This morning I got a copyright claim for a video I published in 2015 which had a brief bit of background music, using a royalty-free song I got as a perk for being an iTools user from FreePlay in _2003_.
I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims.
To me that's $1/year lost revenue (no big deal, right?) but that company now gets the revenue from this video—and millions of other videos... so they're making mint and gambling that most users won't even try to appeal.
> I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims.
Obviously the problem is that it's completely unbalanced. Do people making copyright claims have the same threat? "By disputing this counter-claim, you agree that you could have your right to file any copyright claims revoked."
It would be entirely reasonable for Youtube to block them from submitting the current style of claims and require them to submit actual, proper DMCA claims which open the claimant to all kinds of counterclaims, require the claimant to assert under the penalty of perjury that they own that content, etc.
That's an idea for sure. I should have clarified my point that while these aren't DMCA claims, YouTube is required to handle DMCA claims, and their current process essentially preempts them. So that's how they're choosing to effectively 'handle' what would otherwise presumably be large numbers of DMCA claims.
But yeah, maybe requiring claimants to actually go through the official process would be better (albeit more work for YouTube).
> But filing claim is protected by law, you ability to have content on YouTube is not. There is a fundamental asymmetry.
Filing a claim automatically and conveniently is not protected by law. They could just as well say, "We have an automated system with a convenient interface for good-faith actors. If you show yourself to be acting in bad faith, you can exercise your legal claim in writing by sending it to this address: X. The postal system to that office is pretty bad, loses stuff all the time, so you'd better send it FedEx."
To be honest this doesn't seem that hard. write an application that crawls youtube videos in some order, grab the audio and stream it to something like echonest, then strike if it hits on anything?
They upload the sound clips, YouTube finds the matching videos and sends them a list, then a human reviews the list(haha just kidding) and activates the revenue stealing. I'm sure some of those videos are earning a lot more than $1/year.
Fallout 76 patched in a setting to turn off music worldwide. Before that, if you turned off the radio, the in-world radios would still play. You would see YouTubers rushing to the in-world radios to turn them off, or cutting sections of the video so they didn't get claimed. It's absurd.
Conceptually, I agree. But at youtube scale, I suspect they aren't comparing a corpus of "asserted copyrights" versus "all videos". It's a corpus of "all videos" (straight up) with some preference for asserted copyrights.
I expect that even toggling off Fortnite's "licensed music" setting can still run into audio copyright claims against other Fortnite videos which have the same audio.
Yeah, it's common for Influencers with a big subscriber base to shove all their videos into Content ID, so other smaller channels get their videos claimed because they happened to play the same video game (and the audio matched as a result).
AFAIK in that case it's at least not malicious, it's just the content ID system completely failing to handle this category of content, where a big chunk of the visuals and/or audio are guaranteed to match with other videos because it's a recording of interactive media.
I work for a rather large consumer goods company. We had a video taken down during a really important product launch. We had absolutely no idea why for three days.
It cost us maybe two full days of development resources + consultants + throwing money at different consultants to get an "in" to youtube to figure out why our video was taken down. About a week later we received official word from the artist and then we figured out that our consultants who made the video messed up and forgot the critical step of securing permission.
It was an expensive blunder, both from a media standpoint but also in the amount of resources we burned trying to figure out what the hell was wrong.
I'm not mad at youtube for taking the video down, but it's absurd that there's nothing in the system that would tell me why, and absolutely zero hope of figuring it out.
FYI: I've seen screenshots of takedown complaints in the Youtube mgmt. UI. So login to your control panel and look around for that.
It says who did it, what they object to and gives you the choice of fixing it or filing a complaint. But if you lose the complaint, you get a copyright strike and can lose your channel.
It's not even just copyright strikes. Sometimes they worry about being demonetised over swearing or other minor indecencies so they self-censor more than they should to be safe.
I saw one video where they spent some time up front saying how great Stadia is so the algorithm treats them nicely before spending the next 10 minutes saying how bad it is. They were clearly joking, but it does make me think about the type of control the system has and what messages get promoted. Who knows?
They can't file a DMCA counterclaim because they never received a DMCA claim in the first place. Youtube simply blocks the content, you don't even get a proper claim with the contact info.
"They would then be required by law to reinstate the content. The step after that would be that the other party now has to go to court, to take down your content." is the followup process for a DMCA claim - but that's not what's happening here. Youtube is not requiring claimants to submit a DMCA claim (with all the associated process) and they are not submitting DMCA claims. Youtube could make their copyright claim process following these rules if they wanted to be on the side of users, but they have not. They can also choose to have a process where any complaint simply causes content to get removed with no recourse, and this is pretty much what they have done.
Also, for many people, even doing something like "sending an email to counter claim" is too much work for them to bother doing it.
You'd be surprised how many people won't follow through on something when there is even the smallest barrier to them doing so.
> And why haven’t I heard of this before in all these topics?
Things can get to be pretty technical, when people are talking about the minutia of a counter claim to DMCA. It does not surprise me that info like this is not well known.
But we are not talking about the DMCA system. We are talking about YouTube's own system that is not DMCA and for which they are not required to provide due process.
