> "SonyATV & Warner Chappell have claimed 24 of my videos because the royalty free song Dreams by Joakim Karud (from the OFFICIAL YOUTUBE AUDIO LIBRARY BTW) uses a sample from Kenny Burrell Quartet’s ‘Weaver of Dream`"
From YouTube's perspective this makes total sense. Their takedown system is heavily automated because they deal with hours of new video every minute. There are two possibilities for error:
1. False Positive -- Video is brought down despite it being technically legal. Creator is mad, but YouTube suffers no more liability.
2. False Negative -- Big corporate lawyers sue YouTube for hundreds of trillions of dollars for copyright infringement. Also, these corporate lawyers would very much prefer it if you didn't believe in fair use at all. They will try to convince the court that fair use isn't a thing for weird technical reasons, and they might succeed.
So naturally the system is tuned to error on the side of generating excessive false positives. Unfortunately the enforcement side doesn't seem to understand how bad the false positive problem is and hits creators with draconian punishments for errors on YouTube's part.
I don't think there's anything wrong with erring on either side, but at least the appeal process should be better vetted. If you know your system is going to fail, which YouTube has so often it generates drama every month, at least avoid putting more salt in the wound by auto-rejecting everything.
The media cartels are going to get quite testy if they flag someone's videos time and time again and yet the person is allowed to continue posting. They get especially testy when YouTube tells them "no, you are wrong" and put a video back up even though it contains a 2 second segment that your algorithm clearly believes is infringing on something you own.
Remember, these are the people who sued individual Napster users for $1.9 million for sharing a single album, and won.
> 1. False Positive -- Video is brought down despite it being technically legal. Creator is mad, but YouTube suffers no more liability.
Solution: Create a law that makes it possible for the creator to sue YouTube for a false positive for the same sum that a media company could sue YouTube for for a false negative. This would counterbalance the scales of both types of errors.
The problem is that a lawsuit takes time and money. MegaCorp Inc. has plenty of both of those, whereas Bob Youtuber probably doesn't want to (or can't!) fight a protracted court battle against an adversary with effectively infinite resources about getting paid for their videos.
Soutions: a) youtubers can collectivise b) expensive law firms pick it up with the resouces to win (bob gets nothing but knows MegaCorp gets stung) c) use bad publicity - MegaCorps hate bad publicity d) rich people pretend to be bob, get sued, unleash lawyers on MegaCorp and make lots of money, so MegaCorps get very wary of the 'little' people.
A and B still mean YouTubers have to dedicate a lot of time and energy to a lawsuit. C is possible today (this article is an example). D is interesting but I am skeptical that even in this hypothetical scenario, "do a thing, wait to get sued and then counter-sue" is the most efficient way for rich people to make more money.
Unfortunately, even if that law existed, how many creators have the financial resources to go to court with someone like YouTube (i.e. Google). I don't think this is the only case where even if you are technically right, you will go bankrupt before you prove that in court. Case in point: the whole existence of patent trolls.
It isn't just the detection algorithm that is tuned to benefit big corporations. The end to end process is asymmetric with automated issuance of copyright claims which need to be manually disputed which appear to be automatically rejected. Then the appeal process has a three strikes rule against channel owners but no apparent punishment for corporations.
I can understand tuning the detection algorithm but to balance the dispute process needs to take this into account. The fact that it doesn't shows where Youtube stands on the issue.
> A musician who made a 10-hour long video of continuous white noise - indistinct electronic hissing - has said five copyright infringement claims have been made against him.
IIRC when you want to dispute a claim of copyright infringement there is no box for "This is fair use." Either you assert you have a valid license to use it or say you do not and submit to the removal or monetization by the copyright holder.
That's a case by case distinction anyway. But as far as I can hear, "Dreams" does not use one short quote, but basically the entire melody of "Dreams" consists of snippets of "Weaver of Dream" looped over and over again.
If you believe in music copyrights at all, this looks like an open and shut case of infringement to me. Plus "Dreams" is a godawful piece of music.
That said, YouTube represented this as safe to use, so it seems to me that the onus should be on them to work out a license and pay the associated costs. I'm sure Google can find enough change in their couch pillows to pay off the rightsholders.
> If you believe in music copyrights at all, this looks like an open and shut case of infringement to me.
There are some that truly don't believe that sampling copyrights should be a thing. They think it's just a way to stifle creativity. One could also argue that Dreams is so completely derivative that is bears little to no resemblance to the original recording it samples, and as such does not infringe on any intellectual property.
> Plus "Dreams" is a godawful piece of music
You opinions on a piece have no legal bearing on what does or does not constitute copyright infringement. The comment was completely unnecessary and uncalled for.
> There are some that truly don't believe that sampling copyrights should be a thing
That's why I said "if".
> One could also argue that Dreams is so completely derivative that is bears little to no resemblance to the original recording
That's not what "derivative" means.
> You opinions on a piece have no legal bearing on what does or does not constitute copyright infringement.
Maybe not, but in light of your general point about "stifling creativity", it might be worth pointing out that this is hardly a good piece to highlight said creativity.
> That said, YouTube represented this as safe to use
This is the crux of the issue... As someone who's dabbled in video creation, I have other things to do than look around for "safe" music to use. If I can't even take YouTube's own word on what music I can use, what the hell is there left?
This something that is going to have to be planned will also need a way of dealing with copyright issues. It sounds like an extremely difficult problem, which is why YouTube is having trouble in the first place. I doubt they enjoy these (very public) mistakes.
For example, how exactly do you catch videos using copyrighted material and deal with disputes when thousands of hours of video are uploaded every hour? Doing this manually is likely infeasible. But algorithms are error-prone, as YouTube exemplifies very well. Or how exactly do you stand up to these massive billion-dollar media companies without going bankrupt during your first court case? Which (I think) is why YouTube currently simply goes along with whatever these companies demand.
Criticizing YouTube is easy. What is hard is coming up with better solutions that could actually be implemented in whatever YouTube could potentially be replaced with.
I don't think they care a fig, tbh. If they did, then they'd have a small department that watched for bad publicity like this, and proactively fixed it ASAP. It would cost them virtually nothing, and solve the reputational problem overnight.
Good point. But whether they do (or don't) care, the fact that these problems aren't being fixed for so long now implies that they don't consider the damage to their bottom line to be significant enough to invest any major resources into fixing them. Which is why thinking about competitive solutions is worth-while, I think. Having a platform that would solve these problems well, and hence poach the disillusioned creators, might be enough motivation for YouTube to start moving.
> For example, how exactly do you catch videos using copyrighted material and deal with disputes when thousands of hours of video are uploaded every hour?
I would argue if they can't responsibly handle it then perhaps they just shouldn't be doing it. They want to have their cake, and eat it too while passing the negative outcomes on to everyone else. Maybe videos shouldn't be public the moment they're uploaded to allow for adequate review, since they clearly have trouble as is. There's a solution.
YouTube got in trouble because they were knowingly making money from infringing content. Viacom sued them for a billion dollars and YouTube barely won on a technicality. ContentID was a way to get copyright holders off their backs. If you're not sending internal memos about how all of your money comes from pirated blockbuster movies, the DMCA safe harbor makes things a lot easier for you as a service provider. You'll need an automated way to take down videos and forward complaints to uploaders, and an automated way for the uploader to say they're challenging the complaint. After that it's between them, and won't involve you until you get a court order when the uploader loses the lawsuit and is forced to remove the video.
If the media groups apply violence (by using the law enforcement agencies as goon squads) even though you did nothing wrong, give the media groups back violence - that's self-defense.
Yes, you can edit out the audio from the file on youtube, but it's my understanding that it removes ALL the audio from the segment you delete so any voiceovers will be lost.
If you rely on YouTube for income, the time to diversify was a couple of years ago. It seems like they have a whole team of people whose sole job is to mess with the creators. Squeezing out the "little guy" so they can be the sole provider of content. They don't need you anymore.
It's the teams Google doesn't create that tell the real story. Nobody is paid to care about these users, it's just one big accounting scam contributing to their $100+ billion in savings. Wherever there are consequences for not providing support... Android users get phone and email. Domains users get phone and email. Everyone else collectively enriching Google gets nothing.
Their support is so bad they literally stole $75m from their own customers while support repeatedly said checks were coming and it was nobody's job to fix it until they were being sued.
I have never really been a fan of the YouTube Audio library, a bunch of channels use the same music and I think it subtracts from the video when another video you seen earlier has the same music. I know there's paid libraries of royalty free music, but even then they still get claimed so got to dispute it but it seems some of those libraries have their own form or canned message to paste in to help. I know I've even heard Apple Loops from Garageband get claimed too even those you are licensed to use them. Even public domain NASA clips got someone flagged, because some news company used them in their broadcasts.
Then fair use isn't always considered too, like if you were walking and a little bit of music was picked up in the background of your vlog, say maybe from a car driving by blasting loud music.
I know with the DMCA there's legal penalties for filing false ones, but Content ID isn't considered a DMCA, so why it doesn't count as a strike unless you disputed it and then the company can then create a DMCA actually reviewing. Really feel like automated technology for policing isn't really ready yet, even flaws in red light cameras.
There are no legal penalties just for filing false claims, only if it's false and made in bad faith. This is an important distinction because "I hold the copyright and disagree that the usage qualifies for fair-use protections" probably doesn't fall into the category of "bad faith"
> I own the copyright and will use an automated system to spam massive amounts of complaints to anything that even remotely looks like my content without even thinking about whether it's fair use
> sending these complaints costs nothing for me and require lengthy appeals and manual review for the affected party who will likely face reductions in revenue in the mean time
> if someone successfully appeals the complaint I'll just send it again until they tire of it because I suffer no consequences
A few days ago, I wrote about a very similar problem that I'm going through at this very moment.
Basically, I recorded myself playing a song that was written 133 years ago, whose composer died 118 years ago.
The copyright claim is that I used a melody owned by ASCAP, ICE_CS. But the melody is long in public domain. It is impossible for this melody to be copyrighted. (Also, just to cover the bases of "what if...", I want to clarify that the melody has been correctly identified as the melody written (and published) 133 years ago.)
And yet, they have claimed copyright on my music and monitized it. I, on the other hand, can't monitize it at all because my channel is very small.
That's clearly what's happening and it's the problem with the system, it has no way to determine if a song is actually the original recording or if it is an original performance based off of a public domain song played correctly the two will be largely identical (to the satisfaction of an algorithm designed to not be fooled by small pace changes in the different performances).
It seem ridiculous that (it seems) the Youtube provided royalty free tracks aren't explicitly stored in the Content ID system as un-claimable songs. It would probably require modifications to privilege those matches before others but if you can't even count on music provided by YT I don't see how any creator could feel safe using any music in their work.
You and the GP should have both stopped before saying "It's theft." It's not theft, not even close.
You gave them the video and they said they do not want the video -- for whatever reason. You don't have a right to upload content to YouTube. You do have a right to your property, your video and music you've created. They didn't take it from you. They aren't making money on it and not paying you. You don't have a right to force YouTube to display and distribute that content on their website.
Imagine if Columbia records was forced to distribute any and all music sent to it on a demo tape. Columbia saying, "No, we won't distribute this" is not theft.
Columbia would be within their rights to say, "Your music sounds too much like Taylor Swift to us. Sorry. It's too big of a risk for us to distribute it."
That's exactly what YouTube is doing. They are saying, your music is too much of a risk for us to distribute based on our algorithms.
You can still go to Vimeo or soundcloud or build your own website to distribute your music, just like the aforementioned artist that sounds too much like Taylor Swift could go to Arista or upload it to youtube or or soundcloud.
Seems a bit more like you sending your tape to Colombia and them deciding to distribute it but give all proceeds to some other guy with no relation to your music.
ed: You’ve edited your comment but I was referring more to the GP case where they say
> And yet, they have claimed copyright on my music and monitized it.
That is exactly Youtube making money on the video and not paying the owner
That's not what I understood when I read it the GP saying:
>And yet, they have claimed copyright on my music and monitized it.
By "they," I think he meant: ASCAP, ICE_CS, not YouTube. The problem is that ASCAP, ICE_CS has claimed copyright to something, which they are right to do and that is their performance of the public domain work. Since it sounds like the same work that the GP uploaded, the GP's music was locked.
I am no fan of YouTube's profiting off copyrighted material, I think it's unethical, and in this instance I do not believe that is what they are doing. I believe they have written algorithms to prevent copyright infringement and it is over-fitting on the GP's works.
The GP said they are "claiming copyright on my music" but I don't see any evidence for that. I do see evidence that ASCAP, ICE_CS claim copyright on their performance of the same music as the GP.
Yes, the solution is to have a person in there to be smarter than the AI, but YouTube has said it's not worth it to them to do that and so I believe that is their right.
In this case, the GP's claim is that ASCAP, ICE_CS is doing something wrong, but I don't think that is the case. I think everyone here is doing something right and a bad thing has come from that.
My understanding is that Youtube will allow the supposed content owner to monetise your video. They can choose to let you keep it up as long as they get the advertising revenue from it.
I did edit to elaborate where I thought there was ambiguity.
Yes, I agree, if ASCAP, ICE_CS laid claim to the GP's work, then that needs to be fixed. I would suggest any money paid to ASCAP, ICE_CS for that video be returned to the GP, with interest paid by ASCAP, ICE_CS and perhaps some punitive damages so they don't make the same "mistake" again.
To be fair, or give the benefit of the doubt, this could be a Hanlon's Razor scenario where ASCAP, ICE_CS just doesn't understand how to do it right. Or they could be too heavy handed in which case the punitive damages should soften their hand.
This is why due process is needed. These platform companies should be regulated after a certain size to enforce proper arbitrage.
Arbitrarily cutting off people's livelihoods is completely unacceptable. It should be innocent till proven guilty. The burden of proof should be on the one making allegations.
> The burden of proof should be on the one making allegations.
It's not only a copyright infringement for the one making the video, it's one for Youtube too for sharing it.
It still is, Youtube isn't forced to remove the content or sharing the monetization. They just prefer this to the alternative of being responsible for sharing that content.
What's needed is laws that absolve Youtube of copyright infringement outside of the content they produce themselves, and instead shift the blame to the content owner.
So Google is encouraging illegal copyright usage to make other companies more profit. Do they at least get a kickback? And why doesn't the government go after them like they do after pirate sites then?
The update to the article seems pretty relevant. YouTube says the music is not from the official Youtube Audio Library, but could be from a channel titled "YouTube Audio Library".
and yet its right there uploaded under "Dreams - Joakim Karud [Vlog No Copyright Music]" to a channel with an enticing "Audio Library — Music for content creators (Verified)" name with "This channel is not an official YouTube channel." in the description. You can tell its in Content ID database because whole video clip is "protected" (web server will 403/wont play without Google generated crypto signature token).
The music in question is Joakim Karud's "Dream" song, which was made famous when Casey Neistat used it for his vlog. It's also popular with Youtuber since Joakim's music are all free to use on Youtube. Apparently the song sampled from short guitar riff from a musician from the 1955. However, the samples are usually sped up or its pitch made high as to not be recognizable from the original source. It's unfortunate, because some of my videos use his songs.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIsn't that protected use anyway?
1. False Positive -- Video is brought down despite it being technically legal. Creator is mad, but YouTube suffers no more liability.
2. False Negative -- Big corporate lawyers sue YouTube for hundreds of trillions of dollars for copyright infringement. Also, these corporate lawyers would very much prefer it if you didn't believe in fair use at all. They will try to convince the court that fair use isn't a thing for weird technical reasons, and they might succeed.
So naturally the system is tuned to error on the side of generating excessive false positives. Unfortunately the enforcement side doesn't seem to understand how bad the false positive problem is and hits creators with draconian punishments for errors on YouTube's part.
Remember, these are the people who sued individual Napster users for $1.9 million for sharing a single album, and won.
Solution: Create a law that makes it possible for the creator to sue YouTube for a false positive for the same sum that a media company could sue YouTube for for a false negative. This would counterbalance the scales of both types of errors.
I can understand tuning the detection algorithm but to balance the dispute process needs to take this into account. The fact that it doesn't shows where Youtube stands on the issue.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523
> A musician who made a 10-hour long video of continuous white noise - indistinct electronic hissing - has said five copyright infringement claims have been made against him.
If you believe in music copyrights at all, this looks like an open and shut case of infringement to me. Plus "Dreams" is a godawful piece of music.
That said, YouTube represented this as safe to use, so it seems to me that the onus should be on them to work out a license and pay the associated costs. I'm sure Google can find enough change in their couch pillows to pay off the rightsholders.
There are some that truly don't believe that sampling copyrights should be a thing. They think it's just a way to stifle creativity. One could also argue that Dreams is so completely derivative that is bears little to no resemblance to the original recording it samples, and as such does not infringe on any intellectual property.
> Plus "Dreams" is a godawful piece of music
You opinions on a piece have no legal bearing on what does or does not constitute copyright infringement. The comment was completely unnecessary and uncalled for.
That's why I said "if".
> One could also argue that Dreams is so completely derivative that is bears little to no resemblance to the original recording
That's not what "derivative" means.
> You opinions on a piece have no legal bearing on what does or does not constitute copyright infringement.
Maybe not, but in light of your general point about "stifling creativity", it might be worth pointing out that this is hardly a good piece to highlight said creativity.
This is the crux of the issue... As someone who's dabbled in video creation, I have other things to do than look around for "safe" music to use. If I can't even take YouTube's own word on what music I can use, what the hell is there left?
For example, how exactly do you catch videos using copyrighted material and deal with disputes when thousands of hours of video are uploaded every hour? Doing this manually is likely infeasible. But algorithms are error-prone, as YouTube exemplifies very well. Or how exactly do you stand up to these massive billion-dollar media companies without going bankrupt during your first court case? Which (I think) is why YouTube currently simply goes along with whatever these companies demand.
Criticizing YouTube is easy. What is hard is coming up with better solutions that could actually be implemented in whatever YouTube could potentially be replaced with.
Anonymous, encrypted, censorship-resistant peer-to-peer networks.
Think torrenting + youtube + blockchain had a baby.
https://lbry.com/faq
I would argue if they can't responsibly handle it then perhaps they just shouldn't be doing it. They want to have their cake, and eat it too while passing the negative outcomes on to everyone else. Maybe videos shouldn't be public the moment they're uploaded to allow for adequate review, since they clearly have trouble as is. There's a solution.
If the regime had to pay for false-positives then there could be balance. Who has the power to pressure youtube to be better?
In a world where distribution is free and frictionless the only thing to create and manage is scarcity.
also: friendly reminder that peertube exists.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7299936
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7100415?hl=en
Their support is so bad they literally stole $75m from their own customers while support repeatedly said checks were coming and it was nobody's job to fix it until they were being sued.
https://marketingland.com/class-action-lawsuit-accuses-googl...
Then fair use isn't always considered too, like if you were walking and a little bit of music was picked up in the background of your vlog, say maybe from a car driving by blasting loud music.
I know with the DMCA there's legal penalties for filing false ones, but Content ID isn't considered a DMCA, so why it doesn't count as a strike unless you disputed it and then the company can then create a DMCA actually reviewing. Really feel like automated technology for policing isn't really ready yet, even flaws in red light cameras.
> I own the copyright and will use an automated system to spam massive amounts of complaints to anything that even remotely looks like my content without even thinking about whether it's fair use
> sending these complaints costs nothing for me and require lengthy appeals and manual review for the affected party who will likely face reductions in revenue in the mean time
> if someone successfully appeals the complaint I'll just send it again until they tire of it because I suffer no consequences
Basically, I recorded myself playing a song that was written 133 years ago, whose composer died 118 years ago.
The copyright claim is that I used a melody owned by ASCAP, ICE_CS. But the melody is long in public domain. It is impossible for this melody to be copyrighted. (Also, just to cover the bases of "what if...", I want to clarify that the melody has been correctly identified as the melody written (and published) 133 years ago.)
And yet, they have claimed copyright on my music and monitized it. I, on the other hand, can't monitize it at all because my channel is very small.
This is theft.
(Which does not excuse YT or the claimant in the least for this BS)
It seem ridiculous that (it seems) the Youtube provided royalty free tracks aren't explicitly stored in the Content ID system as un-claimable songs. It would probably require modifications to privilege those matches before others but if you can't even count on music provided by YT I don't see how any creator could feel safe using any music in their work.
It's theft and someone should be criminally prosecuted.
You gave them the video and they said they do not want the video -- for whatever reason. You don't have a right to upload content to YouTube. You do have a right to your property, your video and music you've created. They didn't take it from you. They aren't making money on it and not paying you. You don't have a right to force YouTube to display and distribute that content on their website.
Imagine if Columbia records was forced to distribute any and all music sent to it on a demo tape. Columbia saying, "No, we won't distribute this" is not theft.
Columbia would be within their rights to say, "Your music sounds too much like Taylor Swift to us. Sorry. It's too big of a risk for us to distribute it."
That's exactly what YouTube is doing. They are saying, your music is too much of a risk for us to distribute based on our algorithms.
You can still go to Vimeo or soundcloud or build your own website to distribute your music, just like the aforementioned artist that sounds too much like Taylor Swift could go to Arista or upload it to youtube or or soundcloud.
ed: You’ve edited your comment but I was referring more to the GP case where they say
> And yet, they have claimed copyright on my music and monitized it.
That is exactly Youtube making money on the video and not paying the owner
>And yet, they have claimed copyright on my music and monitized it.
By "they," I think he meant: ASCAP, ICE_CS, not YouTube. The problem is that ASCAP, ICE_CS has claimed copyright to something, which they are right to do and that is their performance of the public domain work. Since it sounds like the same work that the GP uploaded, the GP's music was locked.
I am no fan of YouTube's profiting off copyrighted material, I think it's unethical, and in this instance I do not believe that is what they are doing. I believe they have written algorithms to prevent copyright infringement and it is over-fitting on the GP's works.
The GP said they are "claiming copyright on my music" but I don't see any evidence for that. I do see evidence that ASCAP, ICE_CS claim copyright on their performance of the same music as the GP.
Yes, the solution is to have a person in there to be smarter than the AI, but YouTube has said it's not worth it to them to do that and so I believe that is their right.
In this case, the GP's claim is that ASCAP, ICE_CS is doing something wrong, but I don't think that is the case. I think everyone here is doing something right and a bad thing has come from that.
Theft is wrong. There is no wrongdoing here.
Yes, I agree, if ASCAP, ICE_CS laid claim to the GP's work, then that needs to be fixed. I would suggest any money paid to ASCAP, ICE_CS for that video be returned to the GP, with interest paid by ASCAP, ICE_CS and perhaps some punitive damages so they don't make the same "mistake" again.
To be fair, or give the benefit of the doubt, this could be a Hanlon's Razor scenario where ASCAP, ICE_CS just doesn't understand how to do it right. Or they could be too heavy handed in which case the punitive damages should soften their hand.
Arbitrarily cutting off people's livelihoods is completely unacceptable. It should be innocent till proven guilty. The burden of proof should be on the one making allegations.
It's not only a copyright infringement for the one making the video, it's one for Youtube too for sharing it.
It still is, Youtube isn't forced to remove the content or sharing the monetization. They just prefer this to the alternative of being responsible for sharing that content.
What's needed is laws that absolve Youtube of copyright infringement outside of the content they produce themselves, and instead shift the blame to the content owner.
We'll get Youtube's attention and rich people will get civil forfeiture laws repealed.