

YouTube loses court battle over music clips - nsns
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17785613

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sgift
As usual: This is a decision by a LG (Landgericht), it will surely go to the
next higher court: OLG (Oberlandesgericht). In this special case it is a
decision by the "LG Hamburg", famously known in Germany for its useless
decisions in 'internet cases' that will be reverted by the next higher court.
Nothing to see here, people. Move on. :)

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citricsquid
I thought that they already did this automatically? I uploaded a video I took
from my old apartment, because I lived behind a club* you could hear music and
Youtube automatically detected it on upload. Here's the video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOANhQ9nQYk> and the message I see via my
account:

""Hi Friend", musical composition administered by: EMI Music Publishing. Your
video is still available worldwide. In some cases, ads may appear next to your
video. Please note that the video's status can change, if the policies chosen
by the content owners change. Learn more about copyright on YouTube.".

I have also uploaded videos from TV shows that have been detected
automatically as content owned someone else. This clip from a UK TV show
"countdown": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuHREvK74-4>

""Countdown-Countdown", audio-visual content administered by: Channel 4" Your
video is blocked in these locations: Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey,
United Kingdom. Please note that the video's status can change, if the
policies chosen by the content owners change. Learn more about copyright on
YouTube."

Doesn't this satisfy the courts that Youtube is going to great lengths to
prevent this?

* Never live behind a club, it's ridiculous.

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smackfu
Interesting. Is that why BBC and Channel 4 stuff seems to live on YouTube much
longer than you would think? Because it's blocked in the UK?

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citricsquid
They block stuff within the UK because it's available on 4OD, iPlayer etc and
then leave it for people outside the UK.

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w1kke
I am from Germany and I am really embarassed by the stupidity in my country.
Youtube should just disable its service for Germany. Grooveshark did the same.
Everyone who is serious about the internet could enable the service anyway.

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robertgaal
Could you give a little more insights as to why this is happening specifically
in your country?

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jk4930
Because we have certain organisations protected by the state (they're like
early-retirement homes for political friends).

The organisation in question here, the GEMA, "protects" artists (in a similar
way the music industry protects them) and they have special legal privileges
(like that they can assume that every music record is protected by them and
the other party has to prove otherwise).

We have a public broadcasting service that enchroaches with (redundant)
channels (annual budget of 7 bn EUR). You have to pay a monthly fee once you
have a TV or radio or computer, next year it's mandatory for every househeld
(240 EUR annually). Good place for political friends.

We have chambers of commerce that you're required to "join" once you start a
business. They waste money all the time and are unaccountable. Also for good
political friends.

I guess you see the pattern... :( I won't go so far to call it a managed
democracy or a crony cleptocracy, but often I get this impression.

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chandega
[inflammatory comment] So following that logic car manufacturers are
responsible for all the car accidents in history; its their users, they should
check that the person is able and fit to use their service (car). It just
makes me mad. It's just a bad precedent.

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rhplus
I'm probably in a very small minority here, but given that Google is making
money by placing ads next to most YouTube content, then yes, perhaps they are
responsible for determining who actually owns the content first.

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nkassis
They do and they share the revenues with companies that claim to own the
copyright. They even check videos and proactively decide who the ad revenues
should go too. Sometimes their fingerprinting tool does make mistake (thinking
bird sounds are copyrighted music by some copyright troll was an example
recently).

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RyanMcGreal
If Google wanted to make a big stink out of this, they could decide not to
offer YouTube in Germany at all, citing the country's royalty laws as a reason
it cannot operate viably there.

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mattmanser
A stink? Shut down your business in the 4th biggest international market? Lose
millions in revenue?

Think those German clone crazy brothers wouldn't release DieTube.de the next
day? Lose your dominant market share overnight.

Good luck on still being the CEO the next day!

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Shenglong
You make it seem a lot easier than it is. Youtube has tons of content, not
specifically German, that I wager lots of Germans would like to watch.

But your point comes across, all the same. It'd be really nice, if all the big
tech companies could band together in favor of internet protection. I'm sure
if Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook (just to name a few) would say "we
won't operate in any country that filters internet content", I'm sure we'd be
seeing much less of these actions. I suppose though, that may spark antitrust.

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mattmanser
Internet protection?

You actually mean a copyrightless internet. That's never actually existed or
everyone would still be using KaZaA.

YouTube got greedy, they got slapped. Good for Germany for actually doing this
to an American monopoly. Big deal.

YouTube lied for too long about it being able too expensive to filter content.
But now suddenly they can do it! And that now coincides almost exactly with
when they started to want to justify injecting ads into everyone's videos.

We're still in the scenario where aggregators, Google, YouTube, are making
money when the content creators aren't.

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redthrowaway
So you've started a business, and against all odds you actually have users.
Millions of them. _Hundreds_ of millions of them. Now some ancient industry
whose toes you've tread upon comes along and says, "Nein! Your users are doing
things we don't like! It's _your_ responsibility to stop them!"

You're telling me that your reaction would be, "you're right. We got greedy.
Good for you for forcing us to police what millions of people are doing on our
open forum."

No, you damned-well wouldn't. If you ran a taxi company, you wouldn't jump at
the responsibility to ensure your fares aren't visiting prostitutes or high on
drugs. If you built houses, you would not leap at the duty to ensure they
weren't bought with drug money. _Because that's not your problem_. _You_
aren't doing anything wrong; your customers are.

It's an ancient principle of common law that an individual (or corporation,
now that we're playing that game) cannot be punished for the actions of
another. This ruling, and your argument, violates that principle. You want to
force a company to spend its shareholders' money on stopping other people from
doing bad things, and there is quite simply no moral justification for such an
edict.

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mattmanser
'ancient principle of common law'? Well thanks for the laugh at least.

According to you if I make and sell bombs it's unreasonable for a government
to say 'make sure you don't sell them to nutters'.

It's a stupid argument. Of course there's a moral justification for such an
edict.

Say I started a LOIC server tomorrow that people can use to attack websites.
It's on EC2 so can scale wonderfully on demand. You think I can use your
'ancient principle of common law'?

I'm all for better delivery mechanisms, better competition, all that shit, but
YouTube were making money off other people's hard work. They've always played
with fire. YouTube even sailed close to the line of where things like
gorrilavids are these days. At one point you could go on there and find pretty
much any tv show you wanted. Do you know how you found them? Search for
[series name] episode [x] series [x] or some variation like that.

Does that actually sound that hard to detect these with a simple automatic
script? A bank breaking script? It's supposed to be user generated content,
not ripped off content.

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qznc
Could Youtube just silence the videos?

Sometimes I just want to see some cool flying robots and the full video is
disabled, because the creator decided to include some background music.

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nextparadigms
That would certainly be a nice form of protest. They could even show a tiny
message on top of each video explaining why all videos are silent in Germany.
I really think Google should protest this rather than agree to make a deal
with GEMA (if the decision remains final, at least).

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Jun8
Wow, this precedent covers _much_ more than YouTube. If German courts will
hold any such service accountable for what the users post, pretty much all
widely used services are susceptible to suing.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Germany doesn't understand the internet from what I've seen. They're the
country that legally requires you to post your full name, address and
telephone number on your website. (search for "Impressum")

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redthrowaway
Hopefully with the Pirate Party starting to gain support, that will change.

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hemancuso
I remain surprised by how much music piracy seems to take place on YouTube.
Nearly any popular song out there has a YouTube video with essentially
blank/random video content and a nicely encoded layer 3 with the music.
Combined with all the tools/plugins out there to "download YouTube videos" it
seems like quite an easy spot to steal mp3s of most popular songs.

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kayoone
Another great example how the german court again and again tries to kill
internet innovation with ridiculous stuff like this.

Really hope this isnt the last word in the debate!

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w1kke
The next elections in Germany might bring a change as the German Priate Party
is gaining more and more votes in the polls.

This could bring the change we all hope for.

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schrijver
So actually, due to disagreements with GEMA, many Youtube videos are already
blocked in Germany, even if uploaded by the video clips copyright holders. I
was in Stuttgart and couldn’t open a video by SBTRKT that was posted by their
own label <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdUINbi4wSY>

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conradfr
As Germany seems to be more strict than anywhere else, does someone know if
these actions there had effect on the industry revenues ?

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av500
All negative effects on media industry revenues are always due to piracy!

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tbatterii
I guess music in Germany is going to suck for the foreseeable future.

No matter, as long as I can still discover Scandinavian metal regularly, this
court ruling won't affect me as I am not a fan of the Scorpions or David
Hasselhoff.

Rammstein is ok though

<http://youtu.be/Ef3zxiOaYgI>

:)

