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Comment by thirteenfingers | Hacker News Reader

I've posted about this here before, but a lot of people who upload their own videos of classical music on youtube and get copyright-warned or copyright-striked are too spooked to file a counter-claim. If it was a bot that automatically filed the claim against you, there's a very good chance the claim will be automatically lifted if you counter-claim.

Yes, youtube will give you a big scary warning about how repeated violations could mean your account is shut down. Every time this happened I went ahead and submitted counter-claim anyway. On all but one occasion the copyright claim disappeared immediately. The one exception required a bit of escalation but I still wound up on top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488897 if you're curious).

I understand a good many people simply do not feel comfortable risking their youtube account being shut down from contested claims, but I suspect that for many the risk is a lot lower than they realize.

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It's clearly a bot/AI doing the flagging. In another comment on this page I mentioned that I get copyright flags for Gregorian chant and polyphony which is not only 700+ years old but has ALWAYS been in the public domain -- but I get these notices on the YouTube videos within about 90 seconds of completing a live-stream of the Sung Catholic Masses in which the music was performed. Nobody at YouTube is watching this in real-time and saying "Yeah, such-and-such Renaissance Revival Group cut a CD 12 years ago with this music: I suspect your of copyright shenanigans." This stuff is all automated and the default is to "You're a violator!" because not doing so would be to open YouTube up to the liability of knowing they might have copyrighted material on their platform and they did nothing about it.

You've described a system which defaults to injustice and is statistically guaranteed to produce an unjust aggregate result. That a handful of individuals can work around it is immaterial.

agreed 100%

Right. That's the essence of the essence of copyright law. And the (mostly unjust) claims of the collecting societies and their henchmen are enforced with the methods of protection racketing, because hardly any of the victims will ever defend themselves in court. The same game as with the patent trolls, simply less known.

Not so much the law, but how it has been crafted to apply online, and the sheer amount of malicious compliance by Google et al.

And that’s in peacetime. Imagine how effective a censorship machine it will become during a larger emergency (a bigger/more dangerous pandemic, or war, or other national security event) when the host (Google in this case) is not given the legal option to allow appeals/reversals.

Sure, you can sue. Maybe even get your account back, months later... if you survive the emergency without communications of any kind.

Censorship-possible communications systems are an existential threat to a free society even if they are not used to censor 99.99% of the time. The fact that they can be wielded arbitrarily against people, outside of the law, or only with slow and expensive recourse (that fail deadly in the interim) should never be forgotten, especially during the times that they aren’t and everything seems fine and normal.

Do not use censorship/surveillance platforms, even if you are not being censored.

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