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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

I think the interesting question is, how are they doing it?

I would think if you kept the game shots short and incidental the copyright would be fair use.

The DMCA is ridicously unbalanced. There's no penalty to filing false reports and if you disagree with a claim you have to hand over your personal information and fight it out in court. This is hardly a surprise given that the DMCA was written mostly by the copyright lobby; sadly, the law is working exactly as intended in such cases.

It's time to redo the DMCA, but I fear the copyright industry has only gained a bigger foothold since the DMCA was written.

You don't even have to file a DMCA takedown request to take down videos from YouTube anyway, they have an entirely extralegal mechanism for taking down videos.

Guilty until proven innocent is what the DMCA is. Perhaps one of the most asinine, imbecilic, and nonsensical laws of our time.

It's also one of the most confused and irrelevant laws when it comes to people discussing how YouTube works. Something like 2% of takedowns on YouTube are through DMCA.

This is true. The vast majority of YouTube takedowns are via the Content ID system, outnumbering copyright claims 50 to 1. But that doesn't tell the entire story.

The reason why YouTube has such a robust Content ID system in the first place is inherently due to DMCA. The less automated DMCA complaints YouTube receives, the less damage control and legal overhead it will be as expenditure.

Google’s legal overhead would be way worse in the absence of the DMCA, if we were playing by the rules of plain-old copyright. As they wouldn’t have the standardized process and safe harbor that DMCA provides. Reading C&Ds that come in on paper via certified mail is very labor intensive. They’d need Content ID even more in that case.

A judge would consider the fair use argument. I don't know that YouTube employs judges in content moderation. (I don't know that YouTube employs humans in content moderation, at least below director level.)

That made me laugh. Because my movies were also taken down because of background music. And that was the feeling I got when I raised "dispute" in YouTube system to defend my videos. It was like a Russian roulette

YouTube does not employ judges or humans in deciding whether to honor a content owner's request. It doesn't employ anything. It is up to the content owner to police themselves, only when they mess up royally will YouTube remove them from the content owner system.

Most YouTube takedowns are not done through DMCA. They're done because YouTube cooperates directly with many content owners to do takedowns voluntarily. There are almost no legal limits or regulatory terms to what YouTube is permitted to voluntarily take down.

Fair Use is only a legal defense. It is not a requirement that YouTube host your content.

Tom Scott has a great video on Copyright:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

A lot of YT users don't realize it's a platform where a committee of bigcorps outside of Google editorially decide what people can see. This is also a way of keeping activists out of sight.

Doesn't matter. Nintendo send a takedown notice, it gets taken down.

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