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Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

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Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#191

Along the same lines, I was publishing church services each Sunday between May and December of last year, with three English hymns in each, mostly old ones well-known across denominations. In total, I got 23 Content ID claims (about 20% of the hymns), claiming ownership of the melody. Every single one was for a work in the public domain. I disputed each, providing the name and date of death of the composer. Two were…

> Every single one was for a work in the public domain.

While the sheet music is, the performance by other artists - as your own performance - is not. That's the issue the algorithm is having here (not defending).

The automated system would need to "understand" that this is indeed a new performance of a public domain piece of sheet music and not a reproduction of a copyrighted performance by somebody else. Even if you were note for note playing exactly the same (tempo and whatnot) with the same instrument tuned the same way. I think this would be an argument against automated systems. Whether a human could know that my bike-ride was scored by myself and not somebody else is doubtful though.

On the other hand, I do understand that people do not want their individual performances to be used without licence and there may be many such performances.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video covers this aspect. Yes, the current system is bad, but it replaces a scary letter demanding cease and desists plus high damage payments and a resolution between extremely expensive lawyers. It surely is not optimal, but I doubt your common YouTuber could afford to fight claims in court.

DMCA replaces the scary letters. YouTube only responsibility is to collect claims and counterclaims. Common YouTubers can just accept the claim and mute content. Youtuber wanting a fight or that know the other party would never risk their frivolous challenge to go to court with the threat of perjury hanging on their head have a right to counterclaim and put the ball in the other party field. YouTube instead decide to…

I don't think the DMCA replaces the scary letters. The scary letters existed because they were more effective than the DMCA. Threatening to sue someone is always and always has been totally an option. The reason scary letters don't get sent right now is because it's easier to just have Youtube remove the video.

If that went away the next easiest option (scary letters) would happen again. DMCA or not.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#193
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She mentioned that she's not making much money from it. People are migrating from this model into sponsorship such as patreon, with followers chipping in for their favourite creators.

Patreon is also problematic due to centralization.

soon there will be a killer app for that in blockchain that will replace patreon

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned the tradeoff involved in a later comment. The difference between a technical person and a non-technical person is that the former has decided to learn what is needed to do what he or she wants to do. It’s not a secret club. All the information is on the internet. I never went to Apache engineering school, I have been running my own sites and others for many years, and no one has taken anything over for po…

That knowledge is an entire career's worth of knowledge. Sure, almost anyone could pick it up, but it's more cost effective for them to rely on others to do it for them. For a musician, the learning and upkeep is a lot of time that would better be spent creating; making a living.

I don’t disagree. But that’s the tradeoff I’m talking about. Letting others do it for you means giving up control; the limiting case is being abused by YouTube. If you have money, you can hire people to do this for you. But most people can’t afford to hire their own “engineers”. These are the choices.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#195
post #117
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue, not a lack of cost meaning we aren't deserving of a good experience. Look at Peertube or other free as in freedom options.

> I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue, I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale. Currently, about 5000 videos are uploaded to YT every minute . If just 0.1% of them have any potential copyright issues, that's 5 potentially complex cases per minute or 7200 per day. No amount of human review will be able to decide this in a timely manner. The piano teacher's case is j…

> > I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue,

> I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale.

Do you think that the scale of YT is achieved without centralization?

Given the reality that a lack of a centralizing force like YT would just shift copyright adjudication to actual courts and be more expensive and higher stakes for all involved and probably have a similar error rate and bad actors like Prenda, I’d agree that a relatively benignly uncaring Corp without access to police and prisons is better than the court route.

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that white noise is random, a recorded copy of white noise is its own perfect watermark.

Depends on how lossy the compression is. Your watermark becomes compression artefacts instead.

Most audio codecs by now use perceptual noise substitution, which potentially substitutes in identical noise (I think it just EQs it?).

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#197

Summary for those that don’t want to watch the video : - Pianist creates YouTube video demonstrating how to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata - part of this video includes her playing Moonlight Sonata (of course) - YouTube has a new ‘feature’ that scans submitted videos prior to publication to identify potentially copyrighted material - her video is found to include copyrighted material. She is certain this is a mist…

IMO the biggest issue with all this is the lack of a suitable appeals process, handled by humans. Would such a process be expensive? Yes, but you can't have it both ways, enabling copyright holders to lodge spurious claims at will, and not allow content creators - who the entire platform is built on! - to disclaim them. Would such a process be expensive? Yes, of course - but YouTube can very well afford it.

Perhaps the copyright holder should have to pay for a human review, where the content creator agrees to pay the cost if it turns out to indeed be a true copyright infringement.

This would get rid of all bots and most false claims

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hosting issue is orthogonal: register a domain ($4-$15), rent a Linux VPS ($5/month), install Apache. Then, learn how to use the video embed tag ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi... ). Use ffmpeg to convert the videos to the format and size you want them in, upload with rsync. That's it.

I forgot: go to https://letsencrypt.org/ to learn how to get a (free) certificate so you can do https. You might be thinking that you don’t want to learn about all of that just to host some videos, and that’s reasonable. But there is a tradeoff. Either let someone else control your content and live under the threat of arbitrary takedowns, or learn what you need to control your own stuff. If you get popular you will h…

>You can look into Vimeo. For some reason it's not mentioned often as an alternative to YouTube, but it seems to be better in almost every way.

The "Vimeo better in almost every way" needs to be re-calibrated based on the typical reasons that content creators' such as this piano teacher use Youtube.

The many ways that Vimeo is worse:

- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)

- smaller audience : Youtube is ~2 billion users, Vimeo ~200 million

- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization

- less recommendations leading to discovery of your videos because less catalog of content from others to expose viewers to your video: Youtube has dozens of Beethoven Moonlight Sonata piano tutorials, Vimeo has none[2]

And btw, Vimeo also removes videos. Previous comment about someone following advice of switching from Youtube to Vimeo which didn't solve his problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347254

Vimeo is a good platform but it's not mentioned as often as alternative to Youtube because it doesn't solve the same problems for many Youtubers. Also, self-hosting with Apache web server and HTML5 tag also doesn't solve the same problem. And Peertube+Patreon doesn't solve the same problem.

[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade

[2] https://vimeo.com/search?q=moonlight%20sonata%20tutorial

Re: Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same principle applies though: Youtube has no say in deciding what is copyrighted or not. They don't want to have a say in it themselves. Someone, somewhere, claims that they own the copyright to x and y. Youtube can't and won't decide if that is truthful or not. Almost a decade ago, youtube gave the keys to claims to people to remove themselves from the equation. "Someone says they own this stuff so they took it…

How much would you bet that the same wouldn't happen to e.g. Warner Bros.. YT is quite definitely taking a stance, the problem is they're not taking a stance on truthfulness, but simply on how much money does it make us.

They are taking a stance on how much headache and money it will cost them, which is really reasonable. The reason old and unsustainable youtube died is because of the Warner Bros and alike - because their kind tend to hold an enormous amount of copyrights. If they feel they benefit from copyrights, then they will feel the most attacked. They, with their influence, said youtube cannot continue in this fashion back in the day, and it was true. They could sue youtube to the ground and they'd have to close down (assuming manual moderation is impossible). I am actually amazed that they allowed it to continue with this solution, being, "youtube, you give us the keys and we do the takedowns when we feel like our copyrights are violated, then you may continue" and youtube said "fine" and that is where we are. Now if you feel like your content is taken down unjustly, you should take it up with whoever is claiming ownership over your content. Which is... impractical actually, but that is how it is. This is one of the only ways within the current legal framework where you can have a site where people post content to freely without being liable for aiding and abetting copyright infringement yourself. No easy solution to this.

So yes, Warner Bros can be an enormous headache to youtube. Legally and financially. "Piano teacher" probably can't. Youtube acts accordingly which is pretty rational. If you owned a youtube-like service, you'd have to do the same.

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