This is not atypical for YouTube. I had a full on paid gsuite account and when they lost my channel there was “nothing we can do”. I had the video backed up, but lost all the links, views, and subscribers.
No, the reason is probably just as stupid as it sounds, they don't want to investigate the claims so it's easier to close the channel and keep the music publishers happy.
I agree but you would think the world leading company in AI would be smart enough to detect bans that deserve further investigation such as in this case: a channel with more than 770k subscribers, no content with nudity or violence whatsoever in 10 years, no controversies in the comments or downvotes, no automatic detection of copyright violation in 10 years etc. There aren't that many channels with these characteristics and google certainly has the money to investigate manually the very few channels that reach this threshold and they certainly have the AI to detect even more heuristics to avoid false positives like this one.
They are just so arrogant and know that they will never get in trouble with the law that they just won't even spend a dime or a second thought on these issues no matter how life ruining they can be. Pretty sad.
Does it have to? Can we not have content made by whoever feels like it, like many of the articles popular on HN are not for profit, none of the (often insightful) comments are, the plethora of games and tools people create and share for free, etc.?
For professional videos, until there is a law that specifies that a monopoly (currently Google YouTube does seem like the only place where money making is possible) has to follow certain rules, they can throw you out for virtually any reason and it's not a secure way of making a living. So maybe it should be, but it currently isn't, and we can't currently force them to be.
Other platforms may not significantly help one to pay bills, I'm just wondering if that might not be okay given the sheer number of people who seem to have fun doing this. If not, we should make new laws.
You mean paying bandwidth-wise? Because if you want bittorrent... we can do bittorrent. Bandwidth doesn't need to cost anything and can be made to prefer intra-ISP traffic quite easily. Better for everyone.
I mean paying for its existence; most of the content people consume is paid-for content whether by advertising (in one form or another) or direct support via Patreon and similar. And the reasons for this are ones I know firsthand; I am a video producer as well as a software developer. I could not afford to do the former without being the latter. Building a
A reasonable-quality single-camera A/V rig that a video producer would actually want to work with is comfortably in the middle four digits. Three cameras, low five. That money must come from somewhere, as must the rationalization for the time in a world as productized and generally fucked as ours, and "that's OK, art and media can just be done by wildly wealthy dilettantes in their spare time" is a shitty world.
I like to imagine what the trade names of the future are going to be. When you meet someone on the Mars colony whose last name is Tuber and that bit of Snapple (best stuff off earth!) Cap wisdom perks up in your brain: "why, their great-grandpappy must have been one of the YouTube personalities on the first ship!"
I think it was prompted by seeing the name "Hodler" once and thinking it sounded like the cryptocurrency equivalent of Wainwright or Cooper.
You can post to YouTube and also another platform, then on Patreon/Twitter/Facebook/etc always link the other platform instead of YouTube. That way you would still be discoverable on YouTube, but hopefully get some amount of traffic funneled over to the other platform in case YouTube kicks you off.
You're technically correct, but that's not really relevant. 0 < 1 < 780,000 for sure, but that's also the difference between making a living and not.
YouTube, like it or not, is the engine that drives many people's content business (the creators), and if the engine is denied to them, there really isn't a realistic alternative.
I often hear the “host your own content” but I don’t feel like there is an equally vocal “make it discoverable, too” crowd. That is until I discovered the indieweb.
The indieweb’s usage of microformats and features like “webmentions” that can be crawled ad hoc, enabling decentralized, federated discovery (example: http://indieweb.xyz) is the web that-IMO-we should have gotten. Not one dominated by corporatized, professionalized platforms
> What does "overthrow the king" look like when the alternatives are uploading your videos to other sites and getting a handful of views?
Twitch somehow seems to do a pretty good job of competing with YouTube.
If you move and only get a handful of views, do you really have a channel? If you can't take your viewers somewhere else, do you actually have viewers or are you simply one of the interchangeable nobodies that YouTube uses to keep YouTube viewers engaged?
I'm reminded of the "influencer" who couldn't sell 10 t-shirts to her "thousands" of viewers.
For Bitchute you can directly compare the views of videos by Styxhexenhammer666, who seems to be most watched content creator on Bitchute. Numbers seem to be roughly 12 to 1 in favor of YouTube.
Still, we need people to start contributing to alternative platforms. The YouTube monopoly only benefits Google.
The video discovery is the part that really hurts creators there. Youtube is a bunch of stuff nobody cares about attached to that landing page that advertises videos and which billions (I think? hundreds of millions at least) of people pass through every day.
There are great ways to host video for free on the internet these days so if you want to preserve some video or link it in somewhere (I've seen vimeo used as a hosting platform for tutorial videos on sites) then you have much better option than YouTube - but if your business is the videos then you either need to survive on YT or else get big enough to splinter. Given how Dlive (pwediepie) and Nebula (technical vlog folks) haven't taken off that well I'm guessing you'll need a lot more behind you to go indy - those subscriptions (hit the bell icon!) and the feed are the feature YT sells.
Live streaming is more in line with the twitch brand, but youtube's implementation is significantly better, at least on the client side. There's no live rewinding on twitch, or pausing for a minute and then catching back up at 1.25x or 1.5x
It's true that you can't pause a stream on Twitch, but Twitch allows you to save clips that are functionally equivalent to rewinding, which isn't available on YouTube. Twitch's UX&I is also much better suited to streaming than YouTube (bigger chat, multiple viewing sizes/configurations, no video suggestions).
I could go through the awkward process of making a clip every time I miss something and want to rewind a few seconds, but once I do that now I've missed even more of the broadcast and there's no way to catch up. Twitch only works comfortably for completely live viewing, watching finished VODs, or watching ongoing VODS with half an hour delay minimum.
Clips are a neat feature but they're a sharing feature, not a "help me watch" feature.
Yes - why don't more people use Vimeo? I know that they have limits on uploads, especially on the free tier, but it's worth paying for because at least they know you're a customer and not a product.
For $900 a year you get 7 TB of video and unlimited live streaming. Yes, YouTube is cheaper (free) and brings a large audience. So you have to balance paying for something that's certain or being at the whim of the market maker.
I believe it's because YouTube is as much a content-discovery platform as a content-delivery platform. If you only use Vimeo, very few people will discover your videos.
I don't know why more people don't upload to both, though.
> whim of the market maker
As I understand it, Vimeo are also far from perfect in this regard.
An interesting anecdote: the recent Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans, was made freely available on YouTube, but was taken down after a copyright complaint. They moved the video to Vimeo, where it remains. (I can't comment on the legitimacy of the copyright complaint, and this is not an endorsement of the film.)
That's unfortunate as "ibry" would at least be more pronounceable than "lbry". Trying to challenge YouTube with a very user-unfriendly name is an endeavour that's doomed to fail.
So, of those sites, I had only heard of dailymotion. The others I had never visited before, so they will have no history on me, and will get clean recommendations. Upon going to each one, here's what I got:
lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.
bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT
diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.
bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.
Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.
I think the problem is that of the people removed from YouTube, the vast majority are going to be removed for unsavory or misleading content, so any alternative anti-censorship sites are dominated by those people. You have the same problem with Reddit vs something like Voat.
It would be cool if these sites were able to mirror all of the youtube content as well, so you get all of youtube plus the content that people are posting to the decentralized or anti-censorship platform. Probably illegal but that's kind of the point.
Yeah, this is part of YouTube's moat. Twitter as well.
Of the people who get kicked off of those platforms, a significant number will be socially obnoxious. They of course have "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach", and our legal structure has decided that the big platforms get to enjoy being both a platform and a publisher, simultaneously.
So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law". So the socially obnoxious flood to the new plaform, and pretty quickly, you've got a core user base of people who like that, and a few people who are merely willing to tolerate it on principle.
I don't think this was originally strategic, more a matter of not wanting socially obnoxious voices on the platform, because advertisers don't care for that sort of thing. But it so obviously contributes to the continued dominance of the big platforms that there's no chance they haven't noticed.
>So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law".
We are "Social Media X but with no moderation" is a braindead business strategy. I'm failing to find a source, but moot (this founder of the anything goes social website), once said of all the 4chan clones, the ones that never lasted were the ones that were started by people who decided to make their own 4chan clone after being banned from the site. Naturally people discovered those clones were filled with insufferable asshats and died off.
Naturally when you look at these video sites, very few of them actually offer the number one thing I would expect from a YouTube clone - revenue sharing. So not only are they not competitive with YouTube, but for a large group of people kicked off of YouTube, they aren't even substitutes.
Also looking for something like this. I've considered just setting up my own Jitsi server on the cloud but haven't had a chance yet. Doesn't really work well for streaming to the public either.
If you know how, or are a serious youtuber and have the money to pay for IT people, setup a PeerTube instance. There are scripts that will copy your YouTube or Vimeo library to a PeerTube instance:
There isn't a fair use defense to playing cover songs. Moving to an alternative site isn't going to help. This person still needs licenses to distribute even if he is doing covers for free.
Queue the responses of how people don't or won't use it because it's too small, but they will complain YouTube has a monopoly.
I don't know what you guys expect to happen if you just keep using YouTube... Do you expect some benevolent spirit to fly down on a fairy chariot and "break up YouTube"?
It does indeed feel like they supplanted regular television in some sense, and is catering to "the establishment" more and more each year.
Before the focus felt like it was more on exposing people to new up-and-comers, or random viral stuff. The viral stuff is still there, but so algorithmically driven, and catering to the lowest common denominator that it just feels off.
I have no clue how to find new channels with interesting concepts anymore.
As soon as they have the 4k Relaxation Channel (on youtube) content I am there. One monitor is always dedicated to it and I currently pay Google so that I don't get work inappropriate ads playing. It would save me money.
It's not entirely fair to blame YouTube exclusively for the complicated mess that is copyright laws. In fact most of this video & thread are misdirected blame.
Per the video it sounds like he received 5 DMCA copyright strikes to which he issues counter-claims. That's not youtube's system and youtube is bound to follow the laws outlined by the DMCA. YouTube didn't issue the copyright strike, so why would YouTube know what was or wasn't at issue?
So yes the system is broken, but moving somewhere else doesn't fix it. The new system will still have this exact same set of circumstances happen because that new system will still be governed by DMCA & US copyright law (in this instance being US-based).
The only part of this that has anything to do with YouTube itself or being in YouTube's control is the channel being deleted. But that policy is clear - 3 copyright strikes and the channel is deleted. Too harsh? Maybe. Ambiguous or unclear? No. And if the channel does what it should as a business & lawyers up to respond to the DMCA notices & issue counter-claims, if those counters are successful then the channel remains at 0 strikes and isn't deleted. But there the part that's shit is DMCA. Want to fix that part? Stop blaming YouTube for it and go try to get the law reformed. YouTube isn't going to be your lawyer. Nor will Vimeo. Nor will any video hosting service.
What about the part in the video where he showed YouTube's policy which says the claimant must provide information about the material that is under violation, but he shows YT's email to him which says they do not have this information? Isn't that solely YT's responsibility to uphold its own policy?
> Per the video it sounds like he received 5 DMCA copyright strikes to which he issues counter-claims.
Actually, I believe YouTube uses a mechanism which is explicitly not-DMCA for its copyright claims.
Under the DMCA, a user has the right of counterclaim, where the user says "your claim is wrong, here's why, see you in court", and the service provider has to reinstate the claimed material (unless it actually goes to court). I don't believe YouTube's ToS gives the user that provision.
Per the video the creator did issue a counter claim, this is stated at timestamp 2:40. He then also states the course of action to follow is either they drop the claim or sue him - this is exactly the DMCA system. As far as I know YouTube's mechanisms do not end in a courtroom.
There's a summary but it links to a more detailed PDF.
If it is a "real" DMCA claim, then according to this Google must put the content back up within 10 to 14 business days. If it's Google's house rules then they don't, but that would mean it's not a real DMCA claim.
Now I understand Google reserves the right to ban you for anything at any time, like all providers. But that would be a secondary action in addition to this.
Since the current thread of discussion is operating under the assumption that it's a false claim, under DMCA, and a counterclaim has been correctly filed, the US Copyright Office summary certainly seems to say otherwise. What is your reading of their statement?
"If the subscriber serves a counter notification complying with statutory requirements, including a statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed or disabled through mistake or misidentification, then unless the copyright owner files an action seeking a court order against the subscriber, the service provider must put the material back up within 10-14 business days after
receiving the counter notification."
I can definitely get that - his podcast is actually pretty legit and value filled. He could totally be lying about his numbers, but after listening to his story, it seems like it took him a few years to ramp up his piano course sales.
I've never read "The Four Hour Work Week" but I always figured that if it was honest, all it would say is "1) write a book about how to only work four hours a week. 2) convince people to buy it. 3) On average, spend four hours a week on this."
My understanding is that he spent years ramping up his piano course, and only recently started selling his "courses course". I'm in the process of launching my own technical courses, and if I feel like I come up with a great process for it, I'll sell that information as well. (And probably receive a similar criticism)
Pity. That would be valuable information but it's in a market for lemons. It doesn't help that his site looks precisely like all those Get Rich Quick™ sites.
* Same extraordinary number to lead you in
* Massive cost crossed out with FREE on top of it
* No preview till you put in your email
* Some rando endorsements at the bottom from people claiming to also have gotten rich quick both of whom are also selling Get Rich Quick™ stories.
I've listened to his podcast for a while, and it's great, with a credible story and actionable information from those who have found success with their own courses (real courses as opposed to "course courses"). Quite a disconnect from the look and feel of this website (I shared it because I knew it was his canonical URL, and to be honest, I hadn't actually seen it)
His podcast is actually pretty good and seems like legit, and doesn't have as much "marketing reek" as the site I linked. I'm not affiliated with him, but I've gotten a lot of good information from his podcast. (I'm gearing up to put my own course offerings out there)
Wait, it's not 2008 anymore, this is still a thing?
.. of course it is. Ugh.
Yes, that was a thing twelve years ago, and apparently it's still a thing today. There was, back then, a nexus of the 'top tier' creators in San Diego. If you were attractive, they'd even mislead you into believing that you're "in the club" with them, in order to get you to buy more of their "inner circle" product.
Silver lining, I'm now hypersensitive to marketing formatting and layout, and can detect samples of it without having to read the words.
I definitely get the same feeling about his site. I've followed him for a while, and his podcast actually feels quite credible and is actually quite value filled. My understand is that he spent years ramping up his piano course to a successful level, and is now selling that knowledge as well.
Ultimately I'm trying to gleam information from other successful course creators as I work on my own technical offerings. At the end of the day, it seems a better approach than hoping Youtube doesn't shut you down and continues to throw you scraps from their advertising revenue.
Yes, but as I understand it, he only launched this after he found success with his piano course. I've been listening to his podcast for a few months - it's pretty legit, even though I know this website seems a little too "Internet marketing".
"has been incredibly successful doing this: theonlinecourseguy.com" is not accurate. That's more of a hobby and doesn't bring in that much $$. You'll notice everything I offer there is essentially free.
Piano In 21 Days, on the other hand, has been incredibly successful :)
Digital sharecroppers keep running into problems with YouTube, but the alternatives are barely better. That is, not as heavy-handed, but much worse in other ways.
As someone who has been responsible for large cloud budgets, I wonder if Google is aware that their "support strategy" toward both content creators/contractors and customers across the entire brand has completely ruled out GCP for me.
GCP might have great support. They may not have automated bots suspending accounts. They might actually follow the DMCA counterclaim process instead of some weird process on top of it.
I'll never know: I restrict Google products to casual, throw-away contexts. I've imagined myself trying to explain to my boss or a client "They won't respond" or "They say they can't provide any information." Just typing that freaks me out.
Anyway, if you want to be a huge corporation living under one brand umbrella, you've got to take the good with the bad. Google is for entertainment stuff and toys to me.
I was involved a bidding war between GCP and AWS where each was offering a healthy six figures in free credits to move our business to their cloud. GCP was offering nearly 3x as many but ultimately I didn’t want to move to a service where there was a chance offerings were going to get the axe with no warning. Their reputation has indeed hurt them — at least in one instance.
A fair percentage of companies exploring my SaaS company as potential clients are doing so because Google doesn't provide any support / insight for practically any issue they may have.
As someone working for one of its competitor, I'm glad that waking up at night and solving a customer's problem (and/or our problem) is helping in a tangible way.
I work for a company which helps huge enterprises move to the cloud, and we found a lot of places opting for Azure because their experience with GCP support was really bad. These are people paying for the top tier of support too.
A year is an eternity for a start up. But it is a really short time to a large company with complex integrations, a massive book of work and budgets being trimmed every week.
A year isn't much for a non-startup business. Google has also increased prices in the past (maps, kubernetes) while AWS has afaik never increased prices on anything.
I've worked at a couple "mid-sized" financial companies (i.e., not "tech" companies, but with a healthy need for various computer products and services) throughout my career where migration plans from one technology or provider to another were measured in years, and would sometimes get extended to the order of decades for larger migrations (e.g. moving core business functionality off a legacy mainframe system). A year or two notice that you'll need to migrate something important is really not feasible for a lot of businesses who would otherwise be very interested in outsourcing to a cloud provider.
Google has a history of either cutting products (even successful ones) with poor offerings of migration (i.e. this from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548876 where they aren't even allowing bulk export of accounts), or cancelling your entire google account for issues in a single product with only automated systems there to respond to you (i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799)
I mean AWS does the same thing - mine crypto using credits to speedrun getting your account terminated. The only difference with GCP is that they have a reputation for this.
Regular credits as well. I'm speaking more about when an attacker mines monero on a compromised server, and I wasn't talking about products being axed (but I now realize the OP was).
They likely meant how google axes whole products like aws with no recourse for customers. Amazon probably would not do that to a product like aws in a million years.
I was part of a focus group a year ago. The general consensus was Google might be great, but everyone felt better about using AWS for real world projects. MS Azure was a close second.
Not to heap it on with anecdotes here, but I am also part of this group. I was working with the platform team as part of a marketing tech org that sees half the us pop in monthly visits. We were deciding between signing a long term deal with AWS or GCP. We wanted to use k8s at the time too and even realized that GCP was far superior in this space versus ECS / EKS. However support, and product lifespan was the deciding factors.
Similar factors in deciding between Office 365 or GSuite. Different products, same Google story.
Ex-GCP here. Unless you shell out at least $15,000 / mo [1] for a Technical Account Manager (TAM) you are a nobody to Google Cloud. Hence all the bots suspending accounts and scripted processes. If you are a small business, bite the bullet and use AWS.
Only if you forget to factor potential support problems into your economic analysis. What would your systems being down for a week because Google capriciously shut you down cost you?
The cheapest provider in existence runs on renewables (Hetzner Online). There isn't too much of a difference, especially for EU datacenters as they have a high excess of renewables and the energy market works in a way where you pay for renewables but just as everyone else you'll be using the base capacity generating dirty sources.
True, but due to the large extent of the services provided/required, it's very hard to know the unexpected costs, even if one has experience.
For example, one will hardly think of the cost of the disk speed (IOPS, in AWS), before moving to AWS. Then, they will suddenly have to deal with it (note that IOPS will be mostly opportunity costs, in case one doesn't choose provisioned IOPS of larger capacity).
AWS is run like a gigantic social experiment in "how half-assed and crusty can we make it and still have people pay?"
The reason we put up with them is because A. they're the new IBM, nobody gets fired for choosing AWS, B. you can reliably reach a human who will at least give you a straight answer when you start to suspect that the AI-powered auto-scaling is actually marketing fluff sprayed over a double/halve cron job that runs at the top of the hour.
^ My impression as well, after spending nearly $200K of my clients' money on AWS. I use GCP for my own work (+ a bunch of on-prem hardware) FWIW, but "the new IBM" phenomenon and "half assedness" is very real and palpable in the case of AWS.
>B. you can reliably reach a human who will at least give you a straight answer when you start to suspect that the AI-powered auto-scaling is actually marketing fluff sprayed over a double/halve cron job that runs at the top of the hour.
You say this as if it's an afterthought as opposed to an incredibly important and massive advantage AWS has over GCP.
This is great for AWS compared to GCP, but what about Azure? If anyone was "the new IBM" I would have expected it to be Microsoft (but I agree, it's not).
Off-topic, but this might be a good opportunity to address this:
Do people find "?" as being aggressive? I think questions generally, tend to be aggressive (which is why deflecting back at your opponent is common in online arguments), and I'm having a hard time seeing how a question mark does more than just attempt to annoy the other person.
I'm curious what others think, I may be too sensitive.
Yep, that's how I intended it, effectively the same as "What?" with the implied offense level being no larger or smaller than the offense inherent in expressing surprise at someone else's opinion. That level is not zero, but it falls well within the bounds of civil discourse, especially given the lack of elaboration in the original position and the fact that I invested seventeen times its length on explaining my own -- only to not receive a followup from the original poster.
Yeah, next time I'll just type out the question. However, given that it's starting to look like OP ghosted the conversation, I'm increasingly comfortable with the originally-unintended rude undertones of "?"
Well it usually has been when I've personally used it.
There is the disdain of not explaining exactly what you are questioning with the implicit assumption you are questioning everything said. It's pretty much a stand-in for "WTF are you on about? I don't even know how to ask a sensible question about what you said." when I've used it.
In this case though? It's a single statement so maybe a bit abrupt but I read it as a request for clarification. A fairly strong statement was made (essentially "don't use this company") with no backup or explanation. So an equal lack of effort was made proportionally in response.
We have a TAM, but it doesn't buy us much. They use their TAMs as a sales lever to get you to use all of the vendor-lock in features. They'll help you architect your platform so that it won't run anywhere else and charge you for the privilege. You can keep telling them all you want about how you operate multi-cloud and how you won't budge on that and they'll just keep trying to run higher up your flag pole.
For actual issues needing real support, like when anything breaks, they're useless.
We have a TAM as well and they've not show any value. In fact, every issue we've had we've had to escalate through non traditional means (IE personal relationships). Google absolutely does not care.
We've ultimately decided that we're moving out of Google strictly to AZURE / AWS, and ironically enough Oracle.
The job title “account manager” says it all. That is a 100% sales role. So don’t expect deep technical expertise. Any assistance rendered will be to grow the vendor footprint.
That matches my experience actually having worked on the GCP support team. The TAMs just deferred anything technical to the support team... unnecessarily escalating things and being pushy even though we were already investigating the support request with highest priority.
> One TAM unit provides on
average one business day’s
worth of effort per week
Just to have an ear on deck about Google's issues?
It sounds like the platform is bad enough that we're in the ballpark of Bald Tony the TAM coming in with a bat and saying "nice place ya got here in this rough neighborhood... pity if something bad happened to it!"
I'm an independent consultant and have also been involved in large public and hybrid cloud budget decisions between the 3 big players. GCP will never get my backing as long as Youtube continues on it's current path. That is purely from a Google/Alphabet ethics point of view. Don't get me wrong, the other two players are not certainly not perfect either, but they're a farcry better than GCP in my opinion.
Yeah, Amazon aren't exactly good guys either - there's too much to mention really, they're at least as bad as Alphabet.
Alphabet doesn't to my knowledge use poverty wages combined with prison like surveillance and massive union busting to prevent employees to be treated as thrash.
If you're choosing cloud service providers on the basis of corporate ethics, Azure is your best choice at the moment.
The optimists would say that's a testament to how much Msft's behavior has improved over the past 30 years; the pessimists would say its an indictment of just how bad Amzn and Goog really are.
I had just this scenario yesterday where Google ran out of capacity of NVMe-based N1 hosts in a zone. I was forced to upgrade a large number of nodes to N2 hosts, which cost more (despite their claims about them being cheaper -- the sustained use discounts are lower) and are still in Beta.
I just wanted info before I started about whether we should expect to be able to even build those hosts that day and they wouldn't give us _anything_. We're not exactly a small company and the amount we're spending with them is large.
Their answer was basically either reserve capacity or screw you. I had to relay that to my CTO.
Google tried with GAE, which is much closer to the Borg model (“I don't care about VMs, just run this code somewhere for me, and make it scale, make it automatically have access to a database”), but the world wasn't ready for it.
The world wants VMs and virtual networks and firewalls and clickable web interfaces and to run big legacy enterprise apps that MUST NEVER DIE and to fuck around with Terraform and to SSH onto boxes. This sucks, though, and Google SREs know better than to use such terrible abstractions unless forced to. The internal software development ecosystem is eons ahead of anything you can get with any cloud provider, but that sort of alien technology doesn't sell.
Kubernetes/GKE is a good compromise between something that Google sells but Google also wants to use. That, and some of the GCP versions of internal tools (Spanner, BigTable, BigQuery, ...).
I think the important thing is to have a mitigation strategy. Google was very smart in how they commoditized cloud offerings by inventing Kubernetes. You can explode your manifests into GCP, you can explode your manifests into AWS, and it mostly works the same. Obviously you can really screw yourself by not having offsite backups (backup your GCP database into AWS, or vice-versa), or by using their proprietary stuff (Cloud Spanner, AWS Aurora). But if you're careful, you're in control, and the cloud provider is just a commodity that you pick based on price and nothing else. As an application developer, that's a great place to be.
(Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.)
YouTube creators, however, do not have this luxury. People watch YouTube videos because they happened to be on YouTube and YouTube suggested the video, not because the end user was looking for your videos specifically. Social networks and video sharing sites are appealing to creators because there is the chance that The Algorithm (I hate that term) will award them with eyeballs that they can then sell to advertisers for very little effort. That is something you can't just migrate off of, because there are no competitors. You might convince your Patreon supporters to follow you, but even that is uncertain. I have watched many streamers move off of Twitch because they got a better deal from a competitor, only to watch their viewership drop to nothing until they were able to move back to Twitch. If one of these video sharing sites shuts you down, your career is over. Google kills your GCP account, you can still be a software engineer.
So my TL;DR is that cloud computing is very different from being an independent creator. Computers are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't matter which ones you use. But video sharing platforms give you a free audience, and that is something that is very hard to build yourself.
Non-technical users want easy solutions, and they need to be invested enough in your content to pass whatever barrier you put there. Projects like Floatplane[1] only capture a tiny segment of your audience.
Personally, I'd try a simple app that OAuths from YouTube/Google accounts and collects an email, so you control content announcements, even in case YouTube fails. It also has the advantage of being independent from other social media platforms.
> Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.
I do the same, and also back up my email regularly with getmail so that it will be easy to transfer, either if Google arbitrarily locks my account, or if they just shut down Gmail for good.
I wish there was a good solution to similarly back up Google Photos -- only partial metadata is exposed via the API.
GCP has some nice data and ML tooling I'd like to try but the potential risk just isn't worth it. Inefficiencies and extra costs that are constant I can adjust, budget for and deal with.
The company I work for is currently waiting for a reply from google related to an increase in quotas for google sign-in.
The feature has not worked for more than 8 months now, customers complaining and all. We have done everything on our hands (all documentation sent, demo app showing the feature, video explaining all usages, etc..) and it's as good as shouting to the abyss.
We were recently evaluating alternative cloud providers (our main one is AWS) and we discarded GCP because of this.
Imagine if you showed up to a self-storage facility one day and find a different lock on your unit. You go to the manager and ask what the hell is going on.
> Oh, you? Yeah, your unit was full of stolen goods, so we seized it and changed the lock.
> There was nothing stolen in there! What about a bunch of banged up furniture and old cans of paint made you think it was stolen?
(the manager stares blankly)
> Well?!
(crickets)
> Can I at least take back my stuff that you didn't mistake for being stolen?
> We burned it all and sunk the ashes in the Mariana Trench. There is no recourse. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. Have a nice day!
> Gee, thanks... ᵃˢˢʰᵒˡᵉ
---
If we ever come up with a digital bill of rights, one of the amendments should include being given a grace period to retrieve all of the data that you stored with a service in case they decide to terminate your account. It's absurd that you can store your data with a service one day, and in the next it's all gone because reasons.
you say 'frozen" but I think you mean "stolen". When someone offers to forward money to me in exchange for a small fee, we sign a contract, then they keep all the money that's at best fraud but in reality theft.
Now all I need to do is hire a US legal firm to sue paypal and get my money. Even if it was $100,000 it still wouldn't be worth it. Paypal know this.
"The data protection law establishes that you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated means, if the decision produces legal effects concerning you or significantly affects you in a similar way."
One of the clauses of the GDPR gives EU residents the right to appeal certain automated decisions that might affect them.
I'm sorry I didn't see your comment earlier, or I would have linked to yours from mine
While I was researching some substantiation for my comment, I noticed that Wikipedia has a citation saying "Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in the General Data Protection Regulation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... ) -- any idea if the footnote is outdated, or perhaps the actual statute is more nuanced than one might think?
Well no, because its a general regulation which can be overridden by other more specific laws. But besides that, I think that the scope of the regulation probably doesn't encompass traffic lights (no personal data involved). But I didn't look it up :D
More like, imagine if you show up to your storage one day and the lock is changed. You talk to the manager and he says, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service".
"Which rule did I break?", you ask.
He answers, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service."
You appeal multiple times and receive the exact same answer with a blank stare from the manager until he says: "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service, this decision is final and no further communication from you will be reviewed."
Then he just sits and stares at you blankly like you don't exist, no matter what you say.
This is also exactly how Amazon handles shutting down sellers as well.
Facebook does the same with ads customers if they think one of their ominous rules has been broken repeatedly. If the algorithm decides so, you can lose the ability to ever run an ad again by logging in from the wrong IP number.
Only a law that prohibits or at least severely limits automated handling of customer complaints would help against these practices.
I’m switching to T-Mobile as soon as the next phone is released because something in AT&T’s CRM is broken in such a way that they don’t remember how many times I’ve called them to fix an autopay that’s been broken since I reported my old card lost a year and a half ago. Every person I get on the phone treats me like a child who can’t fill out a support form. So they fill it out for me and no payments are ever done. This is the same card I used to manually pay in their support system, which works. If I pretend not to know when the last time was I contacted them, they can’t tell me. Escalate a ticket, no answer.
I’m afraid that whatever is broken will stop the phone number transfer from succeeding.
Could be your video content, or your emails, or whatever you have stored on servers, or in the case of Amazon, any merchandise you may be seeking through fba.
Imagine you stored all your stuff in a storage unit you didn't pay for, where the owner can show people round your stuff, but the owner surreptitiously takes photographs of people and what they are interested in. They then sell those photos to random people who then turn up at your house, your work, on the street, at your gym, in your supermarket and down the pub to try and sell you shit they know you're interested in. These people also sell those photos to a few hundred other such organisations.
Someone claims you stole their stuff, the owner of the building can't be arsed to investigate and tells you to gtfo.
That's the actual comparison.
Who would defend the guy borrowing the space? No-one. But then, if people found out their photos were being sold, they'd also be up in arms!
That's the reality, but somehow that's become the norm on the internet.
That would be the best outcome for the guy who made the videos, but the best outcome for the rest of us would be that content creators become (more) wary of YouTube and move to other platforms, or at least mirror their content on them. That would give us more choice and give YouTube some proper competition that might push them to do better by their users.
yeah maybe for this particular channel. This problem occurs again and again and is not new. YouTube and Google obviously don't scale in management & support
I agree with you and it makes me even more mad that it's only the people lucky enough to get some spotlight that ever get helped. I would be the guy who nobody ever knew about that got crushed like a bug.
I am not suggesting in any way that it doesn't happen, but I do take some solace in that I have never read a story where this kind of thing wasn't ultimately resolved, whether it made a beeline straight to the mothership via an insider on HN or simply endured the protracted process of the official support channels. I'd like to know more about how often undeserved "crushed bugs" are happening.
You realize that if you've heard of the story, that means it went viral, which means it's one of the few lucky ones which get resolved by a human. You don't hear about any that don't get resolved, because the ones that don't get resolved are they ones that didn't go viral. That's the whole reason why it's so ugly and injust.
This is just the general trend with things running on Google owned services. I don't think I've ever had to deal with a more customer/user hostile company. I've had an Android app get payments blocked and had to deal with repeated back-and-forth resending of the same documents over and over before they unblocked it. I never did get an answer on why any of that was necessary or why it was impossible to ever speak to anyone about the details related to the issue.
It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.
If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?
I managed to get myself temporarily locked out of a 10+ year old gmail account 2 months ago. I managed to get it back easily (finding my old phone sim and resetting).
But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life.
I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!
Another option is to control the domain. That is what I recommend for any account that is used to make money in any way. In the event you have a dispute with your email host, you can simply change the domain MX records. You may lose a few hours or a couple days of email, but your name doesn't disappear out of thin air.
That can happen for sure. You should do as little business with your registrar as possible. No hosting, just a domain and a couple DNS records.
Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted.
If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.
Not if using the regular popular DNS and want a domain name because you are just paying some entity for the right to include you on a list of addresses and nothing more. However you can own IPs and you can run your own DNS. Though you might have a hard time getting your IP routed to if you dont let it be managed by some ISP.
I have been hosting my own email using mailinabox. The tool is so painless I suggest more people should use it. The only ongoing maintenance I have had to manage is rebooting it to apply updates. The whole thing is backed up with a built in backup tool that rsyncs the data to my home server.
The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
Mailinabox configures everything in the way gmail likes. Unless you start your vps on a tainted IP address it should be no problem. I send to gmail and outlook emails fine.
Depends on your hosting provider with Outlook still right? I run a mail server on Linode and I had thought that Microsoft was still blocking all their IPs.
Its not really then end of the world. It just means I need to unsubscribe from newsletters manually rather than letting google dump them in the trash automatically. I would like to see server side email filtering though since my thunderbird filters are useless when my desktop is off and I check with my phone.
I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
Yeah this is an interesting side effect: I just use the recommended defaults in spamassassin with my self-hosted mail server and it does a much better job than gmail of properly sorting mail between inbox and spam folders.
mailinabox seems to be a 'magic script' of sorts, which ones can read through, but it seems to wave a wand and things should Just Work. ISPmail appears to be more of a set of instructions of what to run manually to reach the end goal.
How hard is it to understand what mailinabox does after running the script?
Mailinabox is very much automatic. You run an install script and it asks you for a hostname and domain and thats about it. It also manages updating, backups, certificates all for you.
I don't really know how it works but I have been running it for 2 years and it has been fine. The hardest thing was updating to the new ubuntu LTS which involved making sure my backups were safe, wiping the vps and then restoring the backup on a fresh ubuntu install.
Because the software is strict on using only a fresh ubuntu install with nothing else on it, it all just works because you have the same config as everyone else.
Well thanks to using rclone and gmvault (even though it is dead project it still keeps backing up my email) I am hoping it would be very minimal data loss.
I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time.
And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days.
But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.
I was using G Suite on a personal domain, and woke up one morning to discover that google refused to let me IMAP into my account any more. The error message pointed me at a browser verification page which I did multiple times, to no avail, so I moved to a different email provider.
Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.
This is my default stance too, and the advice I give to everyone that asks. If you're no big fish enough or you don't have contacts, you can have a serious problem.
I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again.
This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human.
In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services.
So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.
Big contracts too, surprisingly. We had a dedicated team of Google engineers supporting us, and we still ran into this !@#$%. Many, they could facilitate. Some, they could not.
> I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons.
It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to.
It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.
Yep, I blacklisted them as well and exclusively use Azure. It’s great and I know Microsoft makes its revenue on people like me, rather than on ad networks.
I’ve seen this type of behaviour before. To be completely honest, I have associated the release of new Google initiatives with headlines that say they are shutting down 12-24 months later.
Exactly this reason I avoided firebase at all costs. There is quite a few services now that I wouldnt have minded paying google considerable sums of money for, if it weren't for their long history of this kind of nonsense.
Its reached the point now this is just expected behaviour, and I feel sorry for anyone that has invested considerable effort into any of googles platforms.
Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive.
The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks.
But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.
What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.
Nothing other than Google is obsesed with automating things with half baked machine learning solutions and thinking they don't need a service desk with humans.
Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.
Well, maybe not Twitter? I've used their hidden platform team contact form about 4 times and I've never heard a response from them.
I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.
The main difference is traditional large companies aren't nearly as valuable or profitable because they employ a increasing number of support and customer service staff.
The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.
Google has a net income (aka profits) of $34b/yr and Youtube revenues ($16 bil) are about 12% of google's total revenues ($135 bil). If they sunk 12% of their net income (one year of net income growth) into hiring customer support and allocated 12% to youtube, that would be $490mil. Or around 5,000 account reps (avg cost of $100k/yr). At 1800 hrs/yr, that's around 9 mil man-hours they could put towards decent youtube creator relationship support.
My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it.
Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case.
The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.
Surprinsingly I got in contact with a human in Youtube to look into my blocked channel, after no avail I finally asked him to delete my account, but he refused. Why keeping it blocked forever? Seems like a blackmail scheme.
That sounds like a problem that is ordinarily dealt with by having human beings, who don't operate on a script, on the other end of the line. You can't automate everything, google.
But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings.
This is exactly right! Google has taken all the benefits of scale and made many billions of dollars in the process. At the same time, they’ve externalized all of the social costs onto their users. Hard problems like moderation, customer support, anti-fraud have been automated in an opaque fashion that leaves users with little or no recourse when things go wrong.
Let's be much, much more specific about the counter-point to your counter-point. We have concrete, hard evidence they aren't doing enough to protect their users: they're massively, enormously profitable.
If they were struggling to stay afloat under the weight of that metric crapton of abuse, then maybe I would take that excuse seriously. But they aren't. Every dollar they line their pockets with while allowing their users to be abused is a dollar exploited.
> C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable.
The mistakes Google's automated systems and reviewers make can cause lasting damage, even if your app or channel is reinstated after public outcry.
One of my browser extensions was removed for absurd reasons from the Chrome Web Store, and they've reversed their decision after things were made public [1][2]. While the extension was reinstated, since then it appears to be artificially pushed down in search results, and it no longer appears in the top three results when searching for the extension name [1], despite being in the second and third place for almost a year before the takedown and repeated update rejections were issued.
The way people get around this apparent "shadowban" behavior is by creating a separate legal entity of some form to be the publisher of each app or extension or channel or whatever. It seems that once you are shadowbanned, you are shadowbanned forever. This of course increases the cost of publishing your project, but this is a monopoly we're dealing with and so we have no recourse.
I worry for all the youtube channels I enjoy who have gone all in and made it their full time job. If anything were to happen they'd be done. There's no realistic alternative.
> It’s important that creators always have detailed knowledge about who is claiming content in their videos, where it appears, and what they can do to resolve the claim. That’s why all new manual claims will require copyright owners to provide timestamps to indicate exactly where their copyrighted content appears in videos they claim, and we’ve updated our editing tools to make it easier to automatically release a claim.
Is it a bug with Youtube or do they not follow this policy (consistently)?
DMCA notices are not issued by YouTube. I think you're confusing this with Content-ID, which is youtube's auto-algorithm thingy. That's not what happened here, though, per the video.
OP is talking is quoting a support article about manual claims, and how google require these manual claims must include a timestamp and description.
Something that is notably missing from the strikes shown in the video.
GP is saying that their system shouldn’t let copyright claimants just ignore Google’s policy. Which is clearly what’s happened here. Which just further demonstrates Google’s contempt for its creators.
Those are manual claims via YouTube's non-DMCA system. YouTube still has to respect DMCA claims and YouTube cannot impose requirements on DMCA notices. If it's a valid legal DMCA complaint, YouTube must comply. Google's policy is irrelevant here as it's not law.
The point of confusion here is that there's multiple ways to issue a copyright strike on YouTube. If this is via YouTube's internal mechanisms, then yeah this is bullshit. But if it's not and is instead a DMCA notice, and the evidence suggests it is a DMCA notice, then YouTube has no authority over the matter.
> (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. [1]
Now a timestamp isn’t required in a DMCA notice, but a description of the copyrighted work being infringed upon (i.e. a description of what has been stolen, not just a link to the supposed stolen article) is required to make it a valid notice.
In the video, the creator shows an email and YouTube page where Google claims that they haven’t been given a description of the copyrighted work being infringed upon.
If that’s true, then the DMCA notice given to YouTube is invalid, and once again YouTube demonstrates how little it cares about creators.
The creator should have requested the notice be forwarded to them for further inspection. We don't have the notice, we just know the details of it were not entered into YouTube's UI.
But given the channel in question, the notice & details are really not a mystery? If you cover a song, and get a copyright strike, is it not fairly obvious what the strike is about?
> The creator should have requested the notice be forwarded to them for further inspection.
How can they request that? Also, it's Youtube's stated policy that all copyright strikes must include the details. Also also, the creator did request the details of the strikes and Youtube didn't provide any.
> If you cover a song, and get a copyright strike, is it not fairly obvious what the strike is about?
No, it's not. There are numerous instances where companies would issue blanket copyright strikes even for content those companies don't have a copyright to [1]. There are instances where there are copyright strikes for silence and for bird noises [2]. Copyright strikes are anything but obvious, even for cover songs.
There's a difference. If someone manually claims a video through YT's content-ID system, they have to provide timestamps (this is enforced by Google).
If someone just sends a regular DMCA notice, they're only required (by law) to provide the URL, and Google has no choice but to take down everything at that URL, until/unless they receive a counter-claim from the poster.
The content-ID stuff is a convenience outside the law, if content owners (who have access to it) choose to use it. Anyone can file a DMCA notice, and Google has to respond in a particular way in order to be compliant with the law, and cannot impose extra requirements (like timestamps) before acting on the DMCA claim.
To quibble a bit, the video shows that YouTube's control panel tells users that a claim was "manual" and doesn't detail what "manual" means, or provide the DMCA notice (which is a written document, fwiw) that was filed, if one was.
I barely trust the information in the logging functions that I write, and those don't have legal consequences attached to providing extra detail.
Disclaimer: I have extensive knowledge about YouTube Content ID (CID) and DMCA notices, but I'm not a lawyer. This isn't legal advice.
He received a DMCA takedown, which is different from a copyright claim. Copyright claiming is a system made by YouTube for copyright owners to easily monetize/monitor reuse of their content instead of having to take down the content. It also allows splitting revenue in cases where one party owns copyright in specific territories. When you put content in CID, it will automatically claim videos and provide timestamps to the uploader. Sometimes CID fails to claim a video, and the copyright owner can then manually claim a video. There was a time where copyright owners didn't have to provide timestamps when they manually claimed a video. Nowadays, all manual claims need to provide a timestamp. Only highly trusted companies have access to CID, and getting a claim doesn't result in termination of your account.
The DMCA is a law that makes it easier to remove copyright content from the internet. It also makes it so that a service provider isn't responsible for the content they host. It is basically a legal action to take down content you own from the internet without having to start a lawsuit.
It works like this: when a copyright owner sends a DMCA takedown, the service provider needs to take down the content. If the uploader disagrees, they can send a counter notification. Unless the copyright owner that filed the takedown files a lawsuit within 14 days, the service provider needs to reinstate the content. You can be sued for damages in case of an incorrect DMCA takedown.
If YouTube would reject a DMCA, it would make YouTube responsible.
I'm not sure if it's a legal requirement, but YouTube has the rule that once a channel gets 3 DMCA takedowns (without counter notification) within 90 days, it will suspend the channel. Such a warning is usually referred to as a copyright strike (not to be confused with a copyright claim or a community guidelines strike).
One difference between the Google index and YouTube is that links in the Google index can be service providers like YouTube, while the owner of a YouTube channel is always the one responsible for the content.
Something notable that happened here is that instead of bundling the 5 videos in 1 DMCA takedown resulting in 1 strike, the party sent 5 separate DMCA takedowns causing 5 strikes.
Reading the DMCA (512(g)[1]) it seems a little more nuanced than that.
The DMCA provides wide protection to the service provider against liability for taking down stuff due to a DMCA notice (e.g. contractual SLA with customers mean nothing). However that protection disappears if the correct counter claim steps are followed, at which point the service provider becomes liable for not providing a service.
Of course with YouTube, they almost certainly have broad T&Cs that let them delete/disable your content for any reason at anytime (it’s not like creators are paying for hosting). So YouTube never had any liability to be protected from.
The net result, YouTube can do whatever they want with your content, and you have little to no recourse.
Do you have a source for this? I can't find evidence that this is a DMCA notice. Those are fairly straightforward to appeal on youtube which means the next step is court. I don't think this guy got actual DMCA notices.
That's a drag. That with the ramping up on ads is making YouTube harder to watch. Too bad because I think we can all list some amazing channels.
Slurping all 214 of his videos right now in case I want to improve my journeyman guitar skills in the future.
Interesting, no ads when you watch them that way. Imagining a browser extension that you kick off when in YouTube: it pulls down the video and opens it in a new browser window sans ads....
I always forget YouTube has ads until someone else shows me a video on their device and I'm like "Why do we have deal with 2 minutes of insurance sales for a 30 second video of two dogs playing?"
I have tried not to use uBlock because I understand that this is ad supported content, but Youtube is just killing me with the ads now. I don't think I'll be able to hold out. Literally every 5 minutes they break in with two commercials. It's worse than broadcast TV.
I wonder if you can script youtube-dl into doing something like this. as coayer said, ublock-origin will remove ads but this way you'll never lose your watch history to DMCA nonsense.
Maybe scrape your watch history nightly and take a delta of what you haven't downloaded yet.
I'm curious about this as well. How does that work with books too? Like can I read a book on Youtube and make money with that even if the book is copyrighted?
(In the US) Reading a book aloud is considered a performance and the book's copyright protects it. You could read it aloud (and make money with it) only so long as your activity is covered by fair use doctrine. If you want a more YouTube-relatable analogy, the passages from the book would need to be treated like the original content in a reaction video.
No, because reading the book aloud for free on YouTube would obviate the need for people to purchase the book (or otherwise acquire a purchased copy of it). In this case, learning how to play a song on guitar doesn't obviate the need to hear the original artist's recording of it.
It's an argument over the doctrine of fair use, which has four parts:
1. What's the purpose of the use? Is it for educational purposes, or commercial purposes? (These aren't mutually exclusive, which is a confounder)
2. What's claimed to be copyrighted/creative in the original work? Is the creativity in question merely the phrasing of facts, or are there aspects of the original author's own creativity (for music, this one is probably irrelevant; it's obviously a largely creative endeavor, though I guess there probably exist certain hypothetical pieces of music for which it's harder to say)
3. How much of the work has been used? This is tricky; he probably teaches how to play entire songs, but the guitar part of any given song is a small piece of the overall work (and he probably uses very little, if any, of the copyrighted recording)
4. What's the impact on the value of the original work? In this case it's clear that there is essentially no negative impact – if anything, if you're learning to play a song, you're more likely to purchase or otherwise consume the original recording. This is also usually the most important factor in deciding fair use (from what I understand; I am not a legal professional, I just remember this from a paper I wrote in college for some course or other).
Also note that the musical composition is itself a copyrighted work, not just the recording. So that is a better case against #3, but still doesn't change #4 (unless the songwriter are themselves offering a competing educational mechanism for learning the song... which could be the case, who knows!)
Thousands (millions?) of people post covers on YouTube with no issue, but sometimes people get unlucky. I don't think monetization makes a difference in the eyes of the law (maybe it would for proving damages? I'm not a lawyer.)
What's unusual is that he said he got 5 copyright strikes without telling him why. I've gotten a copyright notice on a video before and I got an email and I think it even shows on the video where the violation is. (I'm not 100% sure, it was a long time ago.)
AIUI the point is that they're being indiscriminate by taking down the whole channel, including potentially both fair-use and non-fair-use items (and even original content).
In a previous video on his original channel he talks about the first strike which was made against on of his tutorials by a company who published their tabs a few years AFTER he posted the video.
Sounds like it's a factor but not necessarily a deciding one. Also, the phrase used is "nonprofit educational purposes" so if he's got ads enabled he may be out of luck.
"Nonprofit" only appears in a non-normative portion of the statute, alongside other factors that might work in the plaintiff's favor here. Of course, Google's "shoot first and don't allow questions later" approach makes that pretty meaningless.
This is true, but won't help very much either. According to Google Support [1], they don't decide what is or is not fair use, leaving it up to the courts. This means the default position is that nothing is fair use unless the content creator is willing to go through the expensive process of proving it.
Funny enough, they cite a case where a content creator (h3h3 productions) was able to prove fair use in court as an example of the system working. If you look into that case though you'll see that the claimant was only an individual musician and not a big studio, and even then the legal fees were hundreds of thousands of dollars.
> they don't decide what is or is not fair use, leaving it up to the courts. This means the default position is that nothing is fair use unless the content creator is willing to go through the expensive process of proving it.
Well.. that doesn't sound right? That sounds like Google's decided it will treat the accused as guilty unless/until they defend and prove their innocence? Could it not equally decide all claims against them are bullshit unless/until the claimant sues and proves their damages?
Given that the rights holders are litigious and the ones with the money, if I were Google I'd also be taking the content down rather than being a sitting duck waiting to get sued whenever a random user clicks the dispute button on their strike notification.
Of course, taking all other videos down and disallowing to open another channel ever, those are not measures which should be used until both parties agree that this has been settled or one of the two supplies a court document. But I don't think it's entirely unreasonable (debatable, sure; unreasonable... not sure) to make the video(s) in question invisible to everyone except the owner, copyright holder, and youtube employees until they agree it's settled or the court settled it for them.
The thing is, Google has nothing to fear here. The DMCA -- as much as we generally think it's a poorly-thought-out law -- already handles this. There's no need for Google to do anything beyond handling DMCA notices in accordance with the law, but they've decided -- likely because it's better for business -- to cater to the needs of large rights holders at the expense of individuals.
As long as they handle DMCA notices as they're supposed to, they're not at all liable for the content posted on their platform (copyright-wise). But it's easier for them to provide a guilty-until-proven-innocent fast-track for their larger, trusted, monied rights holders.
> DMCA [...] already handles this. [...] no need [to do] anything beyond handling DMCA notices [...] As long as they handle DMCA notices ...
Alright alright, I get the message, they need to just "handle" DMCA notices. But doesn't "handling" them include taking the content down? Because that was what I was saying.
> [online service providers must] promptly block access to alleged infringing material (or remove such material from their systems) when they receive notification of an infringement claim from a copyright holder or the copyright holder's agent
Taking the material down seems to be within the scope of what you're saying is "all they have to do".
So based on that, citing from your comment now (not Wikipedia):
> it's easier for them to provide a guilty-until-proven-innocent fast-track
Is that not exactly what DMCA is, given the above?
Viacom still sued Google 10 years ago and dragged them through three court rulings before Google agreed to settle [1]. It didn't matter that early rulings favored YouTube on the matter of DMCA compliance, the content owners will find a way to hurt you and lock you in court. After Google settled the case, they created Content ID and Viacom stopped attacking them.
It frustrates that everyone seems to miss the cause whenever this kind of stuff comes up. Does anyone actually think Google likes being pushed around by copyright holders? Does it make any sense to you for Google to want to create this insanely complex system if all they have to do is handle DMCA notices like they did before Content ID? The content owners have always pushed for something beyond DMCA. YouTube complies because there is something to fear.
Music instruction channels on YouTube know that this may technically be true but simply does not matter. Rick Beato's channel has several rants about this, and here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqvuEal2P2E
Apparently you can have YouTube videos blocked or demonetized for even mentioning the name of a song from some very famous artists who have very active legal teams.
Looking at his other videos this seems like a clear cut case of copyright infringement, if he's not obtaining mechanical licenses. I don't understand why anyone is up in arms about this.
I think people are (rightfully) mad that YouTube is applying the rules so haphazardly. There are millions of similar videos on that aren't resulting in the creator getting their channel taken away.
But you're right that the guy is probably in the wrong. Part of the issue too is how opaque YouTube is about this kind of thing. It would be cool to see them build better appeals systems or at least treat their creators a little better than they treat copyright trolls (which may or may not be who gave him the strikes in the first place.)
In the United States you need to have generally 2 licenses. One is for the audio and another is to show you playing the song.
This may be different though if the work the creator is showing is considered transformative enough to be considered a new work altogether. It could be considered educational in nature instead of violating the copyright.
The thing is, this is not only a YouTube channel, it's a small business. Google is literally shutting down a small business without any proof. You could think that it's somewhat illegal to do, but apparently it's not.
YouTube can't just "opt out" of the law. YouTube absolutely responds to DMCA notices, and per the video he issued counter-claims already - that's a core part of responding to DMCA.
Sure, but these aren't proper DMCA claims. As kristofferR pointed out there are other extra jurisdictional mechanisms that Google employ to make your life difficult as a creator.
And then, which laws apply? US, UK, EU, Russian, Indian....
Now sure, it's a private platform and they can shut you down any time. I recognise there ain't no free speech on private platforms.
But if they've been making a tidy sum of lots of ad money due to your apparent infringement (and much, much more than you the creator) along the way then I'm sure we might see a well funded case against this practice, maybe not in the US, but other jurisdictions that still recognise the limits and powers of private companies and the right not to be fucked over by them.
It's not entirely clear what type of process actually lead YouTube to terminate this channel, so we can't know either.
> there are other extra jurisdictional mechanisms that Google employ to make your life difficult as a creator.
That's not quite true. The DMCA is a very strict mechanism. You get a notice, you take down the content, and if the uploader isn't happy with that, they have to sue the claimant.
Of course, Youtubes process is streamlined for its own interests and the interests of big corporate copyright hoarders. But it's not designed to bully creators.
The problem isn't really the process in itself, it's how Google applies it and the fact that Youtube doesn't seem to care that much for its creators.
When Github was sent a DMCA for the PopcornTime repo, PopcornTime was able to submit a counter DMCA which allowed the repo to be reinstated. Then, if the repo was really in violation, it had to be proven in court by the original claimant. Youtube doesn't allow creators to file a counter DMCA.
The same thing happened here. The creator issued a counter claim, and his channel is currently still up and unaffected https://www.youtube.com/c/GarethEvansYT
Youtube does allow DMCA counter claims because they legally have to. Youtube has absolutely no wiggle room with DMCA. No amount of complaining to them can ever change that, either. You have to get the laws changed.
Here and elsewhere in this thread, you're exaggerating the power of the DMCA over YouTube. The only consequence to YouTube if they fail to follow along with the DMCA takedown notice/counter-notice procedure is that they lose safe harbor protection against being held liable for their users copyright infringement. In a case where YouTube is overzealously removing content that is not actually infringing, they really aren't at much risk of that somehow leading to them being sued for infringement. And you can bet that their Terms of Service adequately indemnify them against any torts their users might come after them for related to such behavior.
> they lose safe harbor protection against being held liable for their users copyright infringement. In a case where YouTube is overzealously removing content that is not actually infringing,
Do you understand that the content in the submission is infringing? And not just to the civil level but to the criminal level? And so YouTube losing safe harbor would be huge.
> And so YouTube losing safe harbor would be huge.
No, it wouldn't, because YouTube is actually removing the content. So they're not going to get sued for infringement, and other parts of the DMCA still protect them even when they operate outside the bounds of the takedown notice procedure.
This is kinda missing the point: to appease Viacom and the other media companies when Google took over years ago, they set up a parallel but separate system for processing copyright claims that is in addition the DMCA.
A creator can have up to three strikes, with them disappearing over the course of time if they don't get more strikes. Contested copyright strikes may be elevated to DMCA requests if YouTube finds in favor of the creator, but it's not required.
If you run out of those strikes, your channel is immediately shut down. It's possible (especially with a large backlog of videos) to exceed this strike count before you can use their tools to argue against the strikes. When this happens, your account is shut down, and a "grace" timer is enabled to allow you to try and challenge the copyright strikes (one at a time). If that grace period passes and you're still out of strikes (don't dare to take a vacation), the only remaining choice is to appeal to the public.
Youtube works in its own little court, they're not real DMCA notices. Otherwise companies wouldn't be allowed to blanket claim random stuff with no repercussions.
Sorry that I didn't read much. But above comment section there are directly contradicting comments. One person says he may have received 5 DMCA notices and another person says it is not true. I have seen similar very contradictory things in other social medias too. How is this possible? How to quickly find who is lying without spending too much investigating?
I'm not sure anyone is lying here, so much as being misled by the conventional wisdom that YouTube has no incentive to straighten out. "DMCA" is a well-known buzzword, and the shallow understanding is that copyright infringement claims that get content taken down are all under the DMCA umbrella. The deeper understanding is that most of the big content hosts like YouTube have frontline systems that exist outside the DMCA procedure and its associated legal requirements, but YouTube is happy for the DMCA to take the blame for anything that is handled poorly by their own system. Disputes through that system can be escalated to real DMCA takedown notices.
Content-ID is something else entirely - an automated preemptive system. But last I checked, it looked like formal DMCA procedures weren't the only manual complaint alternative.
How do you know these aren't real DMCA notices? From the video it's a manual claim, which means it's not Content-ID. The email he received from the support agent also specifically states that they responded to a "complete and valid takedown notice." It also doesn't have the required information that YouTube's manual non-contentid system requires. And, finally, the creator issued a counter claim (stated at 2:40) and states the claimant's course of actions are now to either drop the claim or sue him.
All signs therefore point to this being a DMCA notice. If you have evidence to the contrary please provide it.
Note that you can definitely get a "manually detected" non-DMCA Content ID claim on a video[0] - but the screenshot he shows at 3:43 is in fact a DMCA claim since it says "This video is contributing to a copyright stroke on your channel".
0:30 he says "without any evidence at all". A DMCA notice should have "identifying infringing material clearly and specifically". Even though it sounds like a real DMCA notice, it still sounds like YT isn't facilitating it correctly. At 3:55 he mentions not being able to get this information. Seconds later he mentions YT doesn't mediate disputes. So what's going on here? Through their strike system and communicating to both parties, are they not mediating this? It looks more like a DMCA against YT, in which they immediately roll over, allow the company to file false DMCAs with no repercussion, and tell the content creator "kick rocks"
YT never mediates DMCA complaints. That's not their role or responsibility, nor something they can even do at all. DMCA requires the sites receiving them to immediately role over and comply. Which is the system that should be getting the ire and calls for changes.
And the video itself is identified. He does have that information.
Then this is a case of a tenant agreeing to onerous terms before setting up shop in a retail space, terms which allow the landlord to kick the tenant out at their whim, with no legal recourse.
I can't believe this needs to be said literally every time one of these types of articles gets posted on HN: if you build your business on top of someone else's platform, and have no contracts in place to protect your interests, your business's existence is completely at the whim of the platform owners.
I wish we lived in a world where the Googles of the internet had sane, transparent, easily-appealable processes for these sorts of things. But we don't, and absent government regulation, we probably aren't going to. People need to take these sorts of risks into account when deciding how to run their businesses, and have contingency plans.
It's interesting to note that in the landlord/tenant analogy, most jurisdictions have laws in place that prevent tenants from agreeing to such unbalanced, predatory contracts, and give tenants rights even in the absence of any agreement at all. Perhaps we do need something like that on the internet, for some things.
> Then this is a case of a tenant agreeing to onerous terms before setting up shop in a retail space
One small caveat - the small business owner had no choice in the matter when they moved in 10 years ago. There was only one mall people would actually visit across the entire world. And that mall has a clickwrap agreement for all their rentals, one which includes a clause that says "and we can change this agreement at will and without notice."
10 years ago it was probably less like a "small business" and more like a lemonade stand, so neither youtube nor the creator really cared about having a strong agreement or understanding in place.
It's not possible to build a business without participating on platforms.
Even the web is a platform now. You won't do well running a website if Google Search and Chrome don't favour it. Depending on how you plan to get your initial customers, you may hit a sizeable roadblock if Google Ads or Facebook Ads decide that they don't want to run your ads.
Windows and MacOS are also platforms.
Even pretty big companies depend upon platforms. Take the example of Epic getting booted from Apple's app store. Facebook have not been able to get Apple to approve Facebook Gaming.
If you want to start an ecommerce business, are you meant to build your own rather than using Amazon & Shopify?
It doesn't make sense to not participate on platforms. What does make sense is to consider what it means for your business. In certain extreme cases like YouTube or Apple's app store, it seems like some degree of regulation may be necessary to prevent the platforms from abusing their position.
Imo, government regulations is basically admitting defeat and trying desperately to mitigate a little harm while locking in a lot of it.
A regulator tends to lock the status quo into place, it's almost always incumbent friendly... like banking, casinos, tobacco, etc. Remember that Philip Morris benefits greatly from tobacco regulation.
What "good" would be is wrenching video out of YouTube's Kafkaesque hands.
That's the bit that doesn't ring true to me, his "non-commercial" claim. I'm not at all suggesting that he deserves the treatment he's getting, but it doesn't seem like he's being entirely straightforward here. Can anyone who knows the law weigh in on whether I'm missing something about the distinction between 'commercial' and 'monetized via advertising'?
My sense from listening to him talk is that he believes that not profiting from the videos directly, on YouTube, means that he's in the clear. I fear that this is not exactly how the law works, but I'm also not a lawyer.
>he believes that not profiting from the videos directly, on YouTube
I don't see where he says that. He says he's never profited from selling other people's material. I think he considers putting up content for free with ads to not be selling content.
You are probably being more precise about what he said than I was, but I think the two claims are roughly isomorphic, and also roughly equally incorrect. If I use someone's song in my advertisement I didn't "profit from selling their material," but it's still a commercial use and they will succeed if they sue me or take down my ad.
(1) In general.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
Is there anybody here who can give an insider's view on this case?
I'm aware of the problems of scaling support to a huge scale, and contexts where the communication of the termination causes is an issue in itself (e.g. to protect internal business logic).
However, in cases like this, being hostile seems an intentional decision - specifically, by hiding the reasons. Is this truly intentional on Google's side?
I'm trying to play devil's advocate, in order to better understand the real-world dynamics of support at large scale.
Every once in a while, some insider pops in discussions like this, and says "you don't know support at large scale etc.etc.".
Therefore, with both sides of the story at hand, a productive assessment could be done.
To clarify, I do think Google has a just "f*ck them all" approach to support; for example, there could be paid support plans for people who made a large investment. But I need to hear the devil :-)
We need to support alternative platforms and projects for reasons like this.
NewPipe is one of my recently discovered favourites. It pretty much scrapes Youtube and strips the horrid ads. You don't get any of the recommendation rubbish either and is far better from a privacy and data tracking point of view. FOSS for Android devices.
I've seen this on Twitter, Reddit and now HN, so I assume there will be enough buzz for Google to do something. I expect his channel to be undeleted, then a Twitter apology, then to repeat this all over again with another channel with sufficient clout in 5-6 months.
It's a shame that there's likely hundreds if not thousands of similar cases that didn't hit the internet quite like OP did. I think you must be crazy to have your income be only as a youtuber. It's like mountain climbing with no ropes, you can reach these tall peaks but any moment a foothold can break and you lose it all.
Here's the other way to look at it, videos like this are becoming fairly rare comparatively, maybe 2-3 a year. They definitely used to be more common before. Considering the millions or creators you have, and even with the fact that only a small number of them would make a video like this and blow up, it still is surprising that it's happening so infrequently.
The thing is, for all we know, 99.99% of cases could be handled properly, and we wouldn't have a clue. We only get to see it when it goes wrong, and someone complains. But again, such complains at the very least have been decreasing, while Youtube itself is ever growing, so it looks like at least something is improving in here.
It quickly stops being a mystery when he admits he uses other people's copyright material but "no more of the original subject matter than is necessary". That right after dishonestly asserting "every aspect of every video that I produce is generated by myself". If you aren't exploiting someone else's work, then don't use it! Even if it really is fair use, that just means he would win a lawsuit, not that every publisher is obliged to publish it.
Professional content creators for TV, movies, advertising, etc. don't have these problems because they make sure they don't use anybody else's content without a license! Youtubers don't bother because they're little fish and can get away with it and justify everything to themselves as fair use even if it's not.
Is teaching how to play the intro to Hey Jude on an acoustic guitar exploiting someone else's work? It's not like he's uploading the white album to YouTube.
If that lesson was broadcast on TV, the music would have been licensed, not "publish and pray". If he was really just teaching how to play the guitar, and not taking advantage of the fame of someone else's work that they paid to make popular, then he could have used a free unknown song or one he wrote himself.
I think if you watch OPs video you would agree that in this case YouTubes systems is also broken.
It’s kind of ridiculous that YouTube accept claims against an entire video without _any_ evidence, or even a description of what copyrighted material is being infringed on.
Instead it seems that YouTube will simply let someone claim that a video has copyrighted content without explanation (and in violation of the DMCA), and delete creators based on that.
Americans have setup the DMCA law in a way that content must be taken off without evidence (with widespread support on HN no less), so this one really isn't on YouTube.
If you read the DMCA you would know that at a minimum a DMCA notice needs to describe the copyrighted work being infringed upon (i.e. explain what has been stolen).
You can’t just go and claim that a video or other content infringes on a copyright somewhere. You must state which copyright is being infringed upon.
> (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. [1]
It seems to me they might be speaking past each other?
1. He's trying to figure out which video infringed on what work.
2. YouTube is refusing by saying they don't know which part of which video infringed on other work.
Not sure who's miscommunicating or what the reason is, but based on what he says, it seems this is what's happening. Anyone know if this sounds accurate?
> He's trying to figure out which video infringed on what work.
He knows which videos strikes were issued on. He doesn't know what he did wrong. Like he says in the video, he isn't provided with any timestamps or details about what has entails those strikes and the channel deletion
Yeah you're right. It's confusing to me because he seems to claim different things at different points in the video. At one point he says he doesn't know specifically which part of which video is claimed to infringe on what, whereas in so many other parts he says Google doesn't have any details whatsoever, or (like in 4:48) he suggests Google is lying when it seems like he's actually conflating Google's mentions of details of the infringing work with the infringed work.
It's not easy, but I think if they did get a critical mass, they could make a difference esp. if they are willing to collectively harm revenue (stop publishing and remove existing videos)
794 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadThey are just so arrogant and know that they will never get in trouble with the law that they just won't even spend a dime or a second thought on these issues no matter how life ruining they can be. Pretty sad.
https://lbry.tv/
https://www.dailymotion.com/
https://www.bitchute.com/
https://dlive.tv/
https://bittube.tv/
For professional videos, until there is a law that specifies that a monopoly (currently Google YouTube does seem like the only place where money making is possible) has to follow certain rules, they can throw you out for virtually any reason and it's not a secure way of making a living. So maybe it should be, but it currently isn't, and we can't currently force them to be.
Other platforms may not significantly help one to pay bills, I'm just wondering if that might not be okay given the sheer number of people who seem to have fun doing this. If not, we should make new laws.
Sure! We can definitely have charity content. Most of the content out there is.
Somebody's paying for most of the content most people want to watch, though.
A reasonable-quality single-camera A/V rig that a video producer would actually want to work with is comfortably in the middle four digits. Three cameras, low five. That money must come from somewhere, as must the rationalization for the time in a world as productized and generally fucked as ours, and "that's OK, art and media can just be done by wildly wealthy dilettantes in their spare time" is a shitty world.
I think it was prompted by seeing the name "Hodler" once and thinking it sounded like the cryptocurrency equivalent of Wainwright or Cooper.
So, bigger than that.
YouTube, like it or not, is the engine that drives many people's content business (the creators), and if the engine is denied to them, there really isn't a realistic alternative.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're Google."
https://vimeo.com/355556831
It's like the alternative really is "depend on his largesse and submit to his whims beacuse you can't overthrow the king because he is too powerful".
Like it or not YouTube is in an extremely solid position that is unlikely to be shifted by anyone at this point.
I often hear the “host your own content” but I don’t feel like there is an equally vocal “make it discoverable, too” crowd. That is until I discovered the indieweb.
The indieweb’s usage of microformats and features like “webmentions” that can be crawled ad hoc, enabling decentralized, federated discovery (example: http://indieweb.xyz) is the web that-IMO-we should have gotten. Not one dominated by corporatized, professionalized platforms
Twitch somehow seems to do a pretty good job of competing with YouTube.
If you move and only get a handful of views, do you really have a channel? If you can't take your viewers somewhere else, do you actually have viewers or are you simply one of the interchangeable nobodies that YouTube uses to keep YouTube viewers engaged?
I'm reminded of the "influencer" who couldn't sell 10 t-shirts to her "thousands" of viewers.
Still, we need people to start contributing to alternative platforms. The YouTube monopoly only benefits Google.
There are great ways to host video for free on the internet these days so if you want to preserve some video or link it in somewhere (I've seen vimeo used as a hosting platform for tutorial videos on sites) then you have much better option than YouTube - but if your business is the videos then you either need to survive on YT or else get big enough to splinter. Given how Dlive (pwediepie) and Nebula (technical vlog folks) haven't taken off that well I'm guessing you'll need a lot more behind you to go indy - those subscriptions (hit the bell icon!) and the feed are the feature YT sells.
Clips are a neat feature but they're a sharing feature, not a "help me watch" feature.
For $900 a year you get 7 TB of video and unlimited live streaming. Yes, YouTube is cheaper (free) and brings a large audience. So you have to balance paying for something that's certain or being at the whim of the market maker.
I believe it's because YouTube is as much a content-discovery platform as a content-delivery platform. If you only use Vimeo, very few people will discover your videos.
I don't know why more people don't upload to both, though.
> whim of the market maker
As I understand it, Vimeo are also far from perfect in this regard.
An interesting anecdote: the recent Michael Moore film, Planet of the Humans, was made freely available on YouTube, but was taken down after a copyright complaint. They moved the video to Vimeo, where it remains. (I can't comment on the legitimacy of the copyright complaint, and this is not an endorsement of the film.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Release
We have an large
Should be:
We have a large
lbry.tv - Shows 6 videos on the front page above the fold. 3 are appear to be strongly political, and 1 is pushing a far right conspiracy. NEXT.
bitchute.com - Front page appears to be entirely far right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Lots of race baiting. NEXT
diive.tv - Front page appears to indicate this is a streaming site ala twitch.tv. Mostly game videos on front page, along with 3 race riot videos. Due to titles about "no-go zones", I assume they are all going to be far right propaganda.
bittube.tv - Half of the videos on the front page are not in English. Not a bad thing, but surprising to me. The rest of the videos seem to be focusing on bitcoin scams, bill gates vaccines, and videos calling the corona-virus a left wing conspiracy.
Based on what I have seen, I now assume most of these sites are for people banned from Youtube for spouting far-right propaganda. Would not recommend any of them, and will likely not be back.
It would be cool if these sites were able to mirror all of the youtube content as well, so you get all of youtube plus the content that people are posting to the decentralized or anti-censorship platform. Probably illegal but that's kind of the point.
Of the people who get kicked off of those platforms, a significant number will be socially obnoxious. They of course have "freedom of speech but not freedom of reach", and our legal structure has decided that the big platforms get to enjoy being both a platform and a publisher, simultaneously.
So when a competitor comes along, the natural way to differentiate is to say "we won't ban you unless you break the law". So the socially obnoxious flood to the new plaform, and pretty quickly, you've got a core user base of people who like that, and a few people who are merely willing to tolerate it on principle.
I don't think this was originally strategic, more a matter of not wanting socially obnoxious voices on the platform, because advertisers don't care for that sort of thing. But it so obviously contributes to the continued dominance of the big platforms that there's no chance they haven't noticed.
We are "Social Media X but with no moderation" is a braindead business strategy. I'm failing to find a source, but moot (this founder of the anything goes social website), once said of all the 4chan clones, the ones that never lasted were the ones that were started by people who decided to make their own 4chan clone after being banned from the site. Naturally people discovered those clones were filled with insufferable asshats and died off.
Naturally when you look at these video sites, very few of them actually offer the number one thing I would expect from a YouTube clone - revenue sharing. So not only are they not competitive with YouTube, but for a large group of people kicked off of YouTube, they aren't even substitutes.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertu...
I don't know what you guys expect to happen if you just keep using YouTube... Do you expect some benevolent spirit to fly down on a fairy chariot and "break up YouTube"?
Y'all just want to complain but do nothing else.
Before the focus felt like it was more on exposing people to new up-and-comers, or random viral stuff. The viral stuff is still there, but so algorithmically driven, and catering to the lowest common denominator that it just feels off.
I have no clue how to find new channels with interesting concepts anymore.
They could buy one of the online course sites. I’d pay a small subscription as a Netflix “add-on” to get what ever I wanted to learn without ads.
It's not entirely fair to blame YouTube exclusively for the complicated mess that is copyright laws. In fact most of this video & thread are misdirected blame.
Per the video it sounds like he received 5 DMCA copyright strikes to which he issues counter-claims. That's not youtube's system and youtube is bound to follow the laws outlined by the DMCA. YouTube didn't issue the copyright strike, so why would YouTube know what was or wasn't at issue?
So yes the system is broken, but moving somewhere else doesn't fix it. The new system will still have this exact same set of circumstances happen because that new system will still be governed by DMCA & US copyright law (in this instance being US-based).
The only part of this that has anything to do with YouTube itself or being in YouTube's control is the channel being deleted. But that policy is clear - 3 copyright strikes and the channel is deleted. Too harsh? Maybe. Ambiguous or unclear? No. And if the channel does what it should as a business & lawyers up to respond to the DMCA notices & issue counter-claims, if those counters are successful then the channel remains at 0 strikes and isn't deleted. But there the part that's shit is DMCA. Want to fix that part? Stop blaming YouTube for it and go try to get the law reformed. YouTube isn't going to be your lawyer. Nor will Vimeo. Nor will any video hosting service.
Actually, I believe YouTube uses a mechanism which is explicitly not-DMCA for its copyright claims.
Under the DMCA, a user has the right of counterclaim, where the user says "your claim is wrong, here's why, see you in court", and the service provider has to reinstate the claimed material (unless it actually goes to court). I don't believe YouTube's ToS gives the user that provision.
https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Counterclaim
There's a summary but it links to a more detailed PDF.
If it is a "real" DMCA claim, then according to this Google must put the content back up within 10 to 14 business days. If it's Google's house rules then they don't, but that would mean it's not a real DMCA claim.
Now I understand Google reserves the right to ban you for anything at any time, like all providers. But that would be a secondary action in addition to this.
If his counter claims are successful there's no reason to believe the channel will be deleted, either.
This story probably got enough reach now that something will happen, as usual.
"If the subscriber serves a counter notification complying with statutory requirements, including a statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed or disabled through mistake or misidentification, then unless the copyright owner files an action seeking a court order against the subscriber, the service provider must put the material back up within 10-14 business days after receiving the counter notification."
But that’s not an excuse for every use case. For example a corporate training video with the URL emailed to every participant.
Why YouTube? Because everyone else does it. And nobody even began to think about looking at the possibility that there might be alternatives.
https://theonlinecourseguy.com/
Probably still worth reading? I got some good ideas and perspectives out of it, back in the day.
Just uh, sip the Kool-Aid, don't chug it.
* Same extraordinary number to lead you in
* Massive cost crossed out with FREE on top of it
* No preview till you put in your email
* Some rando endorsements at the bottom from people claiming to also have gotten rich quick both of whom are also selling Get Rich Quick™ stories.
.. of course it is. Ugh.
Yes, that was a thing twelve years ago, and apparently it's still a thing today. There was, back then, a nexus of the 'top tier' creators in San Diego. If you were attractive, they'd even mislead you into believing that you're "in the club" with them, in order to get you to buy more of their "inner circle" product.
Silver lining, I'm now hypersensitive to marketing formatting and layout, and can detect samples of it without having to read the words.
Ultimately I'm trying to gleam information from other successful course creators as I work on my own technical offerings. At the end of the day, it seems a better approach than hoping Youtube doesn't shut you down and continues to throw you scraps from their advertising revenue.
Piano In 21 Days, on the other hand, has been incredibly successful :)
-Jacques
GCP might have great support. They may not have automated bots suspending accounts. They might actually follow the DMCA counterclaim process instead of some weird process on top of it.
I'll never know: I restrict Google products to casual, throw-away contexts. I've imagined myself trying to explain to my boss or a client "They won't respond" or "They say they can't provide any information." Just typing that freaks me out.
Anyway, if you want to be a huge corporation living under one brand umbrella, you've got to take the good with the bad. Google is for entertainment stuff and toys to me.
It seems like for all of the Google ex-products I can think of, they gave advance notice of at least a year.
Turns out the fear is not unfounded see a confession by an ex GCP Googler:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572131
We can't reliably tell whether a product will be supported for the next N years. It feels non-deterministic.
Ironic how Google has squandered their goodwill.
Similar factors in deciding between Office 365 or GSuite. Different products, same Google story.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/enterprise-support...
The price charts are all publicly available. Anyone can check for themselves what the costs are.
For example, one will hardly think of the cost of the disk speed (IOPS, in AWS), before moving to AWS. Then, they will suddenly have to deal with it (note that IOPS will be mostly opportunity costs, in case one doesn't choose provisioned IOPS of larger capacity).
AWS prices are well-known, and not for being low.
Now, the benefit of AWS may well be worth the high cost - that's a separate question.
AWS is run like a gigantic social experiment in "how half-assed and crusty can we make it and still have people pay?"
The reason we put up with them is because A. they're the new IBM, nobody gets fired for choosing AWS, B. you can reliably reach a human who will at least give you a straight answer when you start to suspect that the AI-powered auto-scaling is actually marketing fluff sprayed over a double/halve cron job that runs at the top of the hour.
You say this as if it's an afterthought as opposed to an incredibly important and massive advantage AWS has over GCP.
Do people find "?" as being aggressive? I think questions generally, tend to be aggressive (which is why deflecting back at your opponent is common in online arguments), and I'm having a hard time seeing how a question mark does more than just attempt to annoy the other person.
I'm curious what others think, I may be too sensitive.
I'm on the younger side for HN. In my social circles replying to something with either just '?' or just a leading '?' is pretty aggressive and rude.
I read it as, "huh?" or "what?" or even maybe, "who are you kidding?" and for all of those determining offense level comes with context.
In this context, the person replying clearly sees it as a bullet and puts some detail on why out there.
Frankly, that kind of thing is as offensive as we all might think it is. Almost any offensive thing is.
Context matters.
If it were me, I would continue your preferred mode of expression.
Offence works in strange ways.
Truth is, we are all as offended as we think we are.
And the reasons for it vary widely, with some well established ones seeing broad, but rarely complete consensus too.
Implication?
There is no way to know what may be offensive beyond a few well trodden examples.
Second order implication?
Offence is gamed easily, and I submit regularly as a tactic more than a meaningful, or sincere sentiment.
Having worked through that in my life, I quit apologizing and put more effort into understanding others and helping others understand me.
Starts with, "I did not intend to offend"
And carries on with whatever the primary context is, not the meta context.
Where others insist on the meta, I simply cannot help them and either the convo settles back to its original intent and value or it does not.
All I can do is leave the door wide open to continue and express my stated intent and that I am the authority on it.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I cannot tell you how many conversations I have recovered to good ends doing that.
My 0.02
There is the disdain of not explaining exactly what you are questioning with the implicit assumption you are questioning everything said. It's pretty much a stand-in for "WTF are you on about? I don't even know how to ask a sensible question about what you said." when I've used it.
In this case though? It's a single statement so maybe a bit abrupt but I read it as a request for clarification. A fairly strong statement was made (essentially "don't use this company") with no backup or explanation. So an equal lack of effort was made proportionally in response.
For actual issues needing real support, like when anything breaks, they're useless.
We've ultimately decided that we're moving out of Google strictly to AZURE / AWS, and ironically enough Oracle.
> Minimum 12 month contract
> One TAM unit provides on average one business day’s worth of effort per week
Just to have an ear on deck about Google's issues?
It sounds like the platform is bad enough that we're in the ballpark of Bald Tony the TAM coming in with a bat and saying "nice place ya got here in this rough neighborhood... pity if something bad happened to it!"
Alphabet doesn't to my knowledge use poverty wages combined with prison like surveillance and massive union busting to prevent employees to be treated as thrash.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-is-hiring-intelligence-...
The optimists would say that's a testament to how much Msft's behavior has improved over the past 30 years; the pessimists would say its an indictment of just how bad Amzn and Goog really are.
AWS or Azure will always trump GCP in my mind because Amazon and Microsoft have shown over the years they care about their customers on most fronts.
I just wanted info before I started about whether we should expect to be able to even build those hosts that day and they wouldn't give us _anything_. We're not exactly a small company and the amount we're spending with them is large.
Their answer was basically either reserve capacity or screw you. I had to relay that to my CTO.
The world wants VMs and virtual networks and firewalls and clickable web interfaces and to run big legacy enterprise apps that MUST NEVER DIE and to fuck around with Terraform and to SSH onto boxes. This sucks, though, and Google SREs know better than to use such terrible abstractions unless forced to. The internal software development ecosystem is eons ahead of anything you can get with any cloud provider, but that sort of alien technology doesn't sell.
Kubernetes/GKE is a good compromise between something that Google sells but Google also wants to use. That, and some of the GCP versions of internal tools (Spanner, BigTable, BigQuery, ...).
We're all just living in the real world. What to Google looks like non-terrible abstractions looks like Kool Aid elsewhere.
(Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.)
YouTube creators, however, do not have this luxury. People watch YouTube videos because they happened to be on YouTube and YouTube suggested the video, not because the end user was looking for your videos specifically. Social networks and video sharing sites are appealing to creators because there is the chance that The Algorithm (I hate that term) will award them with eyeballs that they can then sell to advertisers for very little effort. That is something you can't just migrate off of, because there are no competitors. You might convince your Patreon supporters to follow you, but even that is uncertain. I have watched many streamers move off of Twitch because they got a better deal from a competitor, only to watch their viewership drop to nothing until they were able to move back to Twitch. If one of these video sharing sites shuts you down, your career is over. Google kills your GCP account, you can still be a software engineer.
So my TL;DR is that cloud computing is very different from being an independent creator. Computers are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't matter which ones you use. But video sharing platforms give you a free audience, and that is something that is very hard to build yourself.
"Like this video, subscribe, and don't forget to add this channel to your video-RSS feed. Link in the description below." ?
Edit: Looks like this functionality already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en
Looks like Vimeo does too: https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-c...
Personally, I'd try a simple app that OAuths from YouTube/Google accounts and collects an email, so you control content announcements, even in case YouTube fails. It also has the advantage of being independent from other social media platforms.
[1]: https://www.floatplane.com/
I do the same, and also back up my email regularly with getmail so that it will be easy to transfer, either if Google arbitrarily locks my account, or if they just shut down Gmail for good.
I wish there was a good solution to similarly back up Google Photos -- only partial metadata is exposed via the API.
The feature has not worked for more than 8 months now, customers complaining and all. We have done everything on our hands (all documentation sent, demo app showing the feature, video explaining all usages, etc..) and it's as good as shouting to the abyss.
We were recently evaluating alternative cloud providers (our main one is AWS) and we discarded GCP because of this.
> Oh, you? Yeah, your unit was full of stolen goods, so we seized it and changed the lock.
> There was nothing stolen in there! What about a bunch of banged up furniture and old cans of paint made you think it was stolen?
(the manager stares blankly)
> Well?!
(crickets)
> Can I at least take back my stuff that you didn't mistake for being stolen?
> We burned it all and sunk the ashes in the Mariana Trench. There is no recourse. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. Have a nice day!
> Gee, thanks... ᵃˢˢʰᵒˡᵉ
---
If we ever come up with a digital bill of rights, one of the amendments should include being given a grace period to retrieve all of the data that you stored with a service in case they decide to terminate your account. It's absurd that you can store your data with a service one day, and in the next it's all gone because reasons.
Now all I need to do is hire a US legal firm to sue paypal and get my money. Even if it was $100,000 it still wouldn't be worth it. Paypal know this.
One of the clauses of the GDPR gives EU residents the right to appeal certain automated decisions that might affect them.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
While I was researching some substantiation for my comment, I noticed that Wikipedia has a citation saying "Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in the General Data Protection Regulation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... ) -- any idea if the footnote is outdated, or perhaps the actual statute is more nuanced than one might think?
Sounds like traffic lights are illegal in the EU.
More like, imagine if you show up to your storage one day and the lock is changed. You talk to the manager and he says, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service".
"Which rule did I break?", you ask.
He answers, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service."
You appeal multiple times and receive the exact same answer with a blank stare from the manager until he says: "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service, this decision is final and no further communication from you will be reviewed."
Then he just sits and stares at you blankly like you don't exist, no matter what you say.
This is also exactly how Amazon handles shutting down sellers as well.
Only a law that prohibits or at least severely limits automated handling of customer complaints would help against these practices.
I only recently learned that GDPR actually includes such a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... although a footnote later appears to say "no, it does not" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... so I guess we leave that fight to lawyers
There is further commentary elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572144
I’m afraid that whatever is broken will stop the phone number transfer from succeeding.
Imagine you stored all your stuff in a storage unit you didn't pay for, where the owner can show people round your stuff, but the owner surreptitiously takes photographs of people and what they are interested in. They then sell those photos to random people who then turn up at your house, your work, on the street, at your gym, in your supermarket and down the pub to try and sell you shit they know you're interested in. These people also sell those photos to a few hundred other such organisations.
Someone claims you stole their stuff, the owner of the building can't be arsed to investigate and tells you to gtfo.
That's the actual comparison.
Who would defend the guy borrowing the space? No-one. But then, if people found out their photos were being sold, they'd also be up in arms!
That's the reality, but somehow that's become the norm on the internet.
Kafka, at least, got to talk to a person. OTOH, we get to enjoy our Kafkaesque distopia without having to physically go to some office.
It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.
If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?
I have a Gmail inbox that sends and receives from dozens of addresses on 4 different domains.
If Google locked me out, I could just update the forwarding rule on my domain to go to a different email.
But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life.
I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!
Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted.
If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.
https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#ipv4-ipv6-...
My rational is to align my interests with the company running the infrastructure for a fundamental component of my digital life.
Free email is fine most of the time. Until it's not. I want to limit my "until it's not" exposure.
The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
How bad is life without that filter?
I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
How does it compare to ISPmail:
* https://workaround.org/ispmail
mailinabox seems to be a 'magic script' of sorts, which ones can read through, but it seems to wave a wand and things should Just Work. ISPmail appears to be more of a set of instructions of what to run manually to reach the end goal.
How hard is it to understand what mailinabox does after running the script?
I don't really know how it works but I have been running it for 2 years and it has been fine. The hardest thing was updating to the new ubuntu LTS which involved making sure my backups were safe, wiping the vps and then restoring the backup on a fresh ubuntu install.
Because the software is strict on using only a fresh ubuntu install with nothing else on it, it all just works because you have the same config as everyone else.
I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time.
And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days.
But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.
Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.
I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again.
This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human.
In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services.
So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.
It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to.
It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.
This doesn't help when Google decide to sunset one or more of the services that you're relying on, forcing you to migrate elsewhere or re-design
Its reached the point now this is just expected behaviour, and I feel sorry for anyone that has invested considerable effort into any of googles platforms.
A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it.
B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money.
C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable.
D.) They don't want to leak any details that help scammers learn how to get around automated anti-fraud/abuse systems.
edit to add:
E.) The reason might be something utterly embarrassing about some really dumb internal snafu.
Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive.
The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks.
But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.
Do you have any examples?
Other companies automate a lot but its way easier to get to a person. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon - they will all get back to you in under 48 hours and actually undo what the machines have done.
I say hidden because there's a hard to find page that lists all of the contact forms, except the platform contact form isn't on there. You just kinda of... have to know it exists somehow.
The only reason Google is as profitable as it is is because it's happy to automatically delete people's livelihoods programmatically for free.
My understanding is that there around 30mil youtube channels. Let's say that 10% of those are regular uploaders and maybe 10% of that, it's a major part of their lives. So that's around 300,000 creators. Of those perhaps 30,000 make a living from it.
Most issues that come up can probably be resolved via their current automated systems. If those creators have an average of 1 issue that needs human intervention every year, that's 300,000 cases. Which means apx 30 man-hours per case. If 10 issues that require human intervention, that's still 3 man-hours per case.
The conclusion is that Google can easily afford to provide human customer support to creators on YouTube. They simply refuse to do so in order to make more money or for philosophical reasons. Most likely, they view creators as essentially disposable and don't care if they ruin them or not. "Scale" has little to do with it.
This is exactly right! Google has taken all the benefits of scale and made many billions of dollars in the process. At the same time, they’ve externalized all of the social costs onto their users. Hard problems like moderation, customer support, anti-fraud have been automated in an opaque fashion that leaves users with little or no recourse when things go wrong.
If they were struggling to stay afloat under the weight of that metric crapton of abuse, then maybe I would take that excuse seriously. But they aren't. Every dollar they line their pockets with while allowing their users to be abused is a dollar exploited.
The mistakes Google's automated systems and reviewers make can cause lasting damage, even if your app or channel is reinstated after public outcry.
One of my browser extensions was removed for absurd reasons from the Chrome Web Store, and they've reversed their decision after things were made public [1][2]. While the extension was reinstated, since then it appears to be artificially pushed down in search results, and it no longer appears in the top three results when searching for the extension name [1], despite being in the second and third place for almost a year before the takedown and repeated update rejections were issued.
[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/57
[2] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image/issues/63
[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/search%20by%20imag...
The Castle, and The Trial particularly.
I wonder if there's anyone writing Kafkaesque fiction about the modern world. I'm sure it could be Googlified. Any ideas anyone?
> It’s important that creators always have detailed knowledge about who is claiming content in their videos, where it appears, and what they can do to resolve the claim. That’s why all new manual claims will require copyright owners to provide timestamps to indicate exactly where their copyrighted content appears in videos they claim, and we’ve updated our editing tools to make it easier to automatically release a claim.
Is it a bug with Youtube or do they not follow this policy (consistently)?
Even if that is "just a technical issue", no one cared enough to spend resources to fix their underlying system to reflect that policy.
Something that is notably missing from the strikes shown in the video.
GP is saying that their system shouldn’t let copyright claimants just ignore Google’s policy. Which is clearly what’s happened here. Which just further demonstrates Google’s contempt for its creators.
The point of confusion here is that there's multiple ways to issue a copyright strike on YouTube. If this is via YouTube's internal mechanisms, then yeah this is bullshit. But if it's not and is instead a DMCA notice, and the evidence suggests it is a DMCA notice, then YouTube has no authority over the matter.
> (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. [1]
Now a timestamp isn’t required in a DMCA notice, but a description of the copyrighted work being infringed upon (i.e. a description of what has been stolen, not just a link to the supposed stolen article) is required to make it a valid notice.
In the video, the creator shows an email and YouTube page where Google claims that they haven’t been given a description of the copyrighted work being infringed upon.
If that’s true, then the DMCA notice given to YouTube is invalid, and once again YouTube demonstrates how little it cares about creators.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
But given the channel in question, the notice & details are really not a mystery? If you cover a song, and get a copyright strike, is it not fairly obvious what the strike is about?
How can they request that? Also, it's Youtube's stated policy that all copyright strikes must include the details. Also also, the creator did request the details of the strikes and Youtube didn't provide any.
> If you cover a song, and get a copyright strike, is it not fairly obvious what the strike is about?
No, it's not. There are numerous instances where companies would issue blanket copyright strikes even for content those companies don't have a copyright to [1]. There are instances where there are copyright strikes for silence and for bird noises [2]. Copyright strikes are anything but obvious, even for cover songs.
[1] https://www.ccn.com/youtube-has-massive-false-copyright-clai...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523 and https://thenextweb.com/google/2012/02/27/a-copyright-claim-o...
It must not be a manual complaint. That's some nice PR-Legalese.
If someone just sends a regular DMCA notice, they're only required (by law) to provide the URL, and Google has no choice but to take down everything at that URL, until/unless they receive a counter-claim from the poster.
The content-ID stuff is a convenience outside the law, if content owners (who have access to it) choose to use it. Anyone can file a DMCA notice, and Google has to respond in a particular way in order to be compliant with the law, and cannot impose extra requirements (like timestamps) before acting on the DMCA claim.
You can’t just go “this video infringes on my copyright, but I’m not going to tell you which copyright”. That isn’t a valid DMCA notice at all.
[1] § (512(c)(3)(A)(i-vi)) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
I barely trust the information in the logging functions that I write, and those don't have legal consequences attached to providing extra detail.
He received a DMCA takedown, which is different from a copyright claim. Copyright claiming is a system made by YouTube for copyright owners to easily monetize/monitor reuse of their content instead of having to take down the content. It also allows splitting revenue in cases where one party owns copyright in specific territories. When you put content in CID, it will automatically claim videos and provide timestamps to the uploader. Sometimes CID fails to claim a video, and the copyright owner can then manually claim a video. There was a time where copyright owners didn't have to provide timestamps when they manually claimed a video. Nowadays, all manual claims need to provide a timestamp. Only highly trusted companies have access to CID, and getting a claim doesn't result in termination of your account.
The DMCA is a law that makes it easier to remove copyright content from the internet. It also makes it so that a service provider isn't responsible for the content they host. It is basically a legal action to take down content you own from the internet without having to start a lawsuit.
It works like this: when a copyright owner sends a DMCA takedown, the service provider needs to take down the content. If the uploader disagrees, they can send a counter notification. Unless the copyright owner that filed the takedown files a lawsuit within 14 days, the service provider needs to reinstate the content. You can be sued for damages in case of an incorrect DMCA takedown.
If YouTube would reject a DMCA, it would make YouTube responsible.
I guess that's how Google's index works, they remove indexed results, but not the whole index.
One difference between the Google index and YouTube is that links in the Google index can be service providers like YouTube, while the owner of a YouTube channel is always the one responsible for the content.
Something notable that happened here is that instead of bundling the 5 videos in 1 DMCA takedown resulting in 1 strike, the party sent 5 separate DMCA takedowns causing 5 strikes.
I believe this is may reinstate the content, I don't think they're obligated too. Also not a lawyer.
The DMCA provides wide protection to the service provider against liability for taking down stuff due to a DMCA notice (e.g. contractual SLA with customers mean nothing). However that protection disappears if the correct counter claim steps are followed, at which point the service provider becomes liable for not providing a service.
Of course with YouTube, they almost certainly have broad T&Cs that let them delete/disable your content for any reason at anytime (it’s not like creators are paying for hosting). So YouTube never had any liability to be protected from.
The net result, YouTube can do whatever they want with your content, and you have little to no recourse.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
Do you have a source for this? I can't find evidence that this is a DMCA notice. Those are fairly straightforward to appeal on youtube which means the next step is court. I don't think this guy got actual DMCA notices.
Slurping all 214 of his videos right now in case I want to improve my journeyman guitar skills in the future.
Interesting, no ads when you watch them that way. Imagining a browser extension that you kick off when in YouTube: it pulls down the video and opens it in a new browser window sans ads....
(Safari broke that extension though.)
For everything else, there's PiHole
Maybe scrape your watch history nightly and take a delta of what you haven't downloaded yet.
Is he legally allowed to make a guitar cover of any song he wants to and distribute it?
It's also not clear if there were ads on the videos. Would that play a role?
It's an argument over the doctrine of fair use, which has four parts:
1. What's the purpose of the use? Is it for educational purposes, or commercial purposes? (These aren't mutually exclusive, which is a confounder)
2. What's claimed to be copyrighted/creative in the original work? Is the creativity in question merely the phrasing of facts, or are there aspects of the original author's own creativity (for music, this one is probably irrelevant; it's obviously a largely creative endeavor, though I guess there probably exist certain hypothetical pieces of music for which it's harder to say)
3. How much of the work has been used? This is tricky; he probably teaches how to play entire songs, but the guitar part of any given song is a small piece of the overall work (and he probably uses very little, if any, of the copyrighted recording)
4. What's the impact on the value of the original work? In this case it's clear that there is essentially no negative impact – if anything, if you're learning to play a song, you're more likely to purchase or otherwise consume the original recording. This is also usually the most important factor in deciding fair use (from what I understand; I am not a legal professional, I just remember this from a paper I wrote in college for some course or other).
(edit: formatting)
Thousands (millions?) of people post covers on YouTube with no issue, but sometimes people get unlucky. I don't think monetization makes a difference in the eyes of the law (maybe it would for proving damages? I'm not a lawyer.)
What's unusual is that he said he got 5 copyright strikes without telling him why. I've gotten a copyright notice on a video before and I got an email and I think it even shows on the video where the violation is. (I'm not 100% sure, it was a long time ago.)
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107
Funny enough, they cite a case where a content creator (h3h3 productions) was able to prove fair use in court as an example of the system working. If you look into that case though you'll see that the claimant was only an individual musician and not a big studio, and even then the legal fees were hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/1281991?hl=en
Well.. that doesn't sound right? That sounds like Google's decided it will treat the accused as guilty unless/until they defend and prove their innocence? Could it not equally decide all claims against them are bullshit unless/until the claimant sues and proves their damages?
Of course, taking all other videos down and disallowing to open another channel ever, those are not measures which should be used until both parties agree that this has been settled or one of the two supplies a court document. But I don't think it's entirely unreasonable (debatable, sure; unreasonable... not sure) to make the video(s) in question invisible to everyone except the owner, copyright holder, and youtube employees until they agree it's settled or the court settled it for them.
As long as they handle DMCA notices as they're supposed to, they're not at all liable for the content posted on their platform (copyright-wise). But it's easier for them to provide a guilty-until-proven-innocent fast-track for their larger, trusted, monied rights holders.
Alright alright, I get the message, they need to just "handle" DMCA notices. But doesn't "handling" them include taking the content down? Because that was what I was saying.
Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
> [online service providers must] promptly block access to alleged infringing material (or remove such material from their systems) when they receive notification of an infringement claim from a copyright holder or the copyright holder's agent
Taking the material down seems to be within the scope of what you're saying is "all they have to do".
So based on that, citing from your comment now (not Wikipedia):
> it's easier for them to provide a guilty-until-proven-innocent fast-track
Is that not exactly what DMCA is, given the above?
Viacom still sued Google 10 years ago and dragged them through three court rulings before Google agreed to settle [1]. It didn't matter that early rulings favored YouTube on the matter of DMCA compliance, the content owners will find a way to hurt you and lock you in court. After Google settled the case, they created Content ID and Viacom stopped attacking them.
It frustrates that everyone seems to miss the cause whenever this kind of stuff comes up. Does anyone actually think Google likes being pushed around by copyright holders? Does it make any sense to you for Google to want to create this insanely complex system if all they have to do is handle DMCA notices like they did before Content ID? The content owners have always pushed for something beyond DMCA. YouTube complies because there is something to fear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
Apparently you can have YouTube videos blocked or demonetized for even mentioning the name of a song from some very famous artists who have very active legal teams.
But you're right that the guy is probably in the wrong. Part of the issue too is how opaque YouTube is about this kind of thing. It would be cool to see them build better appeals systems or at least treat their creators a little better than they treat copyright trolls (which may or may not be who gave him the strikes in the first place.)
Because copyright is controversial.
This may be different though if the work the creator is showing is considered transformative enough to be considered a new work altogether. It could be considered educational in nature instead of violating the copyright.
Youtube has its own "extra jurisdictional" copyright system.
YouTube can't just "opt out" of the law. YouTube absolutely responds to DMCA notices, and per the video he issued counter-claims already - that's a core part of responding to DMCA.
https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/copyright/#...
And you don't have to go through youtube's webtools to submit one, either (which of course you don't - the law doesn't require that). You can mail, fax, or email the DMCA takedown notice: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6005908?hl=en&ref_...
Sure, but these aren't proper DMCA claims. As kristofferR pointed out there are other extra jurisdictional mechanisms that Google employ to make your life difficult as a creator.
And then, which laws apply? US, UK, EU, Russian, Indian....
Now sure, it's a private platform and they can shut you down any time. I recognise there ain't no free speech on private platforms.
But if they've been making a tidy sum of lots of ad money due to your apparent infringement (and much, much more than you the creator) along the way then I'm sure we might see a well funded case against this practice, maybe not in the US, but other jurisdictions that still recognise the limits and powers of private companies and the right not to be fucked over by them.
> there are other extra jurisdictional mechanisms that Google employ to make your life difficult as a creator.
That's not quite true. The DMCA is a very strict mechanism. You get a notice, you take down the content, and if the uploader isn't happy with that, they have to sue the claimant.
Of course, Youtubes process is streamlined for its own interests and the interests of big corporate copyright hoarders. But it's not designed to bully creators.
The problem isn't really the process in itself, it's how Google applies it and the fact that Youtube doesn't seem to care that much for its creators.
Youtube does allow DMCA counter claims because they legally have to. Youtube has absolutely no wiggle room with DMCA. No amount of complaining to them can ever change that, either. You have to get the laws changed.
Do you understand that the content in the submission is infringing? And not just to the civil level but to the criminal level? And so YouTube losing safe harbor would be huge.
No, it wouldn't, because YouTube is actually removing the content. So they're not going to get sued for infringement, and other parts of the DMCA still protect them even when they operate outside the bounds of the takedown notice procedure.
A creator can have up to three strikes, with them disappearing over the course of time if they don't get more strikes. Contested copyright strikes may be elevated to DMCA requests if YouTube finds in favor of the creator, but it's not required.
If you run out of those strikes, your channel is immediately shut down. It's possible (especially with a large backlog of videos) to exceed this strike count before you can use their tools to argue against the strikes. When this happens, your account is shut down, and a "grace" timer is enabled to allow you to try and challenge the copyright strikes (one at a time). If that grace period passes and you're still out of strikes (don't dare to take a vacation), the only remaining choice is to appeal to the public.
No DMCA claims necessary.
All signs therefore point to this being a DMCA notice. If you have evidence to the contrary please provide it.
https://youtu.be/jpOzW_kRzHs
And the video itself is identified. He does have that information.
I can't believe this needs to be said literally every time one of these types of articles gets posted on HN: if you build your business on top of someone else's platform, and have no contracts in place to protect your interests, your business's existence is completely at the whim of the platform owners.
I wish we lived in a world where the Googles of the internet had sane, transparent, easily-appealable processes for these sorts of things. But we don't, and absent government regulation, we probably aren't going to. People need to take these sorts of risks into account when deciding how to run their businesses, and have contingency plans.
It's interesting to note that in the landlord/tenant analogy, most jurisdictions have laws in place that prevent tenants from agreeing to such unbalanced, predatory contracts, and give tenants rights even in the absence of any agreement at all. Perhaps we do need something like that on the internet, for some things.
One small caveat - the small business owner had no choice in the matter when they moved in 10 years ago. There was only one mall people would actually visit across the entire world. And that mall has a clickwrap agreement for all their rentals, one which includes a clause that says "and we can change this agreement at will and without notice."
You use a platform, that’s on you. It’s never been cheaper or easier to run a website, make videos, and host them.
Even the web is a platform now. You won't do well running a website if Google Search and Chrome don't favour it. Depending on how you plan to get your initial customers, you may hit a sizeable roadblock if Google Ads or Facebook Ads decide that they don't want to run your ads.
Windows and MacOS are also platforms.
Even pretty big companies depend upon platforms. Take the example of Epic getting booted from Apple's app store. Facebook have not been able to get Apple to approve Facebook Gaming.
If you want to start an ecommerce business, are you meant to build your own rather than using Amazon & Shopify?
It doesn't make sense to not participate on platforms. What does make sense is to consider what it means for your business. In certain extreme cases like YouTube or Apple's app store, it seems like some degree of regulation may be necessary to prevent the platforms from abusing their position.
A regulator tends to lock the status quo into place, it's almost always incumbent friendly... like banking, casinos, tobacco, etc. Remember that Philip Morris benefits greatly from tobacco regulation.
What "good" would be is wrenching video out of YouTube's Kafkaesque hands.
Have we given up on decentralisation?
I don't see where he says that. He says he's never profited from selling other people's material. I think he considers putting up content for free with ads to not be selling content.
Which is a pity as it would be nice to be able to use music cues to set the mood and enhance the experience.
Id have loved to used a clip from Bettye Swann's "then you can tell me goodbye" at the end of our recent Expanse one shot.
It’s one of the aspect that the usage is evaluated on, but not a requirement.
What specifically is illegal about this? If it's not and you think this should be illegal, how would you write the law that would make this illegal?
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
506. Criminal offenses
6
(a) Criminal Infringement.—
(1) In general.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
I'm aware of the problems of scaling support to a huge scale, and contexts where the communication of the termination causes is an issue in itself (e.g. to protect internal business logic).
However, in cases like this, being hostile seems an intentional decision - specifically, by hiding the reasons. Is this truly intentional on Google's side?
Every once in a while, some insider pops in discussions like this, and says "you don't know support at large scale etc.etc.".
Therefore, with both sides of the story at hand, a productive assessment could be done.
To clarify, I do think Google has a just "f*ck them all" approach to support; for example, there could be paid support plans for people who made a large investment. But I need to hear the devil :-)
770,000 subscribers 120 million views 600 videos
all gone in 4 days!!!!! keep rocking youtube!!!
Google is now a monopoly with Search, Youtube and probably gmail be right?!
It was only a matter of time before it happened to other high profile creators.
Not quite.
Search -- I use an assortment of non-google engines, but mostly https://duckduckgo.com
Youtube -- Not quite a monopoly, but contains almost all of the mindshare.
Gmail -- There's plenty of other email services. I use protonmail.
NewPipe is one of my recently discovered favourites. It pretty much scrapes Youtube and strips the horrid ads. You don't get any of the recommendation rubbish either and is far better from a privacy and data tracking point of view. FOSS for Android devices.
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
It's a complete shitshow.
The thing is, for all we know, 99.99% of cases could be handled properly, and we wouldn't have a clue. We only get to see it when it goes wrong, and someone complains. But again, such complains at the very least have been decreasing, while Youtube itself is ever growing, so it looks like at least something is improving in here.
Professional content creators for TV, movies, advertising, etc. don't have these problems because they make sure they don't use anybody else's content without a license! Youtubers don't bother because they're little fish and can get away with it and justify everything to themselves as fair use even if it's not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
It’s kind of ridiculous that YouTube accept claims against an entire video without _any_ evidence, or even a description of what copyrighted material is being infringed on.
Instead it seems that YouTube will simply let someone claim that a video has copyrighted content without explanation (and in violation of the DMCA), and delete creators based on that.
You can’t just go and claim that a video or other content infringes on a copyright somewhere. You must state which copyright is being infringed upon.
> (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. [1]
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
1. He's trying to figure out which video infringed on what work.
2. YouTube is refusing by saying they don't know which part of which video infringed on other work.
Not sure who's miscommunicating or what the reason is, but based on what he says, it seems this is what's happening. Anyone know if this sounds accurate?
He knows which videos strikes were issued on. He doesn't know what he did wrong. Like he says in the video, he isn't provided with any timestamps or details about what has entails those strikes and the channel deletion
I think it is obvious, he was playing a copyrighted song, as he does in nearly all of his videos.
The possibility of getting shut down for arbitrary reasons is part of the entrepreneurial risk.
Why hasn't youtube built any tooling for creators?
Not a single editing tool, let alone a whole suite. You're expected to show up with your already polished in Adobe mp4.
They could own a huge chunk of that market, yet seemingly willingly choose not to.