41–50 of 216 posts
From a moral philosophy perspective, corporations like Google display a concerning ethical imbalance when they fail to proactively uphold the common good in scenarios where there's no direct financial benefit. A question to HN, since there are a ton of Googlers on here, what are the justifications of those who work within such organizations, particularly when there are other companies that seem to manage a better bal…
In hbomberguy’s recent video about plagiarism, he points out that one of the dumb side effects of YouTube’s content ID policy is that claiming is so common and usually bad that people assume actual serious infringements are benign.
"Oops, just a bug" only goes so far. What's interesting about content ID is that only a select group of large copyright holders have access to protecting their works through it, and we have a growing number of cases where it makes "decisions" that are not in line with copyright law. So is it a copyright enforcement system or is it really some kind of cartel mechanism which is replacing copyright law? Inquiring minds…
Kinda both, IMO.
So, talking to defence lawyers about copyright cases, even if you settle before going to court, is extremely expensive, and even if you're a well-earning software developer you really don't want to pay even the counterparty legal costs that would precede a court case (and those can count as "actual damages" from an act of copyright infringement). The copyright holder may only get part of even just those legal costs back, so they don't really want to do that either.
For both rights holders and infringers, a thing like ContentID is actually pretty good. Likewise even mere suspected (but actually innocent) infringers, as things can be taken down without having to face a huge legal bill even if you're innocent.
But the downside is the cost savings is in the form of automation, and as there is no algorithm for the truth (and only just starting to be one for "common sense") this automation can be systematically abused by people who are not rights holders. (This isn't the cartel-like behaviour, this is just straight up old fashioned fraud).
Cartels are associations of suppliers who conspire to restrict competition and inflate prices. I think copyright does this all by itself[0], but the extra part of what you wrote was "replacing" copyright law, and… kinda? To the extent that ToS are contracts, and contracts bind parties to do more than the law alone, but can't do illegal things?
But the usual implication is that a cartel is doing forbidden things, even though that's not strictly true and they can sometimes be legally required[1], and that would be something I couldn't prove — but I don't see any particular reason why the big players in video IP would even be interested in doing that given they've already got copyright law. The closest I know of is things where a studio is inspired by a YouTuber, makes a big thing, and then someone sends a take-down request to the original[2], which seems familiar from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide[3]
[0] compulsory cartels include those forced by law[1], and there are copyright holders who lobby for the laws, in some places I'm told it's not possible to voluntarily renounce copyright (though that may have been a game of telephone involving a misunderstanding of a court ruling), and that this was behind the discussion of why there are equivalent licenses that aren't strictly "public domain": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain-equivalent_licen...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_cartel
[2] Pixels movie and it's antecedent, and I vaguely remember Tom Scott saying something similar as an example of the one time he used a small claims court?
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9789445-the-simplistic-styl...
Is that because they partner with big movie/music industries?
Also I don't understand why competitors are not really picking up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s only a valid positive take if it were in any way novel. But there are already loads of such cases. The Content ID system is just broken by design, and they’ve clearly demonstrated no interest in fixing it. The system is designed for abuse. Most notably here, even a successful dispute on the grounds of the work being in the public domain doesn’t stop the claimer from claiming new videos that match , which it very…
I wouldn't say it's broken by design - it's just a matter of incentives that heavily favor taking content down over allowing it to stay. - If Youtube issues a copyright strike that wasn't warranted, a single creator will be pissed of. And apart from Mr. Beast and a handful of others, youtube's relies on large numbers of small creators, so is quite resilient on that front. Apart from that - where are these creators go…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Oops, just a bug" only goes so far. What's interesting about content ID is that only a select group of large copyright holders have access to protecting their works through it, and we have a growing number of cases where it makes "decisions" that are not in line with copyright law. So is it a copyright enforcement system or is it really some kind of cartel mechanism which is replacing copyright law? Inquiring minds…
>So is it a copyright enforcement system or is it really some kind of cartel mechanism which is replacing copyright law? It's neither of those. Content ID is an automated detection system that Google/Youtube voluntarily put in place to help make peace with big copyright holders like Viacom to stop the lawsuits: https://archive.is/Awz5k Basically Youtube created a win-win deal: when our content scanner finds a pirated…
Mind you when we say "it" colloquially we're all talking about content ID, but legally what we're really talking about is how Google, the firm, is making decisions.
So to be more direct: Google is exhibiting non-transparent, cartel-like behavior in selecting which of its partners to pay and which not to. It misrepresents this as copyright enforcement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Oops, just a bug" only goes so far. What's interesting about content ID is that only a select group of large copyright holders have access to protecting their works through it, and we have a growing number of cases where it makes "decisions" that are not in line with copyright law. So is it a copyright enforcement system or is it really some kind of cartel mechanism which is replacing copyright law? Inquiring minds…
>So is it a copyright enforcement system or is it really some kind of cartel mechanism which is replacing copyright law? It's neither of those. Content ID is an automated detection system that Google/Youtube voluntarily put in place to help make peace with big copyright holders like Viacom to stop the lawsuits: https://archive.is/Awz5k Basically Youtube created a win-win deal: when our content scanner finds a pirated…
In this case Disney does not hold the copyright and yet YouTube and Disney are acting like a cartel to demonetize competitors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s only a valid positive take if it were in any way novel. But there are already loads of such cases. The Content ID system is just broken by design, and they’ve clearly demonstrated no interest in fixing it. The system is designed for abuse. Most notably here, even a successful dispute on the grounds of the work being in the public domain doesn’t stop the claimer from claiming new videos that match , which it very…
I wouldn't say it's broken by design - it's just a matter of incentives that heavily favor taking content down over allowing it to stay. - If Youtube issues a copyright strike that wasn't warranted, a single creator will be pissed of. And apart from Mr. Beast and a handful of others, youtube's relies on large numbers of small creators, so is quite resilient on that front. Apart from that - where are these creators go…
There’s already a system in place for removing infringing content: DMCA takedown notices.
The only argument in favour of what Google has implemented is that it’s more gradual, allowing things like claimers to get ad money out of it instead of the poster, should claimers choose to. But you know what? They could have applied that extra logic to their DMCA process (and leave it all manual! That’s all the law requires!) or applied DMCA’s counternotice technique¹ to Content ID (still favouring claimers, but not so unfairly).
And so I maintain: Content ID is broken by design, being designed for abuse.
—⁂—
¹ Roughly, and from memory (exact numbers may not be correct): notice means take the content down and notify the user it was taken down; they can then file a counternotice, which will be passed to the taker-down, who then have two weeks to file suit in a court and notify the service provider to keep the thing down, or else after that two week period the provider must reinstate the content. Note that even a fraudulent notice will still result in the content being removed for two weeks.
I don't understand what youtube is gaining from this, there are so many stories like that. Is that because they partner with big movie/music industries? Also I don't understand why competitors are not really picking up.
As others have noted, the Content ID system is in place to show that YouTube is proactively trying to do something about piracy - this makes the movie studios and record labels less likely to sue Google.
> Also I don't understand why competitors are not really picking up.
Video hosting and streaming on the scale of YouTube is expensive and probably can't be profitable.
YouTube allows anyone to upload an unlimited amount of 4K video, make it available to everyone in the world - all free of charge. Advertising revenue won't cover everything, and of course, quite a few people are blocking ads.
Services like Vimeo compete to some extent, but they acknowledge the expenses involved, so only cater for niche market segments. Things like PeerTube offer an alternative model, using peer to peer bandwidth to keep the costs down - but the federated nature of it makes it less likely to catch on in the mainstream like YouTube has.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s only a valid positive take if it were in any way novel. But there are already loads of such cases. The Content ID system is just broken by design, and they’ve clearly demonstrated no interest in fixing it. The system is designed for abuse. Most notably here, even a successful dispute on the grounds of the work being in the public domain doesn’t stop the claimer from claiming new videos that match , which it very…
I wouldn't say it's broken by design - it's just a matter of incentives that heavily favor taking content down over allowing it to stay. - If Youtube issues a copyright strike that wasn't warranted, a single creator will be pissed of. And apart from Mr. Beast and a handful of others, youtube's relies on large numbers of small creators, so is quite resilient on that front. Apart from that - where are these creators go…
But nothing in law requires them to implement Content ID at all, let alone to allow big corporations to claim any content they want, or for users who dispute Content ID claims to have their claims adjudicated by the corporation who made the claim, or to allow those corporations to retain their access to the system after repeatedly making wrong claims.