
On Facebook and YouTube, classical musicians are getting blocked or muted - pulisse
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/copyright-bots-and-classical-musicians-are-fighting-online-the-bots-are-winning/2020/05/20/a11e349c-98ae-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html
======
mikece
Since the start of quarantine I've been live-streaming Catholic Masses where
the choir and schola take pride in their ability to sing polyphony and chant
which you typically never hear these days and which has always been in the
public domain. However, because commercial recordings exist of these works,
every single Sunday I've got to file protests against the copyright notices,
pointing out that these are live, original performances of works that were in
the public domain for over 200 years (over 1500 in some cases). No matter, if
a recording of this music exists then CLEARLY no human could have possibly
duplicated, in the year 2020, a melody and text that was already ancient a
millennium ago.

I realize this is machine learning and music sampling but I'm a tad surprised
that the dataset cannot include a field such as "this recording is of public
domain music"... and after a YouTube channel has to keep saying "No, I'm not
playing someone else's CDs, we have a choir singing these live -- can't you
hear the imperfections and that the soprano missed that eighth?" I suspect
that at some point the channel will be cancelled because its too much of a
copyright hazard.

~~~
fsflover
Consider publishing your work on PeerTube.

~~~
mikece
That supports live streaming? The “live” aspect is the reason we’re doing this
at all since The State has been issuing “Thou Shalt Not Go To Church” orders
for over a month.

~~~
_bxg1
There are plenty of options for streaming that don't have trigger-happy
copyright detection algorithms because they don't host static videos. Worst
case, I've heard of people throwing together their own P2P video chat web app
using WebRTC in just a few hours.

------
BrandoElFollito
One thing I do not understand in law is that there is no proportionality
(except in some cases in Nordic countries).

If 100B€ company is against me then all of us should expect a painful fine if
we loose. For me that will be 10k€,for them 1B€ (or whatever).

They can afford to send lawyers whose job is to just do that: go to court. I
have to take a day off.

If the fine is 10k it is insignificant to them and they can assume they will
lose and this is no big deal. For me it is.

This unequality between a normal person and a company is painful. I belive
that if companies were possibly in trouble when they loose then they would
make more efforts to provide a good service (also out of court arrangements
should be forbidden to force them to face the music)

~~~
rectang
The impracticality of turning to the courts is what drives a lot of the thirst
for government regulation — legislative relief is the only hope for these
classical musicians.

What good are the courts if the law is on your side but justice is
inaccessible?

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
They work better in loser pays systems. A legitimate complaint can't be shut
down with escalating costs.

~~~
space_fountain
Doesn't that make it a lot worse if you as an average Joe do lose against a
team of well payed lawyers?

~~~
joking
Not really, the fees are more o less standard, and if one of the parties
decide to go with ten lawyers, the loser pays only the fees published by the
legal system, at least where I live.

------
thirteenfingers
I've posted about this here before, but a lot of people who upload their own
videos of classical music on youtube and get copyright-warned or copyright-
striked are too spooked to file a counter-claim. If it was a bot that
automatically filed the claim against you, there's a very good chance the
claim will be automatically lifted if you counter-claim.

Yes, youtube will give you a big scary warning about how repeated violations
could mean your account is shut down. Every time this happened I went ahead
and submitted counter-claim anyway. On all but one occasion the copyright
claim disappeared immediately. The one exception required a bit of escalation
but I still wound up on top
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488897)
if you're curious).

I understand a good many people simply do not feel comfortable risking their
youtube account being shut down from contested claims, but I suspect that for
many the risk is a lot lower than they realize.

~~~
rectang
You've described a system which defaults to injustice and is statistically
guaranteed to produce an unjust aggregate result. That a handful of
individuals can work around it is immaterial.

~~~
Rochus
Right. That's the essence of the essence of copyright law. And the (mostly
unjust) claims of the collecting societies and their henchmen are enforced
with the methods of protection racketing, because hardly any of the victims
will ever defend themselves in court. The same game as with the patent trolls,
simply less known.

~~~
anewdirection
Not so much the law, but how it has been crafted to apply online, and the
sheer amount of malicious compliance by Google et al.

------
xg15
> _Hammons [of Naxos] says that most claims contested by Facebook and YouTube
> users are cleared within a week of dispute, and that arrangements can be
> made for channel owners who are able to prove “the legitimacy of their
> status as a performing arts entity, [or] that their channel constitutes a
> low risk for abuse of the privilege.”_

The "privilege" of being able to play your own original works on your own
channel - generously granted by a random company that has no business
relationship to you whatsoever...

~~~
crazygringo
Who is making those "arrangements"? Naxos? Or Facebook/YouTube?

Because I haven't heard of Facebook/YouTube doing so, though I'd love to know
if they do.

And if it's Naxos, well that doesn't exactly solve the problem does it?
Because the claim against your recording might be Naxos one day, but another
label next week, and yet another label the week after that. Naxos is a big
label, but it certainly doesn't have even the majority of classical music or
anything.

~~~
nikanj
Youtube doesn't care whether they actually have the rights or not, that's for
the courts to decide. You can submit copyright claims on whatever on Youtube,
they don't traverse the complex web of agreements and assignments to see if
you actually hold copyright to the thing you're claiming.

------
bcatanzaro
I got a takedown notice on YouTube for posting a chamber music recording of me
and 3 friends playing a piece written in 1715. Insane.

We need to work on AI that can evaluate the musical talent in a recording. I
mean yes, I was playing the same song as some famous musician, but anyone
could tell I am an amateur and my recording was not professional.

~~~
nitrogen
_We need to work on AI that can evaluate the musical talent in a recording. I
mean yes, I was playing the same song as some famous musician, but anyone
could tell I am an amateur and my recording was not professional._

Years of reading the arguments on HN (and other forums and aggregators before
that) have convinced me that technology will not provide the answers to this
problem. We need better laws from governments, and better policies from
corporations.

~~~
ngold
How about every copyright claim has to be submitted in a handwritten letter
with a picture of you holding that days newspaper. Then put the photo and
handwritten note in an envelope and mail it in.

~~~
kec
Better (and simpler), there needs to be a fine or other punishment for
fraudulent copyright claims. Even better if that fine can be proportional to
income of the claimant.

~~~
0x00000000
Or the fine is that the work in question becomes public domain.

------
Pyrodogg
> “Though the technology works most of the time in terms of correctly
> identifying instances of our clients’ content on-platform, it still
> generates a not-insignificant amount of mismatches that require human review
> to differentiate,” Hammons says. “The chances of conflicts with this amount
> of content are considerable. For these reasons there is always a volume of
> potentially erroneous auto-generated claims that unless contested, I may
> never be made explicitly aware.”

\---

This is _exactly_ the problem. It's obvious that there is a "not-
insignificant" amount of cases where the there isn't extremely high confidence
in the automated model.

Instead of these cases defaulting to claims, it should default to human
review.

------
Rochus
Then this blatant nonsense with these collecting societies strikes back at
those who have benefited from it for many years. When you do a concert you
don't just have to pay for the composition and arrangement and such, you also
have to pay for the secondary exploitation rights (i.e. the performing
musicians), and if someone sings, you also have to satisfy the collecting
society responsible for the lyrics. And if you want to make live recordings of
the concert accessible to people (even for free) it gets even more
complicated. And ironically, the musicians and composers get the least from
this horrendous machinery. The musicians who can secure a decent income from
the collecting societies' revenues can be counted on one hand. For most of us,
it is just enough for a part of the travel expenses.

The people who still dare to perform a classical concert somewhere in the
hinterland are immediately punished and exempted by these collecting
societies. In the age of the Internet, this is now even automatic. No wonder
that there are fewer and fewer places that perform.

So today the shot is well and truly fired in the wrong diretion when composers
and musicians assign their rights to such a society. Where there is hardly any
market anyway, the promoters are penalised even more, although composers and
musicians should be rather glad that someone is still listening to them.

I, for my part, am not affiliated with any such society anymore and have all
my fellow musicians sign agreements whereby I pay them directly and no further
claims of such societies are permissible.

~~~
Rochus
See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective).

Ironically, a musician working as a clerc for a collecting society earns at
least an order of magnitude more than what the median musician can expect as
annual royalties from the collecting society.

------
zuminator
Why can't it work something like this:

* As a YouTube channel owner you have the option of officially registering your channel with verified contact information.

* A video you have uploaded gets flagged by a bot.

* YouTube mutes the content and immediately texts you an alert.

* If you have opted to officially register with YouTube, you are given the ability to text back a countermand to the alert.

* If you countermand the copyright violation flag, your video is immediately unmuted, and the copyright holder receives instructions that if it still believes the content is an IP violation, commencing legal proceedings are the next option.

* If and only if the copyright holder affirms to Google that it will follow through with legal proceedings, it is given your contact information.

~~~
rickbutton
Because Google has a financial interest in keeping these malicious "rights
holders" happy and profits from the stealing of profits from YouTube creators.
Until it becomes illegal, or YouTubers organize, Google will continue to steal
from creators.

------
BitwiseFool
If there's no penalty for false-positives on content ID this is only going to
get worse.

~~~
protomyth
If YouTube charged these companies for their false claims, then we would see a
very quick end to the BS flagging.

------
fortran77
I've had Sony block my own amateur recordings of me sitting in my living room
playing Schubert on my own piano.

These companies should face criminal charges for this extortion. It's
disgusting and outrageous.

------
guscost
Yet another (non-political, this time) reason why the law needs to be changed.
I’ve sent a note asking my district representative to support reform, and
would encourage everyone to do the same:

> In Green v. AOL (2003), the court established:

> There is no real dispute that Green's fundamental tort claim is that AOL was
> negligent in promulgating harmful content and in failing to address certain
> harmful content on its network. Green thus attempts to hold AOL liable for
> decisions relating to the monitoring, screening, and deletion of content
> from its network — actions quintessentially related to a publisher's role.
> Section 230 "specifically proscribes liability" in such circumstances.
> Zeran, 129 F.3d at 332-33.

> There is immediately a question why this "quintessential relation" only
> works in one direction, i.e. why even when "monitoring, screening, and
> [deleting content]", a provider should not be considered a publisher, and
> thus ineligible for immunity under Section 230. The courts may not agree
> with that argument, but I would say that it highlights a serious deficiency,
> and the law needs to be changed in a similar manner as Josh Hawley's bill:
> [https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-
> bill/191...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1914)

> In fact I would argue that his bill does not go far enough. Getting an FTC
> rubber-stamp certifying "no political bias" seems like a vague and squishy
> system that will be easy to game. Perhaps the law should state that any
> provider above a certain size which takes action to "monitor, screen, or
> delete content" that is not illegal, and does not respond to an appropriate
> claim by reversing this decision, should forfeit immunity under Section 230.
> This would be very controversial, because it effectively bans e.g. YouTube
> from having their own "code of conduct" independent of US law. But I think
> that is exactly what needs to happen - YouTube is far too big for a
> "community standard" to make sense, and any attempt to do this will be
> abused for censorship. These companies should be forced to engage with all
> of us in the making of laws about free speech, they should not effectively
> be able to declare what free speech is by fiat.

------
ken
This happened to a friend of mine recently, who didn't care to fight it, so we
all lost.

The part that I don't understand is: Shazam is really bad at classical music.
Unless it's the exact recording of the piece as their database, it seems,
Shazam won't recognize it at all. And a little noise or static is enough to
throw it off.

How is it that FB/YT content detectors are so far ahead of the game that they
can detect old music in completely new recordings? Or, alternatively, why
can't FB/GOOG slap a simple UI on their services and make an app like Shazam
for users but 50 times better?

We've got the worst of both worlds right now: bad detection of music when we
want it, and overzealous matching of new recordings when we don't.

~~~
jecel
Is Youtube really better at identifying the music? For one video my father
posted we got a complaint that some company owned the song for the part where
my sister was playing the piano and singing. It offered the option of muting
it or allowing ads with the money going to the company. What it didn't say was
what song specifically it thought the video had. So though they offered the
option to contest it there was no way for us to do that without this
information. The lyrics were something my sister had written herself, so it
was very likely that it was a false match. It obviously had a recording of
what they thought matched or it couldn't have made the comparison. But without
allowing me access to that recording there is no way to know if their
algorithm is any good.

------
bob1029
I can regularly trick apps like Shazam by playing classical pieces on a Yamaha
digital keyboard with only the built-in speakers being used. Its almost
deterministic. I can get Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata to detect as one of
several published recordings almost 100% of the time.

I feel classical music is especially tricky from a ML modeling perspective.
How many unique recordings are there of Pachelbel's Canon in D?

This is probably similar in difficulty to identifying a specific bird in a
flock of thousands, and then looking at another discontinuous (in time) photo
of the flock taken from a slightly different perspective and being able to
recognize the same exact bird again.

------
betenoire
I used to record myself playing classical music, then listen to it later to
find my weak spots to focus my practicing.

I was flattered and annoyed when one of my recordings was taken down. I
contested it, it was restored. This was SoundCloud though

------
nullc
This only thing unusual about this problem for classical music is the
extremely large repertoire of public domain works.

The article vaguely implies that there is also an issue of miscalibration of
the matching due to emphasising commercial pop-music but I've never seen any
evidence of that and wouldn't expect it from how these systems work. In
particular, I've found various contentid services to be effective at
identifying classical music-- so clearly their database contain plenty of it.
I expect that this claim is pure speculation on the part of the article's
author.

~~~
msandford
I think the idea of miscalibration of matching isn't that the system can't ID
classical, it's that the system doesn't know that classical should have
different rules apply.

A lot of pop music "sounds the same" but the songs are actually different in
meaningful ways note-wise. When you're dealing with classical music it's all
the same notes! Just different people playing it.

So probably what's happening (some-how, some-way) is that the ID mechanism is
trained to find songs that are "the same" and in pop music they're only "the
same" if they're the _same song_. But in classical there are many songs that
are different that are the _same song_ and so the model which was trained with
one set of assumptions completely fails when a different set of assumptions
are in play.

And because classical doesn't register in a big way to the people in charge
this doesn't get fixed because it only takes the algorithm from 99.85%
accurate to 99.72% accurate which as we all know, is meaningless!

~~~
zozbot234
> So probably what's happening (some-how, some-way) is that the ID mechanism
> is trained to find songs that are "the same" and in pop music they're only
> "the same" if they're the _same song_.

Right. Pop music has a lot of variation in timbre even between 'covers' of the
same composition, so if the notes match and the overall timbre matches it's a
safe bet that you're looking at two instances of the exact same _recording_ ,
or at most two versions by the same performer. In classical that just isn't
true, the timbre of acoustic instruments is basically fixed and the notes are
defined by the original composition. There's just too little variation for an
auto-id system to work with.

------
ojosilva
We probably need a PBS equivalent for streaming, as FB and Google and huge
businesses alike will always put their financial goals and liabilities before
the general public interest. This has worked well for Wikipedia, where money
hasn't been, at least in most cases, able to permanently wipe unwanted
information off of articles.

This doesn't mean there won't be copyright claims, but the burden should be on
the copyright owner not the user. If this platform is a "public streaming
system", then no ads are shown and the limits of infringement will be
constrained by the lack of ads (ie "fair use"). Having no financial incentives
for people to make money off of other people's work makes it all much simpler.

A "Wikitube" would have its many challenges, certainly, but resolution would
lean on the side of the public interest, something that has been wildly
forgotten in the digital age.

------
jrochkind1
> Duncan Hammons, considers copyright protection “among our chief duties per
> our relationship with our distributed label clients.”

> “We’re at the mercy of automation in order to uphold our obligations to our
> clients,” Hammons says in an email. Like other record companies, Naxos
> relies on Facebook’s and YouTube’s content identification systems to track
> potential illegal use.

Naxos, please explain who is forcing you to use software/algorithms
implemented by other companies, that you implied you know is harming the
classical music industry/community? It's clear to me who is at Naxios' mercy,
but it's not entirely clear to me whose mercy Naxios is saying they are at.

------
scottious
Anecdote: I got silenced by posting a performance of Fur Elise by Beethoven on
Facebook and Instagram. Really weird.

~~~
kube-system
Was it your performance?

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/B32kS](https://archive.md/B32kS)

------
causality0
The automation of the law ranks very highly among the worst things in modern
society.

------
jancsika
> A few Sundays ago, Camerata Pacifica artistic director Adrian Spence, aided
> by his tech-savvy son Keiran, went live on Facebook to broadcast a
> previously recorded performance of Mozart’s Trio in E flat (K. 498), a.k.a.
> the “Kegelstatt” trio.

> an original performance of an _hour-long_ piece composed by Mozart in 1786

I'm surprised the bot recognized the piece when it was apparently played at
about half speed. :)

------
aaisola
The fact that you can copyright a rendition of something that itself was
created hundreds of years ago is appalling and shortsighted.

------
botwriter
Why not make it so that you just can't own copyright on versions of Public
domain music.

Makes life a hell of a lot easier the ai recognised this is public domain and
so no one can make a claim on it.

~~~
recursive
The music or the performance of the music? Eliminating performance copyright
would be a big deal.

~~~
wolco
Who owns performance rights? The person recording? If many people record the
same thing who gets the copyright?

~~~
recursive
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe it's the performer.

