Unofficial Answers: Why Does YouTube Seem So Biased? (vortex.com) 178
Lauren Weinstein writes with some insight on an frustrating aspect of YouTube's video hosting service: "Why does Google's YouTube seem so biased against ordinary users who upload videos? I've unfairly had my videos blocked, received copyright strikes for my own materials, and even had my account suspended — and it's impossible to reach anyone at YouTube to complain!" No, YouTube isn't biased against you — not voluntarily, anyway. But it could definitely be argued that the copyright legal landscape — particularly in the mainstream entertainment industry — is indeed biased against the "little guys," and Google's YouTube must obey the laws as written. What's more, YouTube exists at the "bleeding edge" of the intersection of technology and law, where there's oh so much that goes bump in the night ...
YouTube (Score:5, Interesting)
YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve. My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
Today's internet is exactly what all of us feared; Cable TV 2.0, and it really fucking sucks. Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Funny)
Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.
Whoa, dude, that's pretty heavy. We're talking about that site where all the pre-teens make homemade music videos for Katy Perry songs, right?
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
So says the AC ;-)
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Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of it boils down to the rise of heavily asymmetric connectivity combined with "no servers" clauses in many ISP contracts.
That kind of killed the whole distributed nature of things...
Oh yeah, guess who are involved heavily in the last-mile service market? Cable companies.
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You mean before the real money came to play.
So, just like every other development.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it really wasn't. I was there. The internet was a smattering of academic, government, and large corporate sites which was generally only useful to other in similar fields, and certainly nothing which your average person could find or use. In fact, it was actually a rather exclusive club.
Do you know what it has now? Github. Stack Overflow. Wikipedia. Online API documentation, programmimg tutorials and example of nearly *everything*. Help forums for both end users and experts alike. Streaming audio and video. MMOs. Downloadable videogames. Awesome stuff that I use every day, both professionally and for entertainment purposes. Okay, it has Facebook, Comcast, and cyber-criminals as well, but you take the bad with the good.
Sorry, but this mythical "golden age of the Internet" was never there. It was really only even *close* to being true if you happened to be a university employee or student (grad student or higher) with direct access to the net through the major university backbones, and even then it was really only a promise of things to come. While I'm sure it was awesome having the internet more or less as a personal playground, I'll take the internet today, warts and all, a thousand times over.
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And for that subset, some which I respected more.
Though for that subset, some only Because Oldschool, I suppose.
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We had MUDs in the good old days, better than the MMOs and just as addictive.
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That was the way it was when most didn't know or care about it. It didn't have a large enough audience to monetize it, so nobody bothered. Many of us who grew up in the BBS era not only predicted the rise of the internet, but also its ultimate fate as the world's largest shopping mall.
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YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve. My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
Today's internet is exactly what all of us feared; Cable TV 2.0, and it really fucking sucks. Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.
Posting AC because of mods, but I agree with you, heavily. It's rather crushing to go back and read predictions made in the 70's, 80's, and even into the 90's. There was so much optimism and innovative ideas, there were actually individuals, and it was decentralized - you could actually own a piece of the internet. People even hosted their own websites!! Imagine that. Watching it all fade to the world of Twitter and Facebook...
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There was so much optimism and innovative ideas, there were actually individuals, and it was decentralized - you could actually own a piece of the internet. People even hosted their own websites!! Imagine that. Watching it all fade to the world of Twitter and Facebook...
Whenever there's a new field to be conquered, there tends to be a rush of all sorts of people trying out their ideas. In the end, though, things always start to centralize. Big corporations industrialize even the most mundane things we see on the Internet. If they don't produce the content themselves, they still run the platform the content is produced on (Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, YouTube etc.)
While the sort of backbone of the Internet has become more and more centralized, I don't think "our" kind of th
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I find it too hard to get good information these days. Every topic has it's own separate forum or sets of competing forums, requiring separate accounts, and there's never any central one stop place to go to get an answer without being inundated with ads and trolls and wrong answers. The amount of data is higher than ever but actual information seems to be a scarcity on the information superhighway.
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A solution would be a separate Internet on which commercial enterprises of any kind are strictly prohibited. Obviously, this is not going to happen at the physical layer or transport layer, but it would at least be possible to write a P2P network on top of IP that has a strong legal protection against company (ab-)use.
The easiest way to get rid of commercial outfits is to choke them to death with ad-blockers. It's beginning to work, already!
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"A solution would be a separate Internet on which commercial enterprises of any kind are strictly prohibited. "
Such an "Internet" actually did exist. It was called ham radio, and although it was great at pushing the technology of the medium, there was endless wrangling over what constituted commercial use. Ordering a pizza, for example?
Commercial use has brought much more good to the Internet than bad, and as a previous poster pointed out the bad has happened when large companies gain monopoly powers. If th
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Freenet was designed to be just that. No one used it, because it was so slow, because no one used it. P2P with good encryption, no servers anywhere to take down, and very strong protection for uploaders (Government-level resources could de-anonymize individual downloaders, but the MPAA couldn't). But since it's slow, none of that matters.
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You can't really do this without moderators, and you won't really get good and unbiased moderators without paying them, and so the idea fails. Enforcing the rules is impractical. USENET used to be a lot like this, sitting on top of existing networks with dialup to bridge the networks or give access to groups not on a network, with the unwritten rule of keeping commerce to a minimum except in commerce specific groups. But then that died a twitching death when the internet became popular and it was complet
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Posting AC because of mods, but I agree with you, heavily. It's rather crushing to go back and read predictions made in the 70's, 80's, and even into the 90's. There was so much optimism and innovative ideas, there were actually individuals, and it was decentralized - you could actually own a piece of the internet. People even hosted their own websites!! Imagine that. Watching it all fade to the world of Twitter and Facebook...
Hey now, I own a piece of the Internet (several, in fact), and I still run a few websites for my personal enjoyment/enrichment and to get my personal message out there, but since each website I run is one out of about a billion [dailymail.co.uk] voices, it's tough to be heard above the din.
There are a lot more non-technical users of the Internet these days than there are technical users, but everyone wants their voice to be heard. The problem is that for people like you and me, setting up and maintaining a website is trivial
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No, watch it reduce to the lowest common denominator. With more access from more places (cell phones, etc) by more people, and the ability for "most folks" to publish something without knowing HTML, how to FTP pages up, etc.
What is different from me using the resources of facebook, twitter, etc. as a publishing platform vs. renting a Linode vs. hosting my own on my DSL line (my ISP doesn't block ports)? Heck back in "the good old days" us dial up users had to use other hosting anyway, sometimes provided b
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You could set up ACTube, and be the gatekeeper of your website like they're the gatekeeper of theirs. YouTube isn't a public utility. It's a for-profit business that will make decisions that they believe to be in their best interest.
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He will still have to obey the DMCA laws, assuming it is in the US. It is my understanding things are worse in other countries, including European, because their laws allow content producers to sue the hosts of posted content -- they habe no safe harbor provision like DMCA, whicb protects from lawsuits for "publishing" as long as they do a requested takedown in a timely manner.
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, the new free trade agreements coming on line were partially written by the content holders and loopholes like safe harbour provisions will go away in the name of harmonization
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It has little choice. The problem here is that no one wants to enforce any consequences against those who are making false copyright claims.
The real problem is too may lawyers.
Re:YouTube (Score:4, Funny)
The real problem is too may lawyers.
We should sue!
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Calm down (Score:5, Interesting)
YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve.
That's a little hyperbolic don't you think?
My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
What color is the sky on your planet? A peer to peer system with all peers being equal? Never been true in practice since the internet was founded. It has aspects of a peer-to-peer system but the internet is more complicated than that. Differences in bandwidth alone make a true peer-to-peer internet impossible even if we ignore the legal and economic landscape. Empowering the little guys? It already does. But empowered does not and never will mean equal results. Letting unpopular messages be heard? It does that but only to a point. Getting an unpopular message heard requires an audience and unless you can match the big content makers economic resources you're very unlikely to be able to match their audience.
Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.
Ok Neitsche, calm down. Sounds like you were a young idealist and you've grown up and figured out that the world is a touch more complicated than you hoped it would be. It's not all roses but it's not all gloom and doom either. Technology isn't "enslaving us" any more than it ever did. Just because it didn't turn out to be a utopian fantasy doesn't mean everything is bad and we are all slaves.
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It used to be if you wanted to host a video, post a blog, send an email, whatever, you bought a computer, installed your own web server on it, connected it using your own paid-for Internet access, and put the video on your own website running on your own hardware. (Well, the email was usually provided by your work or school, but stuff for the web was your own r
Hire a nerd (Score:2)
It used to be if you wanted to host a video, post a blog, send an email, whatever, you bought a computer, installed your own web server on it, connected it using your own paid-for Internet access, and put the video on your own website running on your own hardware.
No, nerds like us did that. Most of the rest of the world either hired a nerd or couldn't be bothered. Even those who did bother often run into problems of limited bandwidth, time consuming administration, clumsy interfaces and other technical problems that make it not worth the trouble.
But people are lazy and cheap.
Or busy and don't have the time. Or have other important things to do. Or don't understand the technology well enough to do it. Honestly I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own web server and email server and have do
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I like your post, but it needs formatting, and you verify that formatting by preview before committing it.
"Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (Score:2)
You do know there is a "Preview" button when writing a post.
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5 billion channels and nothing is on. I still go to like maybe 5 sites a day.
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You can use bittorrent to share your own videos, it is peer-to-peer, two-way, etc... All you need it is a typical home internet connection.
But look at what bittorrent is used for : 90% of it is for piracy of popular content like Hollywood blockbusters. I almost felt weird when I shared original content on TPB.
Despite the occasional collateral damage caused by anti-piracy systems, the little voice is actually better heard on video sharing platforms like YouTube, at least for now. That's simply because with p
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Lots of 'typical home connection' ISPs get really grumpy if you start sending lots of gigabytes of information to the Internet.
That's the great part about bittorrent : you don't have to pump up a lot of data. In theory, you could upload the file just once (like with YouTube) and let the swarm do the rest. Some BT clients have a "superseeder" mode to help you with that.
In practice, it only works if your files are really popular. If they are not then you have several solutions : stay connected but limit your rate to a low value (slow but sure), ask a bunch of friends to help you seeding, rent a seedbox (that's just a few bucks/month)
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> My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.
But all of that does happen. Witness the witch hunts, the misinformation, the wingnuts, the anti-vaxxers and more. All of whom have a FAR louder voice in society than would have been possible even 15 years ago. You're falling into the same trap most people do that by thinking only of the we
Re:YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when was the internet supposed to be "peer-to-peer, with all peers being equal"? It was NEVER designed or intended that way. Those words mean things, and I don't think they mean what you think they mean. You're confusing the Internet with a Lantastic network.
And on what planet do you think unpopular messages have ever been broadcast as loudly as mainstream ones, in any forum, at any time? If anything, setting up a personal blog and getting your voice heard is easier than its ever been in history. Even so, the freedom of speech the internet affords us means while you have a right to say what you want to say, no one is obliged to listen to you. If you were expecting the internet to be any different, than simply put, you were a massive fool for expecting the impossible.
Oh, and lighten up, Francis.
I had the same experience (Score:5, Interesting)
My own experience with youtube was the same as the OP. This was several years ago, and youtube has changed a lot since, but it looks like the more things change, the more they remain the same. I had a semi-popular channel, nothing spectacular, about 100,000 channel views and maybe a thousand subscribers. At the time it was not bad for a guy who just posted some of his own sports clips.
The entire channel was yanked one sunny day, without any explanation as to why and no recourse or way to appeal. The automated support was entirely useless. I could not get a hold of a human, or at least, an e-mail address. There were none to be found. Youtube, as it appeared at the time, was entirely ran on automatic. It is, on one hand, understandable for a site that receives several years worth of uploaded material each minute. On the other hand, it was a thoroughly frustrating experience as I have done absolutely nothing wrong. To this day I have no clue as to what happened, my best guess is that someone reported me for the evulz, and that was enough.
I tried again to rebuild my channel with new material. About 6 months later the same thing repeated, at which point I gave up and never registered again.
The moral of the story is: you have to be corporate big, or you have to self-host. Otherwise, you are always at risk.
Re:YouTube - mod this up! (Score:2)
Truer words were never spoken. Just wait until the IoT takes hold, along with distributed AIA (Advanced Artificial Intelligence) all distributed via the Internet. The Internet has turned out be largely a "top-down" broadcasting service controlled by large ISP, large content creators, etc. Of course, they let us have our blogs and our Instagrams and our pathetic little selfie opportunities for fame like Facebook, Pinterest, etc, but the Internet is FAR FAR FAR from the liberating force that it was predicted
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" I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us."
We're being 'enslaved' by the legal system, not by the technology.
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Money is the real problem. It's great to have this idea of a free and open architecture that everyone can equally use but the reality is that the internet represents tens of billions in infrastructure and operating costs. Once you start involving money like that someone is going to want to control it. Until we have an internet that is completely wireless and not reliant on large infrastructure you will never have this world you wish for.
This is a rhetorical question; right? (Score:5, Informative)
Google has a preference for channels that produce revenue and so mitigate the overhead of maintaining YouTube. Smaller channels cost more than the make so get passively discouraged.
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Some of these channels are pretty big and make a fair bit of revenue, and in fact revenue theft by bogus copyright notice is one of the biggest problems they have. YouTube made it so that some companies can submit a copyright claim and immediately begin stealing all revenue for that video or even the whole channel. One of the requested changes is to have the revenue put into a holding account until the claim is resolved, because once stolen it never gets returned even when the thief is caught.
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Note YouTube gets its cut regardless of who the final check gets sent to, so dragging ass is in their favor.
Reminds me of cell phone companies dragging ass on disabling stolen phones, because they get hooked up to their network after ID laundering, boom a second customer! And the old guy is stuck under a 2 year contract, so usually buys a new phone. Hence the customers stolen from provide a cost-free mechanism for phone companies to double their contracts.
Such a lame native ad (Score:2)
I hope you got Google to pay for this!!!
Right description, wrong conclusion (Score:1)
— and it's impossible to reach anyone at YouTube to complain!" No, YouTube isn't biased against you — not voluntarily, anyway.
Uh, yes, it is biased against the small users and they do so voluntarily. Users who make YouTube enough money (or attract enough popular attention to matter in storeis) will be able to actually make contact with people in customer service. There is no reason aside from the desire for [greater] profit that YouTube cannot field live customer service for all users. That's what other companies do in bleeding edge areas where things go bump in the night: Provide customer service. YouTube doesn't have to and
Live Concert Videos (Score:1)
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That's probably a bit off topic, considering it is actual copyright violation. "But other people break the law worse" isn't really a valid complaint there. Make your own thing.
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I've noticed for the last few years how much inconsistency there is regarding who/what gets blocked for violation.
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Either way, it's not Youtube being inconsistent. They only respond to takedown notices and copyright owners who have applied to their content ID program. It's entirely in the hands of the copyright-owners.
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Youtube also does fingerprinting
See above post where I mentioned their Content ID program. That's fingerprinting.
Re:Live Concert Videos (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a prime example of why I am skeptical when people complain about getting unfair copyright notices on Youtube. There are a lot of individuals out there that don't have a clue how the various IP laws work yet think they're experts.
I'm not saying that Youtube is perfect. I've seen some actual abuses and false claims made but for every legitimate complaint I see a hundred instances where someone did something like mix their wedding footage with some Katy Perry songs, upload it to Youtube and then wonder why they got a copyright strike for their totally original material.
Why can't I do that, but other people post concert videos and even full albums, full music DVD rips, etc. and they don't get taken down?
If the guy driving ahead of you is over the speed limit on the highway and they don't get pulled over that doesn't mean it's suddenly ok for you to speed too.
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False copyright claims against movie and video game reviewers get made all the time - it's becoming a crisis for the guys who make a living as critics. These guys know the rules (well, most of them), and it doesn't matter. The fingerprinting system that detects prated movies also detects very short clips used appropriately for movie reviews, and they get flagged. They win every time, but lose weeks of income as a result. My favorite movie reviewer goes to the extreme of never showing any clip or even st
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"Making a living" on youtube sounds like a serious case of someone needing to get a real job. Honestly, treat youtube as side income and it starts to lower the amount of crap out there, like the 10 word announcement that shows up as a 10 minute video with half of that video being self promotion.
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Did they play a middle C at any time? I have a copyright on middle C.
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...and so I'm thinking I may buy some tickets to see that band when they tour my area, because I have all their albums and am curious how they sound in concert, and I do a search on the net to see what I can find, and I come across your cell phone recording "crappy sound and all," and think, reasonably, hey, maybe this band ain't worth the 50 bucks, I'll just stay home and enjoy them on my 5.1.
Seriously, d00d. I never understood guys like you. You're *not* helping the band, and anyone else who wanted to "r
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I uploaded a 2+ hour long stream of me playing The Division beta. Google picked up some faint background music playing on a radio in the game and my account was flagged for copyright. I can dispute it, sorta. The dispute choices you get are pathetic and were no where near what happened. I had no other options to dispute this. Now I get advertisements on the video.
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Part of it is - Was this violation due to him recording something without permission, or due to him recording something with permission of the musician that fell afoul of very complicated ASCAP/BMI rules on "public" performances because one of the songs turned out to be a cover?
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In your cover scenario, it would still be due to him recording something without permission: the songwriter's permission.
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So, in your mind, someone is going to watch a clip of a concert, with shitty distorted audio, INSTEAD of going to the concert? Wow. That's a whole new level of fucking idiotic.
Inspiring.
It's money. (Score:5, Interesting)
Money wins against free, 90% of the time. Money pays people to do work, then free has to do that work for nothing.
We need the following system in place, by law.
1) Youtube (and similar sites), must rank all censor requestors that make more than 10 requests a year, by how many requests are found to be invalid.
2) Those that rank in the bottom 5%, i.e. more of your requests are found to be invalid than 95% of the rest of the requestors), then next year, you must pay a refundable fee of $120 per request. If it is found to be invalid, the person you tried to censor gets $100, Youtube keeps the $20.
3) If you attempt to game the system (by using multiple logins or other methods), you must pay double that fee.
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Youtube (and similar sites), must rank all censor requestors that make more than 10 requests a year, by how many requests are found to be invalid.
How many Youtube users even file a DMCA counter-notice?
Those that rank in the bottom 5%, i.e. more of your requests are found to be invalid than 95% of the rest of the requestors), then next year, you must pay a refundable fee of $120 per request. If it is found to be invalid, the person you tried to censor gets $100, Youtube keeps the $20.
Under the DMCA, if Youtube doesn't take down the video, they are liable for all the copyright infringement across their entire web site. Youtube won't take that risk because some complainant isn't paying them $120. Blame congress for passing DMCA, not Youtube.
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Please also note that the system I wrote is designed to work even if most people do not file a counter claim. Hence the 95% rule.
Obviously I was talking about a new LAW that needs to be passed by Congress, not a new policy that Youtube should implement. You did see that I wrote "similar sites"? How would Youtube make similar sites do anything? You clearly misinterpreted what I was saying.
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Everything except for the two words "by law" looks like a tip for Youtube to do better. And no, I didn't read every word of your post.
"Found to be invalid" is something that can only truly be done in court. If the complainant wants to drop it before then (and admit it's invalid), then they could lose that fine, sure.
Going back to your original post:
3) If you attempt to game the system (by using multiple logins or other methods), you must pay double that fee.
Few content owners do it themselves. It's going to be multiple companies springing up and dying constantly. As soon as you get to the bottom of that list, th
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Honestly, 90% of the Slashdot comments would disappear if people generally followed the advice in your sig: "Before you reply, check to make sure you read what I actually wrote rather than what you assume an idiot would write."
Beyond the first couple of comments in any thread, the "discussions" are generally just misinterpretations of misinterpretations of misinterpretations... I love the defense of poor reading comprehension that follows your last post.
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Seriously, what would you propose instead of the DMCA safe harbor provisions?
As long as we have copyrights, we will have copyright holders who don't want their stuff posted all over the Internet by random people. For the copyright to mean much of anything, they need to have a way to stop or at least deter this from happening. In other words, the copyright holder needs to be able to file some sort of takedown request and have some assurance it will be honored if valid.
Consider sites that rely on user-
Re: It's money. (Score:2)
I support the safe harbor provision - I never said anything against it. What I don't support is how the DMCA is being used to crush fair use or even properly licensed content.
Smaller bands having their own music videos (with their own original songs) taken down. The original film short "Pixels" being ordered taken down by the company that produced the feature-length film. The little guy has no recourse, and the big boys get no punishment.
The safe harbor provision helps sites like YouTube to even exist at
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This is why YT is so messed up (Score:5, Interesting)
I posted a video last year, and when I first made the video, I used an old blue song that was recorded 90 years ago and is long out of copyright. You can easily find it on the internet archive. Well of course I get the dreaded "copyright violation", etc, etc. I challenged it, even provided YT with the link to the internet archive and links to information about the song, why it is in public domain, etc. Still lost the challenge.
So okay, next video I use one on youtube itself. They provide songs you can supposedly use hassle free when you edit your video online. The first couple go fine, but about my 4vth or 5th video i upload, I get a copyright violation notice again. So I challenge it and point out that I used the music as provided by youtube itself in it's own video editing menu. Still lost the challenge. I don't think they even read or pay attention to these challenges at all.
At this point I seldom use YT for anything now. I totally agree people are abusing YT for many things, but punishing the honest user is not helping the situation at all either. Youtube needs to pull their head out of their arse, but hell will likely freeze over first.
Re:This is why YT is so messed up (Score:5, Interesting)
> I don't think they even read or pay attention to these challenges at all.
This is the crux of the problem here. They don't actually honor appeals process unless you are a big company with big bucks to sue them with.
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> I don't think they even read or pay attention to these challenges at all.
This is the crux of the problem here. They don't actually honor appeals process unless you are a big company with big bucks to sue them with.
Yup. I know someone who makes his own music for his videos - even plays the instruments for the video IN the video in some cases and still gets copyright violation letters.
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What are you going to sue YT for? I'd bet that their use policy says they can yank anything for no reason. Even if it doesn't, the fact that they host for free means there's no actual contract, express or implied.
The problem is not that YT abuses its users, but that there's very little competition.
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Do you really think that their user-agreement indemnifies them against a company/consortium like Universal, Sony etc?
There's a reason they play along with these folks and not piddly upstarts like content creators.
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A host is not required to accept a DMCA counter-claim. What the counter-claim process does is makes the host not liable for not hosting the content. Since YT doesn't have a contract with people putting up videos, there's no liability in the first place.
The DMCA process is not required. It's a safe-harbor process that allows the host to avoid being legally liable in copyright disputes.
It's not just you (Score:3)
It's not impossible to get your own videos through YouTube without any problem. My nephews have done it for goofy stuff they shot themselves with friends that doesn't use any music. I took a quick look at the linked to article and we need a lot more info than seems to be provided on just what exactly these videos are. YouTube is pretty inconsistent in what they flag. I've seen some interesting tricks used to get copyrighted stuff past the monitoring bots. If the complainer is trying to get, for example, TV or movie excerpts through or even worse entire episodes or movies, there might be good reasons why it's being flagged.
...the fuck? (Score:2)
This article seems to be saying, "It's not just YouTube that's biased against you. It's the whole world."
Well, thanks for that bit of info, Slashdot. As if I needed more information that late-stage capitalism is designed to crush ordinary people.
I think there's a battle going on inside YouTube (Score:3)
On the one hand they're trying to protect some of the users from that crap. There's even a pilot program supposedly. However that program has largely gone quiet.
And on the other hand they're bound by agreements struck with the likes of television producers and music labels. And who knows what's in those things? I suspect that there's more than one directive for YouTube to follow.
Given all of this, I'm thinking that there's a contingent in YT that wants to be sued by one of the bigger channels for some of this stupidity. If it was my business, I would want something to happen so we could have a 21st century version of the Sony decision. That way I could get out from under all of this policing of copyright and get back to developing the platform.
Happened to me (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend loaned me a DVD of an old Italian Spaghetti Western, that was in Italian with English subtitles.
Kind of a cult classic.
This is a film you can't get on DVD or any other way.
There is no way to watch this film, period.
So I ripped it and uploaded it to YouTube.
Then about a month later I got an email from YouTube/Google, whoevertheyare, saying:
[Copyright claim] Your video has been blocked
the claim was from some German film company...
Then about two weeks later they released the claim.
Why keep art hidden away so it will never be seen or enjoyed.
I can understand blocking things that are already available and can be purchased.
But for something that is unavailable?
Re: (Score:3)
Youtube doesn't care because compliance is something they are required to do and they don't make any money off tiny users, thus no incentive to spend time fixing false positives. Tiny users get screwed? Let them eat cake.
Competing with yourself (Score:2)
Why keep art hidden away so it will never be seen or enjoyed.
Ostensibly because keeping it away "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by not competing with the same author's or same publisher's other works [wikipedia.org] that are released.
Re: (Score:2)
A friend loaned me a DVD of an old Italian Spaghetti Western, that was in Italian with English subtitles.
This is a film you can't get on DVD or any other way.
So, if you can't get it on DVD, where did your DVD come from?
Bear in mind that YouTube is available internationally so, even if you can't buy a DVD locally, that doesn't mean that there is not somewhere that the DVD is available and there your Youtube video does compete with the rights holder's product.
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize the two statements are mutually exclusive?
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
Who says you need to use YouTube? Who says YouTube has to change what it has become to please you? What did everyone do when they weren't happy with MySpace?
Switch.
Pick your poison. Vimeo. Daily Motion. Veoh. Hell, even Zippcast is still there. And maybe, just maybe, if it's a good enough service, we might turn one of those into the next Facebook.
It's just good business. (Score:2)
Youtube is a business, first and foremost. Their goal is to make money.
The big corporate partners (Sony, Disney, Warner Bros, etc.) serve that goal much better than little one-man review channels, mommy blogs, or whatever else.
I got hit by a copyright violation (Score:2)
A couple of weeks ago, I got sent a copyright claim by Machinima, stating that I'd copied a portion of their video and was passing it off as my own work.
Machinima stated that I could keep the video up, but they'd keep all the revenue that it made. Nice.
Upon inspection of Machinima's claim, it turned out that not only was their video a compilation of inferior quality clips (a top 10), it was also uploaded 2 years after mine.
I disputed the claim and it was quickly dropped.
What annoyed me was how easy it was f
Insert Einstein quote here, yeah that one (Score:2)
"OMG, they're all mostly Morons, RUN!"
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein - Pre Internet / Pre You-tube and twitter
300 Hrs of Video Posted To YouTube Per Minute (Score:2)
---- and there are four billion video views on YouTube a day. 130 Amazing YouTube Statistics [expandedramblings.com] The stakes for both the rights holders and Google are high and there is no getting around that.
The music you posted may be based on public domain sources but the arrangement you used was not. The arrangement you used may have been in the public domain but the performance was not. The point being that the worst that can happen is that your post will be taken down.
You aren't looking at the expense or legal exposure i
Instagram are bastards too (Score:4, Interesting)
I had an Instagram account, which only consisted of my own photographs, disabled for "copyright infringement"
There weren't even any pictures of objects on which copyright could be claimed.
It was various animal and nature photography I had taken over the years, interspersed with photos of our puppies.
There was no way to reach support or challenge it in any way. I just got the notification that my account was shut down and that's it.
I wonder if they still turn around and license user content if they've deleted a user account.
Re: (Score:3)
There was a copyright on a gene in one of those puppies.
Horseshit (Score:2)
particularly in the mainstream entertainment industry â" is indeed biased against the "little guys," and Google's YouTube must obey the laws as written.
Um... OK, so .... how the hell does the law impact things like being able to get in touch with higher ups, being able to dispute false Content ID claims, etc? Content ID is Youtube, it's not the DMCA, or any other laws, so I find it hard to believe there is any legal ground for slow responsiveness in regards to that....
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So don't? (Score:4, Insightful)
The signal-to-noise ratio may not be that great, but there's plenty of good content on there. Once you find channels that you like, and subscribe to them, all the noise just passes you by as if it didn't exist.
Re: (Score:2)
But the UI is so awful on Youtube that it is difficult to use. I subscribed to one channel feed, but keeping track of what you watched or not is cumbersome. Instead you see other things you might like since you watched episode 1, and it shows you a link for episode 12, episode 7, episode 93, and a video of a dancing goat. Even worse if you're not on a computer and are trying to use a smart tv of streaming device to do the same thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you should take another look.
Re: (Score:1)
No, the law makes me too much money. I'll sue you if you think it shouldn't. Also I'll sue you for thinking, and doubly sue you for thinking of music.
Re: (Score:2)
Getting found and selling your ads (Score:2)
I see two problems with hosting your videos yourself. First, you may have a hard time getting found in the first place because the related videos column on YouTube shows only other videos on the same service. You may have to throw teasers on YouTube whose description links to the full video. Second, because advertisers don't know you exist, you'll have a hard time selling your preroll ad inventory, and without ads, you'll see a big S3 bill from Amazon if your video does go viral.
Re: (Score:2)
The law as written doesn't force YT to do much of what it does. Legally, they could act on DMCA takedown notices and accept counterclaims. The MAFIAA put pressure on them, and they self-police (which they are not required to do) and disregard counterclaims (which they can do).