
YouTube blocks recording of public domain Schubert/Liszt composition - imiller
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPZUQqtVDmcjm4NY5FkzqLA/community?lb=UgwnsAnMT7NLWnGylUB4AaABCQ
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coliveira
The big problem with classical music is that the compositions are all in
public domain, however most performances are not. Given the subtle differences
between performances, algorithms are not smart enough to figure out the
difference. In fact, even humans would have a hard time to distinguish between
two performances of certain classical pieces.

~~~
stephen_g
I don't think it's so much that the algorithms aren't smart enough to tell,
it's that Google have had to make the algorithm still match in the case of
people altering music with filters/effects, time stretching, pitch shifting
etc. - so it's been made deliberately a lot less sensitive to most of the
factors that a musician brings into their interpretation.

That's fine - it's probably necessary for Google to not be constantly dragged
into the courts by actual infringement slipping through with small
alterations. The issue is that there is absolutely no recourse for an
incorrect match. There's no option to say 'no, the algorithm is wrong' or 'the
claimant has made a false claim' \- the nearest option is to claim fair use,
and that kicks it back to the claimant to be able to lie again if it was
fraudulent, with no fear of consequences.

There needs to be some process where it can be appealed to a human. I think
the best way I have seen suggested is to stake a small amount of money on it
to have somebody review it - say, $15 from each party, and then you lose it if
it's ruled against you, or get a refund if you win. That should easily pay for
half an hour of somebody's time, so they could hire staff to do it.

If the claimant lost and still didn't agree, it could be escalated to DMCA,
where there are potential penalties for fraudulent claims (even if it doesn't
happen much).

~~~
Wowfunhappy
We don't necessarily disagree, but what bothers me is when people blame Google
for this, as opposed to focusing on the draconian laws that have forced their
hand.

~~~
TremendousJudge
poor Google, making billions of dollars out of other people's work with an
automated system where it's impossible to talk to a real person. feel real bad
for them

~~~
Brian_K_White
Poor me for the results our idiotic laws have produced. I do in fact feel real
bad for me.

~~~
TeMPOraL
These laws didn't appear out of the blue, they're created and lobbied for by
rich companies making money off copyright. Blaming Google for facilitating
further abuse of copyright laws is a fair thing to do, and frankly, the
unlikely event in which Google uses its money to put pressure towards fixing
these laws is still more likely than the laws getting fixed because "we the
people" somehow coordinated enough on the issue.

------
wbhart
It's ironic that a system of rules (DMCA) that was designed to help performers
not lose revenue is actually causing a performer to lose revenue. Rousseau is
one of the most recognised pianists on YouTube. He works tirelessly to perform
a new piece about every week. This must be incredibly tiring, and the skill
required to be able to do that week in, week out, is absolutely breathtaking.

If anyone deserves to be made the poster child for the damage the DMCA and
YouTube content ID is causing, it is Rousseau.

And how is it that an hour after this is reported, the problem still
persists!? A million people are missing scheduled content. If this happened to
a television station as often as it happens to YouTube there would be
widespread, vocal, public complaints. Their competitors would also be having a
field day.

~~~
onli
Content ID is not the DMCA. Content ID got it wrong here, and that happens all
the time. It's not a big deal for the claimer. Which is totally contrary to
how DMCA works, if someone makes a wrong claim there it gets very expensive
for them.

Youtube could easily copy that aspect of the DMCA and make it very expensive
for mis-claimers, and easy to counteract automatic mis-classification. That
they don't has nothing directly to do with laws, it's simply Youtube being a
bad platform.

~~~
izacus
> Content ID is not the DMCA. Content ID got it wrong here, and that happens
> all the time. It's not a big deal for the claimer. Which is totally contrary
> to how DMCA works, if someone makes a wrong claim there it gets very
> expensive for them.

That simply is not true. DMCA misclaims are pretty much not punished at all in
practice.

~~~
onli
The provisions are there. If they are not used it's either because the
violated party does not sue or because the US justice system again is not
working properly. But at least that's how the system ought to work. With
Content ID there is no recourse at all against misuse, it all relies on
Youtube to care. Which it doesn't seem to do at all.

~~~
tssva
The provisions don't protect against a wrong claim but a purposefully false
claim. Unless you can come up with proof that the claimant knew they were
filing a false claim you are out of luck.

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jimbob45
If anyone is wondering, Schubert and Liszt didn't collaborate IRL on these.
Schubert wrote the pieces, died, and then Liszt transcribed them for solo
piano after they had posthumously been found in Schubert's belongings.

~~~
nine_k
Thank you! The answer to _this_ question is why I even clicked on the link. (A
collaboration like that would be awesome, though.)

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cameronbrown
YouTube's filter is so sensitive it's scary. Music from cars driving past in
vlogs, or even <2s of music is enough to trigger the filter. Dialling the
sensitivity up so much is bound to have second order effects negatively
impacting somewhere else.

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jasonjayr
[https://twitter.com/hyperionrecords/status/11623845149849477...](https://twitter.com/hyperionrecords/status/1162384514984947712)

From @hyperionrecords regarding a recent unrelated incident. Hyperion's
content is the one making the claim against Rousseau's video.

They seem aware that ContentID often misidentifies claims, but there doesn't
seem to be a public statement on what they proactively can or will do to help
fix it.

~~~
fireattack
I'm not sure what to fix.

Let's give the benefit of the doubt to Google and say they're constantly
revising their algorithms; even then, due to the sheer amount of video
uploaded to YouTube every day, there _will_ be some of them that are
misidentified, it's simply unavoidable IMHO.

I think the improvement can be made on the smoothness and speed of
disputing/reviewing these claim, though. This process should be as short and
painless as possible, for sure.

In OP's case, considering it only seems to be a couple of hours, I think
everything is still OK-ish _at this point_.

~~~
jasonjayr
I didn't notice the timeline of the OP's post, but they could pressure Youtube
to implement something that requires manual review before action is taken,
instead of automatic action. Especially with a genre that typically has lots
of similar recordings of out-of-copyright compositions.

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dpcan
YouTube seems to be taking the brunt of the criticism when it's the
repercussions of copyright infringement lawsuits that are the problem.

I'm sure YouTube would love to be more lenient. If they could say "anything
goes" they'd be thrilled, but we know they cannot because of the LAWS that are
protecting IP owners.

IP should be protected, but to what extent?

And the bigger problem is the amount, and rate, of which content being
produced threatens everyone's ability to do anything!

Try naming a business. NOTHING is available. If you want to run a competing
business in a saturated market, the naming options are almost non-existent,
especially if you want to name your company something that embodies what your
business does.

Music is having this problem too. When you can take a few stanzas and say you
OWN that music, could someone not just use a computer to generate every
possible sequence of notes, slap a copyright on it, and own all future music?

Photography, video, games, puzzles, speeches, books..... it's all about to hit
a brick wall if we can't be more lenient with IP.

In my opinion, complete works should be awarded a copyright, but sub-sections
of works should not.

And software patents..... dear god.

~~~
izacus
Meanwhile, book publishers are suing Amazon because they added a captioning
feature to make audiobooks accessbile for copyright infringement:
[https://gizmodo.com/is-captioning-an-audiobook-illegal-
major...](https://gizmodo.com/is-captioning-an-audiobook-illegal-major-
publishers-sa-1837563008)

Reply All also has an interesting story about how impossible is it to have
ANYONE accountable AT ALL for DMCA takedown machinery that harasses people:
[https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-
all/76h5ro](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h5ro) A person got
strikes on his internet connection due to previous owner and there was noone
in the insane chain of IP strike machinery that could be appealed to or own up
to the mistake.

The current state of copyright is so broken that it's downright evil.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
This is all historically bound up. Audiobooks and printed books used to be
separate physical things. The publishing rights ecosystem was built assuming
this.

Now that they're fungible, its not making much sense any more. But millions of
publishing contracts exist, that enforce the distinction. What do we propose
to do about it? Without dismantling fundamental contract definitions.

~~~
jerf
20 years ago I made the observation that the whole intellectual property
domain was fundamentally based around all of the individual aspects of
intellectual property being cleanly and completely distinguishable from each
other, e.g., this is a book, this is a song, this is a movie (which is made of
this song and this script), etc. But even then it was becoming clear these
categories were getting fuzzier and fuzzier and in many cases outright
merging, and the categories weren't going to just go together nicely because
of the various contradictory assumptions in them.

The worst then, and I think still today, is computer software, which is
covered by both patents and copyright. Copyright has always covered them, in
the last 20 years, patents have covered more and covered less at times, but
still have always covered some of it.

I'm actually a bit surprised that I've still seen no hint of the legal system
directly grappling with this problem. It just keeps getting worse. I've been
keeping my eyes out but I haven't seen anything.

And this is another example; nobody wrote the copyright laws for the YouTube
case. If you get down to it, you have this intricate interplay of video,
audio, automated systems generating some content, automated systems checking
them, an extra-judicial system for mediation where I will not say the
incentives are 100% misaligned, but they are certainly nowhere near 100%
aligned with what they should be, with a lot of mismatches between YouTube,
the copyright holders, and the video producers in terms of powers and
responsibility (that is, there are many places in the system where there is
power without responsibility, and responsibility without power), and we're
trying to adjudicate it on 20th century law that was already, at times, kinda
cobbled together. (Don't look, but we're already 1/5th of the way into the
21st century.) It's madness.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>I've still seen no hint of the legal system directly grappling with this
problem. It just keeps getting worse. I've been keeping my eyes out but I
haven't seen anything.

IP is modern capitalism's goose that lays the golden eggs. I suspect that they
are somewhat nervous to do the kind of root and branch reforms that would be
neccessary to solve the problems you have outlined. Part of the genius of open
source licences is that they are built out of some of the aspects of law that
capital is most wary of breaking.

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smcameron
I used to use music from musopen.org that contains recordings that are either
public domain or creative commons, typically from the Air Force band, or
various small town orchestras or college or even high school orchestras for
background music for my little space game videos, but dealing with the
copyright claims became too much of a hassle, so now I just rapidly strum some
chords on an acoustic guitar and run it through paulstretch and throw some
reverb on it to get some ambient space music sound.

~~~
moron4hire
Yeah, I do the same thing with my Korg Kaossilator. For ~$100 (I have the
original, not the updated one), you get a phrase sequencer that just about
anyone can learn enough in about an hour to be able to generate their own
ambient music.

I feel like music education for children starting with pianos, guitars, and
recorders is backwards. Get them playing music first. The interest in
instruments will come.

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fortran77
This happens to me all the time. As an amateur pianist, whenever I sit down
and play a piece and upload it, it nearly always gets a copyright flag -- even
if it's 150 years old or more!

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crazygringo
Content ID is never going to be perfect (so there always needs to be an appeal
mechanism).

But I'd always expected that false matches would be due to some kind of hash
collision, not different recordings of the same piece.

Because YouTube doesn't know what the composition is, it only compares to
other performances (which _are_ under copyright).

And the fact that two different pianists could interpret and perform a work
identically enough to generate the same signature Content ID uses is...
astonishing to me, from my classical music background. If I'd had to guess,
two musicians normally probably couldn't achieve that even if they tried.

So this seems to just be a crazy statistical fluke? Otherwise classical
performances would be getting blocked left and right, given the
hundreds/thousands of different performances of the same underlying music? Or
is something more advanced that audio fingerprinting going on?

~~~
brokensegue
Hash collisions? No, I don't think you understand how these content matching
systems work.

~~~
imihai1988
well, that does not seem to be a very constructive answer. mind sharing some
info/references on this specific one, or any others ? because I though it's a
blackbox type of software

~~~
brokensegue
I mean how exactly they work isn't public knowledge. But we can be sure they
don't just hash anything. It would be too easy to just add small amounts of
noise and defeat them.

Here's a reference I googled for you
[https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-
processing...](https://www.toptal.com/algorithms/shazam-it-music-processing-
fingerprinting-and-recognition)

~~~
imihai1988
I think you misunderstood the parent comment ( or I misunderstood your reply
to that). He talks about about a signature (which is pretty much what it comes
down to), not a file hash as in here's a hash of the file contents. That would
be meaningless.

As for the reference you provided I know how shazam works, they pretty much
made a blog post about it. This is not that. Not by a long shot.

~~~
brokensegue
I can't think of a useful copyright matching technique that wouldn't flag
different renditions of the same song. That's my point. The failures of these
techniques wouldn't be hash collisions but songs that legitimately sound
similar.

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wbhart
Rousseau found a way around the block. He uploaded the video again in a way
that caused it to be claimed, rather than blocked, by a different company.
He'll still have to dispute it, but YouTube is not obliged by law to take down
content that only received a claim. The video is no longer blocked.

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falcolas
This is a shame. I love Rousseau's performances of classical pieces. It really
reminds me how little I am capable of playing the piano. ;)

On a slightly more serious note, this is what happens when you force a content
host to bypass the normal flow of copyright claims.

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blisterpeanuts
Youtube seems to have gone to a ridiculous extreme on filtering copyright
material. They blocked a non-public video of my daughter's Irish step dance
recital, because the live band played three traditional tunes in the same
order as found on some commercial recording. It took months to get the
"copyright holder" to grant us permission; ridiculous.

YT doesn't, and can't, have enough resources to correct every such situation,
so they err on the side of the copyright holders. When they're receiving a
billion submissions a day, the innocent ones caught in the net are just a
rounding error.

I'm wondering whether Bitchute might take up the slack here.

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danso
I have a slightly tangential question: can someone link to articles and
writeups that discuss how YouTube and other platforms efficiently disambiguate
between a valid/allowable recording and a prohibited recording, when the
content between valid/prohibited is very similar or near identical in the most
obvious features (e.g. rhythm and key).

~~~
albertsondev
Answer: They don't, and you're guilty until painstakingly proven innocent.

~~~
danso
I don't disagree with your cynicism about the flawed and slow disciplinary
process. But it's still in their operational best interests to improve and
iterate on their auto-classifier algorithms.

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ropiwqefjnpoa
Another huge problem are the companies making money simply calling copy-right
strikes.

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tenaciousDaniel
Rousseau is actually active on HN, curious to see what he says about it here.
What a ridiculous DRM implementation by YT. I understand that with such a
large volume of data, it's a difficult challenge. But it should _not_ be
difficult for an algorithm to figure out that Schubert or Liszt are in the
public domain.

~~~
wbl
They are but the recording is not: it's copyright belongs to the performer.
Unfortunately YouTube can't figure out the subtle differences between
performances that identify them.

~~~
i_am_proteus
The headline is slightly inflammatory in its reference to the "200 year old
composition." Exactly to parent's point: a contemporary recording would be
neither 200 years old not in the public domain.

~~~
ratel
I'm not sure I agree with inflammatory. It seems that the common attribute
between the two materials is that it is based on the same 200 year old
composition and not much else. Like if IT takes your keyboard and gives it to
someone else because they are the same keyboard. Completely missing subtle
differences like the serial number or the fact that on one the space is worn
out and on the other the tab key.

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blondie9x
Where do you get that piano visualizer? Looks helpful for learning and
playing.

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sheinsheish
Have a look at Rick Beato on Youtube

~~~
MichaelApproved
Why?

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aoeusnth1
Maybe he's referring to the video breaking down the bullshit Flame vs. Katy
Perry lawsuit about Dark Horse,

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MuhPqfIk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MuhPqfIk4)

He also says one of his videos was de-monetized because Dark Horse was
bleeding through someone's headphones in one of his videos.

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lazyguy
DMCA, ain't it fun?

~~~
WillPostForFood
DMCA as intended would be better here. The person who thinks they found
something infringing should have to proactively send a takedown, which should
trigger a process that can be appealed. What Google has created is a proactive
automated takedown system with minimal recourse.

