Showtime comedy special taken from TV, 1M views - https://youtu.be/Wo27OxaEB3w
If this is above board, what am I missing?
What stops YouTube from doing cursory scans and then relying on a user agreement to protect themselves from liabilities, like "you agree to pay to us sums sufficient to cover all legal costs including any copyright charges, fines, etc., arising as a result of uploading this work"??
However, the Wikipedia page on the Directive [1] mentions that Art.13 :
>"extends any licenses granted to content hosts to their users, as long as those users are not acting "on a commercial basis".
That would be massive as videos uploaded to YouTube would then be able to be downloaded, and even shared, as works for [personal] non-commercial use. This would be a huge change in favour of the people and against copyright rights holders -- perhaps Wikipedia editors misinterpreted?
The article mentions the "Fair Use Act", what's that a reference too? The para it's in is about EU, and the USA Fair Use Act never survived. We don't have a Fair Use in Europe.
It would really help to know which companies are trying to push this and what specifically they're trying to protect from??
---
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
There was a Hacker News thread about a new research paper that showed that GDPR is hurting European investment, and there were plenty of Europeans in that thread saying "Good, stop using my data." Like really? Wouldn't it be better to stop data usage without hurting investment? It's such a self own.
On which site? HN? Many Europeans here are well aware this will mostly hurt smaller sites and independent content creators. Many MEPs seem to hope that European newspapers will get some of Google's money, but I honestly don't see how that's going to happen.
GDPR is a different issue. It's less unreasonable and better intentioned, but the implementation is incredibly annoying. I'd rather see browsers handle this for me in a way I can easily control.
EU data protection laws are excellent. Far better than those of the US, which do pretty much the complete opposite.
I'm surprised Google News doesn't stick ads on news results and do some sort of 70/30 profit sharing like YouTube. That's the best way for newspapers to profit from a Google Listing. Instead Google News sidesteps copyright issues by not monetizing news results at all.
>EU data protection laws are excellent. Far better than those of the US, which do pretty much the complete opposite
Forget laws. Are things better in practice? Because people tend to get enamoured with regulations because they sound great (I mean, who doesn't want low emission, high efficiency cars in 5 years) that are disconnected with reality.
Even in 2018 it seems that Youtube is being funded by the "Napster model" of allowing de facto circumvention of copyright law.
Or, put another way, Youtube is profitable mainly because of vastly imperfect enforcement of laws.
Because the costs are determined not by the number of true positives, but by the degree of difficulty in identifying those true positives with both high precision and high recall, and by the level of risk that false negatives provide.
This is why SESTA forced Craigslist to shut down their personals section in the US. No, the overwhelming majority of posts were not by sex workers, but the liability that SESTA imposed was so high that there was no way for them to operate it in a manner that wouldn't expose them to massive legal risk.
And ContentID is useless because it's full of false positives and false negatives, so it only creates problems for honest customers without even removing all of the infringing material.
Following the law being the cost of following up on the copyright owners of every piece of content before allowing it to be viewed, unlike now where they let it upload and only take action if there is an infringement reported.
Call it the "Uber" model.
That’s not my experience. Name me a non-obscure movie, show, or song and I’ll bet I find it on YouTube. Except of course YouTube’s paid content...good luck finding a pirate version of say YouTube original series Kobra Kai, They seemed to have figured out a way to police their own content without issue.
With songs, at least, most of the time it's posted there by Vevo, so the recording industry put it there themselves. It's unlikely to be a big driver of their traffic or revenue. The incentives aren't even there, they're so quick to demonetize or send DMCA takedowns that anything people are likely to search for are at high risk of being taken down. You really only see the flowering of pirated content in the early days after live events, like when a new movie trailer drops.
Heavily distorted to the point that you wouldn't really want to watch it in that format if you had any alternative.
Sure: Kill Bill (vol 1).
Not quite the full movie, but a substantial portion and its certainly not being used under fair use doctrine like using these clips as examples to discuss film techniques or a parody. This took all of 5 seconds to find copyrighted content on youtube
Personally I wouldn't actually care about stuff like this, and accept the DMCA safe harbor as a valid argument to protect YouTube and similar sites. However, all of them have started to, or already been deep into, do content curation. Once you take an active role in the content available on your service I dont think you should be able to argue that you can't help what users upload. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too
And how do you know exactly these short clips aren't just allowed and monetized by the copyright owners?
> Personally I wouldn't actually care about stuff like this, and accept the DMCA safe harbor as a valid argument to protect YouTube and similar sites. However, all of them have started to, or already been deep into, do content curation. Once you take an active role in the content available on your service I dont think you should be able to argue that you can't help what users upload. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too
It's exactly what they are doing now, it's called ContentID and it sucks (as expected).
All you've proven is that detecting copyright infringement is actually hard and not obvious as people here are claiming.
Yes, there are illegally pirated scenes and soundtracks, but you're assuming that companies actually wish to get them off, when in reality they upload it themselves (see the Movieclips account, which is owned by Fandango, which is itself owned by NBC and Warner). Pirated scenes and sountracks are ads for the movies, it's not in their interest to take them down.
I agree that this criticism is about five years out of date. When I was younger, I used to happily go to Youtube to watch free versions of TV shows and cartoons. However, they've gradually become good enough at enforcing copyright that while you can absolutely still find anything you like on there, the degree to which it must be munged to escape the copyright filters means it's utterly unwatchable. It's actually really annoying, because you can no longer even find short clips of particular moments reliably, as they've often been taken down.
It's impossible to say until after someone claims a copyright violation, at which point it might already be too late.
To put it another way - why aren't the rights holders even attempting to provide their content in the way their audience wants it? Even if they were failing to compete it would go a long way to strengthening their claims that YouTube is abusing the system.
If enforcement became perfect overnight I don't doubt there would be nothing learnt and nothing would change.
The problem is copyright law allows for copyright of every different aspect of a performance, recording, composition, rendition, video, audio, translation, etc, all to be owned by different people/groups/organizations (and it's different for TV/Radio, even for the same audio recording too).
The glaring deficiency is the copyright system is held together by ducttape and gum, and was never built for a system that allowed perfect reproductions to be transmitted instantaneously. It was designed for selling sheet music to 18th century orchestras.
Define that because I feel like everyone who complains about this is just mad they cannot pay netflix prices and get ad-free content to everything everyone has ever produced. News flash: that content costs a lot of money to product and at least in the US, I don't know of any content I have ever been interested in consuming that wasn't available for rent/buying on places like itunes. Is it more expensive than netflix, yes, but that's because it costs a lot to make. I bet I could make and license a streaming service that had all content ever produced but you would then complain about how it would cost like $200 a month to afford all of those licenses.
Piracy is rampant in Europe. Ironic, considering that EU seems to be up in arms about it:
https://torrentfreak.com/europe-has-the-highest-online-pirac...
(anecdotally, none of the videos i watched last month had anything to do with pirated content. those days gone)
Sitcoms like Big Bang theory... I'm not sure if they're worth paying for for a lot of people, but it'll take a long time before you can watch it for free (well, except for the advertisements) outside the USA.
Even worse, no individual can take on the risk of self hosting their own videos.
> Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell recently became the number one channel in Germany by creating videos that help others fall in love with science.
If the number one channel in Germany is in English, then maybe YouTube still has some more fundamental challenges to overcome in Europe.
As an American who lived in Germany decades ago, this was actually a substantial barrier to me improving my German. It was usually easier for them to converse in English than for me to converse in German, they jumped at the chance to practice their English with a native speaker and it made it difficult for me to find opportunities to practice my German.
"bilingual" is someone who speaks two languages, "trilingual" is someone who speaks three languages. What do you call someone who can only speak one language? An American.
I know a little German and a little French. I know a smattering of Spanish and Russian. I wanted to be fluent in all of those. I fell far short of fluency.
I live in a foreign country and this rings true for me as well. It's just so much easier to use English.
And this isn't even a country where 'English education' is something that is amazing (Thailand).
Though I wouldn't be surprised if more people watched the English version because so many people in Germany speak fine English.
The original text linked to the English version with its 7M subscribers. The German one has 300k.
Now I’ll wonder about YouTube analytics too, and what being “number one channel in Germany” really means...
Similar to this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46030112.
I think it is a fair argument on its own, but I would assume that the vast majority of Swedish singers actually sing in their native tongue (with the same going for any country). In addition, I also have the feeling that many don't actually care enough to become worldwide stars.
You underestimate the amount of people who speak english in germany/europe. The #1 youtuber in the world is a swede after all.
Also, it's not just youtube. Gaming is the same way. Lots of young gamers in europe can communicate in english.
There is a reason why english is lingua franca.
Do they though? Other people are saying that also, but the evidence I've seen isn't very good.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mythbusters+ful...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=simpsons+full+e...
With the exception of the last one, which has paid options, all of those do not have permission.
They are guided by abstract nonsense instead of careful judgements based on the scientific method (measure, make and test your hypothesis).
It was supposed to be a choice, not just "I accept". I rather type out this comment than take the 10 seconds to open this article in an unmodified browser.
What a depressing statement. So there's no value in having a diversity of choice, points of view, taste, etc? Or in allowing anyone to share what they've made, without gatekeepers? Do you only listen to the top handful of musicians, or read the top handful of books? Hell, HN is not in the top handful of sites with the vast majority of revenue and views, does that mean it has no value?
I'd say it's actually the only value it has; it's what distinguishes it from TV, which is otherwise a better system in other ways.
Every channel started with 0 subscribers once and were part of that "400 hours of video uploaded every minute".
What did they think would happen when they started making editorial decisions about what content to show and what to ban or at least bury?
They made their bed, let them lie in it.
Do you also believe that when you, just once, move a large branch that had fallen from a tree you suddenly become responsible for the safety of all the city's sidewalks?
Making editorial decisions like that does give lawmakers leverage to push for more responsibility.
Live by the pen, die by the pen.
Hopefully this legislation will lead to re-decentralization of media distribution, or at least a move away from surveillance-capitalism business models like YouTube’s.
To the extent that's true, that says a lot more about how far the office of President has fallen than anything else.
In a sane world, there would be bipartisan consensus that many of the views Trump expresses should rightfully be condemned:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/stephen-f-hayes/donald-trump-...
> The degree of this normalization is stunning. The Republican nominee for president made comments Friday that one might expect from a patient in a mental institution, the kind of stuff you might read on blog with really small print and pictures of UFOs. And yet his remarks barely register as news. There are no condemnations from fellow Republicans. His supporters shrug them off as Trump being Trump.
As for the role of content platforms, others have already explained the difference between a journalistic publisher and a mere content filter better than I can, so I won't bother to repeat it here.
Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I do not believe most of the large minority of Americans that voted for Trump did so because he espouses hate and bigotry, but rather despite it. I think many conservatives who voted for Trump overlooked his rhetoric due to partisan fervor or because they were convinced Clinton was worse, rightly or wrongly. I do not believe the alt-right and unabashed racists are a "large percentage of the American population" or that public platforms need accept their hateful views.
I do believe conservative voices deserve to be heard, whether I agree with them or not. But it would be doing principled conservatives a disservice to conflate them with Trumpists and the so-called alt-right. I understand there may be concern about where to draw the line, but I think any government regulation your "bi-partisan group" produces is more likely to do harm than good in the current political context.
The term "hate speech" is extremely subjective, as are the terms "hate" and "bigotry" as they are used today. If you take a person on the religious right, they will use the terms such as "heathen", "sinner", "obscene" and "degenerate" to describe many alternative lifestyles, also subjective terms. I've heard some on the right say they want to think that many on the left do not really feel these lifestyles are OK etc..
The reality is that that the person on the far right, and the person on the far left, no matter how tolerant they may feel they are, will ultimately be biased towards their own morals when dealing with subjective matters. They may feel they are doing the right moral thing, yet the person from the other side may fervently disagree. The reality is that there is an equal amount of sin on both sides which is why I want neither of them being the sole arbiter of the content I see.
This is why the checks and balances are so important. But when you have a pseudo monopoly, for profit corporation such as YouTube, with a predominately left leaning set of values running the show we no longer have that. More importantly there is an argument to be made that the content filtering as is being done today is not what was intended in the current legislation and clarification via legal precedent and/or revised legislation is overdue.
Not that they're wrong as such but nobody knows the truth, no one can get to the bottom of this. There's infinite opinions at play here.
Personally, I think going after the internet in general for file sharing (which you can consider Youtube, videos are just files) is completely insane and I like the approach TBP took which is basically to say "fuck off, come back when you're actually serious"
There are more than 400 hours of video uploaded every
minute to the platform, and putting the onus of
responsibility on platforms like YouTube to catch every
video isn’t fair, according to Wojcicki.
Where an unprivileged worker class has to go through hours and hours of video material of the upper societal levels in order to make sure that they satisfy the grotesque utopian "always happy no conflict" image of an all seeing censor, including the denial of their own existence.
I don’t have a Glassdoor account to confirm what this is saying but I think you’ll find at least circumstantial evidence here if you can view it. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-Data-Associate-Revi...
[0]:Infantry-equivalent numbers are used.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderat...
One might get someone unemployed and with no other choice to do it for a while, until another job comes by, but I don't really think anyone wants to do this for a living.
They could catch the obvious stuff like people uploading Hollywood videos, but the reality is that humans will let tons of stuff through, and also accidentally block stuff that should have been allowed.
There's far more copyrighted content than a human can even view or listen to in a lifetime. There's just no way for a human to know what's in violation and what isn't.
People can host their own stuff. Simple. Don't host content you don't know the origin of and can't document you've got the right to do so.
How exactly would that solve the problem? Is there a step 2 where they also cut all the cables into and out of Europe?
Who are you going to hire who can watch a video and instantly know every copyrighted piece used to produce it, judge whether or not the piece is one or another sort of "fair use" correctly/consistently etc., and be correct enough that YouTube feels safe taking on the corporate liability?
Getting this right is more than just "a human views the video once". Sure, there's some obvious piracy, but a loooot of things that are not obvious piracy would require active research.
Even if only 1% of videos get flagged for review, YouTube is still looking at ~50% of all it's employees working on reviewing video.
Of course, that don't work for copyright protection since there isn't a person alive who can recognize every copyright protected image/video/audio on the planet and whether the person uploading owns/licenses the copyright in every territory.
If this law is rolled out, I highly suspect that YouTube in the EU will consists solely of large channels that have a low rate of videos that violate policy.
400 hours a minute is 400x60x24x365=210,240,000 hours a year, equivalent to ~100,000 full-time employees. Anything less than $15/hour and they'll be hearing from Bernie Sanders, plus FICA and any employee benefits. Then they need real estate to work, utilities, parking, furniture, computer equipment, HR/IT/accounting support staff etc. The cost is in the ballpark for the estimates of YouTube's total revenue. Profits would be a fraction of that after all the existing expenses for hosting infrastructure and staff.
And the $100B in cash is across all of Google. They would have to be pretty dumb to spend it down continuing to operate something that could never be expected to turn a profit again.
There are three major problems:
1. Audio, video and image recognition systems are nowhere near close to perfect and the upload volume means even a small error rate will result in a large amount getting through.
2. Users are constantly coming up with new ways to avoid the filtering systems making it a game of tag, but where one side is made up of tens of millions of people.
3. There isn't a central registry of who owns what type of copyright in each territory so there is no good way to know if the person uploading has the right to or not.
Then there are the issues of compositions... someone has the right to a music track, but only when synchronized to a particular video or someone inserting a frame of a copyrighted image inside their video.
And this will affect far more than YouTube. Copyright extends to all creative works including this comment. Image hosting services, forums, reddit, social networking sites, comment systems, review sites should all worry.
I'm well into the opinion that if platforms can't operate within the law that they take some responsibility for what the environment they build and the problems they cause, they should be shut down. I think the world would be a better place without YouTube.
In the US, I think removing Section 230 is an absolute imperative. These platforms currently have no legal responsibility to police content, and many of our problems today stem from the fact that they aren't going to do what's necessary until they're legally responsible to do so.
If they're turning a profit on a user submission, and they aren't legally required to remove it, they have no incentive to do so. Platforms must be held responsible for their content, and if that changes the landscape of the Internet, so be it.