On Facebook and YouTube, Classical Musicians Are Getting Blocked or Muted (washingtonpost.com) 46
Michael Andor Brodeur, writing for The Washington Post: As covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the Internet, they're having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots. Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings. You've encountered these bots in the wild if you've ever had a workout video or living room lip-sync blocked or muted for ambient inclusion or flagrant use of Britney or Bruce. But who owns Brahms? These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of "reference" audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren't great listeners.
These systems aren't just disrupting the relationships between classical organizations and their audiences; they're also impacting individual musicians trying to stay musically present -- and financially afloat -- during the crisis. Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of "2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America" -- specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not. [...] And this wasn't Sheppard's first run-in with Facebook, which has blocked or muted past performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach for being too digitally reminiscent of other performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach.
These systems aren't just disrupting the relationships between classical organizations and their audiences; they're also impacting individual musicians trying to stay musically present -- and financially afloat -- during the crisis. Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of "2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America" -- specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not. [...] And this wasn't Sheppard's first run-in with Facebook, which has blocked or muted past performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach for being too digitally reminiscent of other performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach.
There needs to be accountability (Score:5, Insightful)
The major problem with this is that there's no penalty for false positives. There's not even a penalty for repeated false positives on the same work, or for knowingly submitting a false claim.
If you want these issues to stop, there needs to be some accountability to the bots doing this - they need to be required to pay damages, with a non-insignificant minimum, to anyone they take down who shouldn't be.
JIDF WITH INFINITE FIAT MOD POINTS TO BURN (Score:2)
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Re:There needs to be accountability (Score:5, Interesting)
The major problem with this is that there's no penalty for false positives.
No, that has nothing to do with it in this case.
It has everything to do with it. There are penalties for failing to detect it, but no consequences at all for false positives.
The DMCA has a serious criminal penalty of up to $500,000 and five years in prison for a first offense conviction. A second offense is up to a million dollars and a decade in prison for repeat offenses. Civil penalties have statutory damages at $25,000 per distributed copy.
If there were serious penalties associated with these failures, maybe on par with copyright infringement a statutory damage of $500,000 paid to the victims for each incorrect flagging and $1,000,000 for repeat incorrect flagging, or even $25,000 payout for each wrongfully-denied server request, you can be sure the bots would be corrected in a hurry. Lawyers rubberstamping bulk takedown requests would think twice after a few colleagues start facing potentially centuries of prison time. There are also musicians who would suddenly find themselves multi-millionaires.
If the teeth were as sharp against violators on the other side, the problem wouldn't exist.
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Given that there is a 0% chance of that happening though what practical improvements can be made to the current laws? It's worth asking because the Copyright Office just published a report saying that the DMCA isn't working and lawmakers need to reform it.
For automated take-downs it seems like the burden needs to shift so that anything but an extremely precise match must be reviewed by a human. If flagged it should remain up until the uploader has had a reasonable chance to respond, say 5 days. If the uploa
Re:There needs to be accountability (Score:4)
The problem is, those publishers pay advertising dollars and the little nobodies do not, let's guess why they content is being wiped out, not an accident, a clear work of greed. It's like saying Amazon did not know what they were doing when they slipped in pay for content with prime video subscription content, they knew, they were just being arseholes and I wonder whether they will lose more than they make via this tactic, I cancelled my account upon first exposure and it did feel like being exposed to so dirty disgusting genital flasher, one I could cut off and did. Google knows who PAYS THEM for advertising and who does not and who do you think they will favour, those bots are a who lot more reliable than people realise and Google, the arseholes are relying on "but the computer did it by accident (1 million times)", yep uh huh.
Once corporations get that large, myopic greed sets in at all levels and purposeful abuse of customers becomes the norm, hidden behind lame arse excuses.
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It sometimes happens to big companies too. NHK had some videos taken down of news reports they did because some Chinese news channel copyright claimed them. It looks like the Chinese channel bought the same aerial footage of events and then then claimed ownership of it.
Re:There needs to be accountability (Score:4)
We should have tamped down soon and hard once the copyright holders started getting politicians on their side. Now our rights have eroded and the excuse given is that false positives are all legal and written into the laws. Facebook or Google are stuck here, they can be fined a lot of money for letting copyright violations slip past them and the cost of having humans monitor and respond to any take down request in very short order is huge. It's not technology that causes this, it's the law.
The fines for copyright violation here are immense, they're not just like library fines, or the fines you'd get 30 years ago by illegally mimeographing music for church. Intellectual Property is a huge business now. They paid the politicians to push tough intellectual property laws all across the world through diplomatic action. They even had the provisional government in Iraq, after the fall of Saddam, have intellectual property reform as a priority issue early on even before infrastructures had been rebuilt. It's gotten out of hand, seems like the biggest industries in America now are collecting on copyrighted works and advertising.
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The major problem with this is that there's no penalty for false positives. There's not even a penalty for repeated false positives on the same work, or for knowingly submitting a false claim.
If you want these issues to stop, there needs to be some accountability to the bots doing this - they need to be required to pay damages, with a non-insignificant minimum, to anyone they take down who shouldn't be.
U.S. Code 512:
(f)Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1)that material or activity is infringing, or
(2)that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result
Would the bot become an “agent”? (Score:2)
Re:Would the bot become an “agent”? (Score:5, Informative)
Part of the problem is that a lot of these takedowns aren't being done via legal tools like the DMCA. They're just cushy private deals between the big hosting services and the big media players, where one gets privileged access and the other's dubious business model continues largely unchecked and without having the spend millions lobbying for the law to stay on its side.
As an individual with a channel, the basic position is that YouTube has no obligation to you and can kick you off arbitrarily any time it wants. From a rational business point of view, that includes if whatever you're posting causes more trouble than it's worth, whether or not there's anything actually wrong or illegal about it.
Re:Would the bot become an “agent”? (Score:4, Informative)
It's been ruled, I believe, through various case law that a bot cannot be an agent, like how a bot cannot be an "inventor" for the purposes of patenting a design, such as one achieved through and evolutionary algorithm process.
As such, whatever organization, whatever people, chose to deploy and trust said algorithm are ultimately responsible for its actions.
That said, as The Rizz(oh ancient one) mentioned [slashdot.org], there is no significant penalty attached to making a false representation, so much like how spam exploded because the marginal cost of sending it amounted to nothing, so doesn't copyright trolling - deliberate and accidental, prosper because there's no penalty, so there isn't any meatspace intervention until it is forced.
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Penalty for false positives on takedown orders are tiny. Penalty for not taking down a valid copyright violation is huge. These aren't even merely civil lawsuit matters, these have been turned into criminal matters because there are jail terms involved.
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you'd have some sort of legal protection if you were posting your content on your own site, instead of somebody else's, but since you're a guest in their house, they can probably do whatever they want, including block you or close your account.
Re:So? (Score:4)
Re:So? (Score:4)
"Hosting your own" is generally understood to mean not using someone else's hosting service, that is to say, having the data reside in a server that you personally own and operate. There is a non-zero cost associated with this, but it'd be mostly time and effort. "Time and effort" is the name of the game when it comes to performing, recording, and distributing music. The financial costs are insignificant compared to that - I assume most Slashdot readers have a computer somewhere, probably more than one, sitting idle.
The point where a third party becomes involved is connecting your server to the internet, then you have to deal with an ISP. Those often have local monopolies. The good thing with the internet is that it doesn't have to be local. The host I used to use overseas (Contabo out of Germany) would absolutely let you ship a rackmount or desktop tower to their data center, where you had your pick of I think 4 or 5 different backbone providers for the internet connection. I don't know how copyright laws are in the EU, that's not why I chose Contabo, but you could try China.
There are attempts by Google and others to de-legitimize personal web sites hosted in this way, by showing them as somehow lesser or "untrusted" in the browser. That's definitely something to watch - but it doesn't seem to have gained much traction at this point.
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Holy crap! That was a rabbit hole I did not anticipate!
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Classical music is a poor fit for metadata schemes (Score:4, Insightful)
Classical music (and really anything instrumental) tends to be an extremely poor fit for how everyone insists on using metadata to categorize and navigate a music library. Not so much the metadata fields themselves, but the way these fields tend to get used to present an interface to the user.
So much popular music tends to consider the "performer" first and foremost, with the "composer" often as an irrelevant and faceless property.
Meanwhile, classical music considers the "composer" to be the most important field, with the "performer" often as the faceless one.
Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but we fundamentally group popular music by "who performed it" and classical music by "who composed it."
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Yeah, I've frequently seen lyrics for classical pieces with copyright notices because some recent singer sang them at some point. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Search for the lyrics for Pomp & Circumstance some time.
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Is that perhaps due to the style of the music and musicians?
With classical, you have sheet music. That hasn't changed in a long time most likely, or there may be variations from various folks bringing it up to "modern" notation, etc.
But if I go to a show and expect to hear Beethoven's 9th or whatever, it will likely sound pretty darn near identical to any other professional group's performance of it.
Whereas more modern music tends not to be so strongly orchestrated (heh) and the performers who are also the
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Is that perhaps due to the style of the music and musicians?
It absolutely is. The problem I'm really citing is that whenever anyone decided to implement a "one size fits all" way of organizing/navigating/classifying music, they generally do it based on assumptions that are really only valid for "popular" "artist-focused" music.
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Only because they had the work of the first group to build on.
Nothing New here (Score:5, Interesting)
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I recorded some forest sounds as ambient for a short film.
I recorded those sounds, I didn't download them from Sounddogs or anywhere else.
In a trailer on YT, that section of the short film received a claim from some French outfit claiming to own it. I proceeded to ignore the claim.
Alternative (Score:2)
I can see the technical complexity (Score:5, Insightful)
It will not be easy for bots to notice the difference between Bavouzet’s recording and a live broadcast by a good player, because these bots allow for some variation to deal with processed recordings etc.
It is a ridiculous situation, and probably bots are best not used for classical music until they can handle subtle differences in performances
Happened to me (Score:2)
Reference Audio Files Include Classical Music (Score:1)
Sue for Liable (Score:2)
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You can't. That's the law and the terms of service.