Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

Not only this, but in the EU* it requires verifying your age with a credit card or ID photo: https://i.imgur.com/gP20dXi.png

It's not "racey content gets marked special" with "suitable for children" being a catch-all category.

YouTube's "content developed for children", is the special case. It's explicitly content meant for and marketed to children, or content that children would be particularly attracted to, like nature documentaries.

All other content should be marked "not intended for children", even if it's not "adult"--aka restricted to 18+--content.

This is stated pretty clearly in YouTube's documentation. They have a link to it in a contextual pop-up right next to the form field asking you to self-rate the video.

Google recognizes that these flaws in their AI aren't worth caring about. Google doesn't have any mission or obligation to help the world share videos. Google cares about Google's profits. And they've found that the expedient way to do that is just let the AI be overzealous with rejecting, because the cost of a false positive is infinitesimally tiny and the cost of a false negative (real copyright violation) is so much higher.

How do we fix this? Competition. We need a Google/Youtube competitor so that users will choose the platform that does copyright recognition better.

TL;DR copyright becomes absurd surprisingly fast when you have a large population, widely-available authoring/recording tools, and a way to store/search all of them, indefinitely. Like, indefensible absurd.

Let's be clear. It is not Google that wants it. Actually Google is on the side of calling all of this retarded. It is the state of copyright laws, of the DMCA, of the lobbying by the RIAA. The day the whole copyright ecosystem is updated to accept that computers exist and that people share files on internet easily, Youtube will be VERY happy to unplug all these terrible bots that are there to provide a bad solution to a problem we should not have.

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...

I love this quote from the classic The Manual: How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way by KLF:

...the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

i am a big fan of film music. i made a small piano reduction of a favorite piece and uploaded it to youtube. i wasn't even mad when i saw the copyright claim within hours, since i run no ads.

i was however baffled and somewhat proud that my efforts were not in vain, and that the algorithm thought my poor interpretation was close to the real thing.

i do not defend the algorithm though.

Step 1: Someone files a copyright claim (or perhaps this is done automatically). This is free.

Step 2: Someone disputes the claim. This is also free, and automatically restores the video.

Step 3: The filer can re-submit the claim but they have to post a bond for the price of a professional manual review by a trained copyright lawyer; maybe $1000.

Step 4: If the video owner can re-dispute the claim; to do so they also have to post a bond for the price of a professional manual review. The trained copyright lawyer comes to a conclusion; whoever "wins" the ruling gets their money back, and the other person pays for the whole thing.

If the video owner doesn't go on to step 4, obviously the copyright claimant gets their money back.

This would get rid of all bots and most false claims

there's the rub .. in the OP's example, the strike wasn't cleared

Look at Peertube or other free as in freedom options.

The “western” world lost a once-in-a-thousand-years chance to change how copyright works at a fundamental level, when the internet started getting traction. We’re now forever beholden to the whims of parasitical “industries”.

APRA is the Australian music copyright organisation (https://www.apraamcos.com.au/)

ECAD is the Brazillian version.

VCPMC is the Vietnamese equivalent.

Not sure about the others, but basically these are the people with whom a composer registers their work. These organisations work together by forwarding royalties collected within each territory to their rightful owners.

I am a member of APRA and very much doubt that someone got away with registering a Beethoven work as their own.

Very curious indeed. I have no explanation.

[Edit] You are only meant to register your work in one territory, so it is odd that this 'work' would be registered in four of them.

APRA: Australasian Performing Right Association

ECAD: Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição

SOCAN: Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada

VCPMC: Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright

CS stands for collections society. In another age CS would stand for the Mafia.

All but ECAD were found from here: https://www.cisac.org/

1. Print rights protect sheet music etc. from being copied.

2. Performance rights control whether your composed music can be performed.

3. Mechanical rights control whether your performance can be copied (onto mp3 say). Also related to these are "synchronization" issues and licenses.

[0] https://www.bmi.com/licensing/entry/types_of_copyrights

I think it's more instructive to look at it from the other side. What's the reasonable alternative for a video hosting service to doing this kind of policing? Remember it's not really an option to just throw video over the fence, DMCA requirements mean you have to be responsive. And thus there's a built-in incentive to cut a deal with the content owners to preemptively prevent the DMCA claims (which are expensive!) by doing this sort of automated policing.

It's true that not every host does this, but every host that doesn't do this either does it in violation of the law or eats significant overhead that needs to be recouped in some other way (i.e. by paying their content creators less! Check the author's channel, this is someone who's clearly on youtube for revenue. Would even she jump ship given that it would probably cost her money?)

Really, this isn't something Google can fix. It's a problem with the legal regime that imagines that all infringement is a bright line definition and that preemptive takedowns are the best solution.

Insurance? I'm only half kidding. No individual youtuber has the deep pockets to stir the slumbering Googlebeast enough to get it to notice and correct its mistake, but all youtubers certainly do. Conversely, perhaps there's a market for a we-only-get-paid-if-we-win lawyers to spring up here, as they have with workplace injuries and such. Youtube's resolution process may not be friendly to creators, but juries probably will be, if the creator bypasses Google and sues the party making the claim. "Sues for what?" I dunno - emotional damages? Tortious claims? They'll figure something out, I imagine.

Maybe those are silly ideas, but they're certainly less silly than waiting for Google to fix things...

If I was a creator I’d use YouTube, but also have backed up local copies of videos. Preferably hosted elsewhere in case the channel gets in trouble too.

You have to be where the users are and YouTube is by far the best video streaming service (with the largest audience).

I've noticed several tech-related content producers copying their videos over to LBRY/Odysee as a backup in case the YT algorithm decides to cancel them.

Put your videos on Youtube and PeerTube.

There's no legal grey area here. This is completely on Google/Youtube. Why isn't there a way to assert the copyright status when uploading, beyond saying you ownt he copyright or not? The answer would seem to be that it would take some work on the company's part, and they don't want to put it in because it's unlikely to yield any additional revenue and the occasional bit of bad publicity doesn't hurt them enough.

Google makes this moderately difficult of course, but it seems to be a viable option when coupled with patreon (where you usually get more content/early access/more creator engagement) or some other external subscription where the same is offered.

To answer your question succinctly, no, you don't want "other youtube" you want something sufficiently different to avoid youtube's pitfalls.

Boycotting Google is the only way to go. One can also advocate for regulation in this are.

As for your question: They can put the video in Nebula or Patreon, for instance. Maybe there can be more of those, perhaps for music teachers. Maybe that's also an opportunity for someone new to jump into the streaming game and provide some competition.

Vimeo? Peertube? Facebook? Self hosted website? Anywhere?

The business model is closer to "use network effects and really well implemented streaming technology to build a monopoly on video hosting, and then use the insane level of viewership to extend our advertising business"

Step 1 is walk away from the biggest, most obscure and capricious banning system around, to pull the biggest teeth of that copyright industry.

Sure, building on quicksand is free. No one wants to pay for a service that is as undependable, and impossible to appeal in case of fraudulent or just mistaken bans.

So go ahead and build on that quicksand... but do it knowing so, and stop complaining when the quicksand swallows you.

There might not be much land around the edge of the quicksand patch, but it's solid ground.

Is this really true, though?

Google certainly doesn’t want to pay for people, but automated systems can be used as a first-pass filter, before human are brought-in to make a second-pass judgement.

So what is the rate of false-positives? And how many automated flags are triggered per day?

Yes this costs money but it is the only way to do the job without being a scumbag and a general burden on the world.

Furthermore it should cost the person sending a complaint somethings to file it, which then is refunded if the complaint is found to have merit.

Lastly, some of these steps could and should be skipped if a particular account or multiple accounts determined by some other means to be the same person are repeatedly found to be in violation.

Similarly if a person keeps making unfounded accusations the refundable fee might increase in steps.

False positives are absolutely unacceptable when it comes to anything dealing money. I sure wouldn't stick with a bank if they said "oh well, false positives happen. you'll get your money next week... maybe".

but there are several banks that help ensure that security. There are no checks to google allowing for such false positives.

Historically Google only put ads when requested by the channel, which required a fairly significant threshold of views and subscribers and supposedly manual review by Google. Some time last year they started a switch towards serving ads on all videos, regardless of the preferences of the channel (whether you’re big or small, whether you want ads or not), which I hear has been progressing steadily further and further. (I wouldn’t know. The internet’s too dangerous to view without an ad blocker. I also just generally hate ads and only see any at all when I leave my peaceful rural environs and go to the big city.)

I went searching around using that info and came across a (similarly outraged) thread on google's support forums about this video, in which someone named longzijun seemed to make a reasonably sound counter-argument:

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/108213944/a-posted...

> Then she files a counter-notification. The appeals process has not been completed. She is only part-way through it.

> Once she files that and if she does it properly, the claimant has 14 days to initiate a court action against her or the claim is released, the strike removed and the video goes back online.

> Obviously, the claimant will not pursue legal action in this case.

> False claims can cause inconvenience for sure, but with the counter-notification system, they don't do long-term damage.

> Both the takedown system and the counternotification system are mandated by US law (specifically the DMCA).

> YouTube is not supposed to intervene in copyright cases. If they do so, they will lose their safe harbor status (again under the DMCA) that protects YouTube from being sued for hosting copyright infringing content.

> To sum up

> 1) the dispute process has not been completed in this case

> 2) your beef should be with US legislators, not YouTube

This is Google's poorly implemented system to satisfy big studio creators to publish on YouTube.

Perhaps it just was? Things evolved. Digital tools now make everyone face the law that was invented for publishers while not every person is even aware about publishing nor wish to deal with it.

People simply try to express themselves and punished for that like they are criminals. I do not think this is a way to encourage the production of new culture today.

From encouraging tool in the past as it perhaps was today it become a tool for opression of any form of self-expression because the environment has changed. Now it does exactly the opposite of what it suppose to do.

>Now if you excuse me I have to take care of my collection of scalps While you take care of your collection of scalps please notice how valuable such activity was back then and how useless it is now.

I’m really confused by that part: YouTube lawyers must know that there’s a significant risk they’ll piss of a someone like a law professor and that they’ll use all their faculty to go after what is essentially fraud: there are provisions in the CDMA precisely for that, and the platform is liable for indulging those in systematic cases. Even if it’s not, they are risking a change in law.

Compared that PR nightmare to having an engineer spend a few days to hack a “public domain” user that automatically accepts re-use, or re-train to distinguish interpretations from copies… I feel like I’m missing something — and I’m not missing a cynical take on how Google is too big to care.

God knows that I’ve been arguing that some problems are harder than one expects, but public domain sheet music isn’t a hard one for YouTube.

Being a non-profit organisation doesn't make you immune from frivolous lawsuits...

Mandating real people COULD help, bust sometimes it doesn't - yet this is by design. For example, Amazon Seller Support renders humans into bots because they can only reply with templates (it's like they have humans teaching machines what to reply from a fixed set of replies) - of course this is a shitshow.

If you get a cryptic reply, you have to figure it out, just to reply and get the same response, and then to finally get a "case is closed".

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

See the whole world of educational music youtubers, they are well within their rights to do quite a few things, but in reality they can't even perform certain short guitar riffs themselves without getting flagged.

That seems to me (IANAL etc) like it could be used to argue that you need to be able to appeal to a real person who actually has the power to do something about the problem. Because these examples like in the GP(?) where one gets hold of a real person who claims they can't do anything because "that's just how the system works"... Well, then they're not really "a person" in the sense that I'm fairly sure has to be the one meant here; they're just another cog in the automated means.

No such thing exists. Using "reputation damage" in context of YouTube, or any Google service really doesn't make any sense.

No such requirements exist on the release side.

Therefore it is no surprise that platform policies will heavily favor claimants, that is very strong incentivised if not an explicit requirement.

  >If google does not react swiftly, it is considered guilty of copyright infringement.

The problem is that none of these companies ever apply a gramme of logic or examine the merits of the claim, when someone cries 'copyright infringement'. They just automatically remove the 'offending' article and refuse to countenance any counter-arguments from the person accused.

It's this supine attitude which, I reckon, is fuelling all these ridiculous claims. I just wish that the likes of Amazon, Google, YouTube, RedBubble... etc. would call the copyright trolls' bluff occasionally and not just instantly cave. Every. Single. Time.

How will sonic fingerprinting be able to decide whether it is that copyrighted work, or whether it is somwonw playing it live? It just won't

If the law promotes, say by making it a default, that one side can easily benefit from a certain behaviour, then people, companies will assume that as the behaviour to favour. And then these are the consequences: that going around claiming rights on whatever you feel like is not only not punished by Youtube but carelessly accepted. Because it's just easier, less effort.

Nonsense. Assuming the revenue to Google increases linearly with uploads, so does their ability to hire content moderators.