451–460 of 803 posts
Since Youtube started to show me funny "TURN OFF THE ADBLOCKER!!!" notices, I just started slamming links in yt-dlp and watching them offline. No drawbacks so far.
It will become harder to ignore the possible retaliation Google can make against your/your family’s Google accounts.
Every time I sit down at my own piano in my own living room and record something written by a composer who died 150 years ago or more, I get a copyright strike on YouTube--often by a big label (BMI, etc). Last week it was a Robert Schumann piece, composed in 1848. The strike is still there, even though I contested it. (The form to contest it doesn't even have a good box to check for this scenario.) I would love it if…
The lack of (legal) recourse (in practice, if not in theory) against large multinational monopolists like YT is the real problem here. Imagine if a policeman came to your house every time you played the piano to fine you for nonexistent copyright infringement. That cop would be unemployed in very short order. You could take all sorts of against them, and there are protections in place to prevent such abuse of power.…
The legal concept of qualified immunity prevents taking personal action against civic officials for actions they perform in the course of their civic duties. So, assuming the policeman is coming to your house because BMI called 911 to report (non-existent) copyright theft, the policeman is simply doing his thankless job, and is immune from suit.
If the policeman is just showing up without being called, then - while he would not benefit from qualified immunity - 1. it makes no sense to label him as a "policeman" since he's no longer performing the job of a policeman - you might as well just say "brown-haired guy" or "rollercoaster enthusiast" or "guy who prefers Pepsi to Coke" as those traits are just as relevant; and 2. it's a very poor analogic fit, because in the situation you're comparing it to, YouTube (the cop) is being called by BMI.
Note that qualified immunity is, strictly speaking, only applicable to government/civic actors, not private enterprise. However, the general principle still applies throughout the legal canon (usually lurking between the phrases "duty of care" and "assumption of risk" - you can't sue Kevin McCallister for causing you to cut your foot when you stepped on haphazardly-placed Christmas ornaments, because you were trespassing on private property and the McCallister family owed you no duty of care; and you can't sue We Throw Pies At Your Face For Five Dollars Inc for throwing a pie at your face, assuming you went there and paid five dollars, because you knew what you were getting into and they were just doing their job). In the case of copyright, legal immunity for content providers is actually hard-coded into the DMCA, mostly via the OCILLA safe harbor (Title II).
Also, please don't confuse an explanation of the process for an endorsement of the process. The DMCA is bad law that only looks good if you compare it to hypothetical laws that would be worse, copyright in the US has been ridiculous for generations and trying to emulate Europe in the late 80s only made it worse, and I wish YouTube could find a way to take a stance against rightsholders who abuse the process. But their status as a large multinational monopolist isn't why you can't sue them - it's baked into the law, because that's how the DMCA works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while… There are so many issues with this. Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the rea…
> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have…
See how copyright is protected when it's whatcd violating it and when it's OpenAI
This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…
But, short of such an obvious breach, the rules regarding what can and can't be said, broadcast, forwarded, analysed are thought to be kept deliberately vague. In this way, everyone is on their toes and the authorities can shut down what they like at any time without having to give a reason.
I like the way Jeff signed off the article, pointing out that whilst the video has been pulled for (allegedly) promoting copyright infringement, Youtube, via Gemini, is (allegedly) slurping the content of Jeff's videos for the purposes of training their AI models. Seems ironic that their AI models are getting their detection of "Dangerous or Harmful Content" wrong. Maybe they just need to infringe more copyright in o…
Gemini doesn't need his video as train data, google can just torrent any content and use it as training data, just like facebook.
This is mass problem with almost any topic you want to share. I'm sport shooter, range officer and competition jury. You have no idea what crazy stunts YouTube do for Gun/Sport Shooting related content. YT terms containt some weirdest restriction for things like "shown magazine capacity". Wrong angle on video and your 10 round mag is seen by YouTube as 30 round and your video is gone. You can show silencer disconnect…
Same for tobacco stuff. I follow a few pipe-tobacco reviewers, and YT has begun to tighten the clamp there, too. It wouldn’t bother me if YouTube wasn’t basically a monopoly. I know some of them have been switching to Rumble, but to be honest, the competition is so fragmented that I don’t see any of them gaining critical mass.
> In that case, I was happy to see my appeal granted within an hour of the strike being placed on the channel. (Nevermind the fact the video had been live for over two years at that point, with nary a problem!) Looks like some L-(5|6|whateverthefuck) just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software. Quick appeal grant…
There's peertube and Pixelfed and someone was working on an activitypub version of Instagram, but really it's like Pixelfed but more ergonomic for video. So the next stage, ideally, would be everyone kinda sharing hosting responsibilities, and if you like a creator, you just follow them. This has the benefit of possibly caching/mirroring all the videos, too. My Fediverse server was chewing through disk, one of the re…
My intuition is that they're only left alone because they very explicitly don't step on any content and delivery trusts' toes.
I hadn't really thought about it until I did a crawl for a round of DMCA takedowns for a friend and was surprised by how many platforms apparently use the same few CMSes. It turns out, there are some fantastic, affordable options if you want to start an independent website and VOD service beyond the corporate fray.
This is mass problem with almost any topic you want to share. I'm sport shooter, range officer and competition jury. You have no idea what crazy stunts YouTube do for Gun/Sport Shooting related content. YT terms containt some weirdest restriction for things like "shown magazine capacity". Wrong angle on video and your 10 round mag is seen by YouTube as 30 round and your video is gone. You can show silencer disconnect…
Same for tobacco stuff. I follow a few pipe-tobacco reviewers, and YT has begun to tighten the clamp there, too. It wouldn’t bother me if YouTube wasn’t basically a monopoly. I know some of them have been switching to Rumble, but to be honest, the competition is so fragmented that I don’t see any of them gaining critical mass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have…
> Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. > But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. There is no contradiction there. Imagine a forum about knitting. Someone, who has it in for the owners of this knitting forum (or perhaps even just a SPAM bot) starts posting illegal, or even just n…
This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…
Once you normalize vague enforcement around "problematic" content, the net just keeps widening
Generally speaking in the world of "science" (any field) there will always be a level of disagreement. One scientist will come up with one theory, the other will come up with another theory, they will endlessly debate until the topic is "settled" and then the whole loop repeats if another scientist thinks that the settled topic is not actually settled. Overall I would say this is a very healthy dynamic and keeps society moving forward.
What people go so mad about during Covid was not the content being taken down, it's that you had had various scientific organizations around the world straight up break what I described in the previous paragraph. During covid you had one group make endless rushed decisions and then when other scientific groups challenged those findings, the response was not what I outlined above but rather an authoritarian "I am the science" response.
This "main group" (NIH, CDC, etc) painted all those challenges as conspiracy theories but if you actually listened to what the challenges were, they were often times quite reasonable. And the fact that they were reasonable arguments highlighted the insane hubris of the "main group" and ultimately led them to loose virtual all credibility by the time Covid wrapped up.