What's the alternative? YouTube footing the bill for copyright lawsuits?
Also, if Google can show that the copyright claims are incorrect, then they get to keep the difference.
Now copyright holders are incentivized to make accurate claims and Google is incentivized to find inaccurate claims.
The content owner should be able to negotiate a rate with Google or choose not to, not have to be forcibly entered into it.
But of course that just means that things get taken down - and no revenue goes to the claimant. Great for protecting your copyright, good for trolling, really shitty for extracting money from the works of others.
* creator is in the hospital
* creator is dead, and the heirs know nothing about dealing with copyright claims
* creator is hiking the Appalachian Trail for the next year
* creator is in jail for something unrelated
* creator got deployed on a submarine
* creator now has Alzheimer's disease and can't remember the internet
ContentID becomes a trivial way to steal money, and the DMCA becomes a trivial way to suppress the creator's work.
They would still have the DMCA process, but they lose rights to use the copyright strike process until they prove their competence.
YouTube's policies are as Draconian as they are because that's literally the only way to comply with the law. I can't for the life of me figure out why YT doesn't have some kind of messaging strategy around that.
How do you get an AI to evaluate what is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" ?
Fair use is hard enough for lawyers and judges.
To clarify, this would work the same way classified information works in the DoD -- many small pieces of information can be one classification level (or even unclassified), but if you aggregate them, they can become a higher classification level in aggregate. Similarly, small fair-use clips on an individual level would retain fair-use status, but if you start aggregating them, via a playlist or some other method, the playlist would not be fair use and would count as infringement.
The ballsier move than simply lobbying forever would be for Google to just go ahead and do this -- go ahead and write a script/AI that rejects infringement reports and/or DMCA requests on excerpts that are less than 5% of the total work on the basis that such a small excerpt necessarily must be fair use no matter the context because of the small size of the clip, and then battle each case out in court on behalf of the infringing user. I think they would win every single case, and once they have won a few in a row, precedent would take care of the rest and predatory media companies would stop trying.
This isn't impossible. Google is in a position to clarify / influence how copyright law is applied, and they should do it.
It's in their interest to make sure the platform is even viable to publish content.
On a related note, Google should clean up their customer support. Everywhere.
Sounds kind of like the outlets at Cabazon, or any of the music and art festivals in the desert. Just need people to group together and do it.
Unlike a real desert, everyone can still reach you in your internet desert, and eventually it can become an internet oasis.
Then again, maybe once that happens YT will actually start to become content-creator friendly again.