
Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/takedowns/ten-hours-static-gets-five-copyright-notices
======
odabaxok
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325)

------
appleflaxen
Since you have to attest in a legal document that you are the copyright holder
in order to file a DMCA, then you are guilty of a crime (would it be perjury?)
if you provide such an attestation under false pretenses.

If we don't punish these false claims when they happen, then they will
continue.

An alternative approach based on civil disobedience would be in the form of a
large group of individuals filing claims against large swaths of content
(basically using the same broken rules of DMCA against the people who advocate
them).

~~~
predakanga
There's a bit of conflicting verbiage around this, but the 'copyright notices'
that are mentioned in the linked article aren't actually DMCA takedown
requests; they're Content ID matches.

The Content ID system is a private arrangement between Youtube and various
rightsholders, and it allows them to assert control without the legal
repercussions involved in DMCA claims.

The EFF has another article[0] which goes into more detail on the two systems,
but I found that to be a bit confusing as well - it seems to conflate the two
systems at times.

[0]: [https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-
yo...](https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-youtube-
removals)

~~~
mtgx
Somewhat tangential, I think it was also Cory Doctorow or Larry Lessig arguing
that DRM is bad because it goes _beyond_ what the law requires (especially in
relation to blocking all fair use).

This is similar in that Google goes beyond what the law requires to appease
certain content providers. People should start boycotting YouTube in the same
way they have started boycotting Facebook. We won't see a major shift
overnight, but eventually enough of us will do it and Google, like most other
companies, will only notice when it's too late to do anything about it.

Vote with your feet/clicks and plead with indie creators to switch to a
different platform (such as D.tube, for instance, but any would work).

~~~
ploxiln
Youtube was in perpetual high-cost lawsuits until they implemented Content ID
to media conglomerates' satisfaction.

The problem is the law.

~~~
jkaplowitz
At least in the US, they tended to win those lawsuits, thanks to the fact that
online content hosts receive a liability safe harbor if they comply with the
DMCA provisions around takedowns and terminating repeat infringers.

This was one of the good details of the DMCA, although other countries
implementing the WIPO Internet Treaty may have done a less hoster-friendly
job.

Unless the problem was lawsuits outside the US or they wanted to make the US
lawsuit nuisance go away (both entirely possible!), I imagine they started
playing nice with the media conglomerates so as to be able to offer Google
Play Music, Movies, and Books, for all of which they need licenses.

Note for anyone who looks at my profile and sees Google among my former
employers: I never worked for YouTube, Google Play, or Google legal and had no
involvement with these decisions. I'm not speaking based on inside information
or otherwise speaking for Google here.

~~~
ploxiln
Yeah, they won, but it still cost many millions ... I guess I mean the flaw is
with the judicial system.

But you have a great point, the media conglomerates could with-hold
cooperation which Google needed for Google Play, so Google needed to make them
happy anyway ...

------
mindvirus
For the sake of argument, assume that we want to protect copyright on sites
like YouTube. What is a good, fair solution here?

Given the scale, I think that automated solutions are required to have any
reasonable enforcement. However automated (and non-automated) solutions will
have false positives. Right now it seems like there is no cost to a false
positive (claiming that a video is copyrighted when it is not), and so systems
are happy to be aggressive with these notices. Likewise, the cost of a false
negative (missing a copyrighted video) is high to the rights holder, as they
are losing revenue.

Since these systems use machine learning, it seems that it’s easy to add noise
and fool them. I’ve seen videos that are flipped, slightly skewed, and have
audio sped up or slowed down, presumably to get around the system. So I would
assume that the system would have to be a bit aggressive to catch added noise.

I think it’s ultimately an economics problem though. Since there’s basically
no cost to the person making the claim when there’s a false positive, there’s
less incentive to avoid false positives. However, it seems hard to charge fees
here - if you’re charging people to take down content that they hold the
rights to, that’s basically extortion.

Any thoughts on what could be done to improve it? I think long term, we have
to evolve our understanding of copyright and licensing, but given the current
regime, is there even a solution?

~~~
gridaphobe
Why should it be YouTube’s responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn’t the
beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that
were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it’s not worth
the time/effort.

This doesn’t directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use
(which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.

~~~
icebraining
Without YouTube's system, you'd have automatic takedowns based on nothing but
keywords in the title: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner-
admits-it...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner-admits-it-
issues-takedowns-for-files-it-hasnt-looked-at/)

There's no cost when you have bots sending emails. You'd have to fix the law
first.

~~~
cup-of-tea
But as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion there are legal repercussions
for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request. The problem is Youtube have
their own version of the law and just automatically believe the claimant.

~~~
icebraining
_there are legal repercussions for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request_

Can you find a single entity that has ever been hit with these "legal
repercussions"?

~~~
ubernostrum
The responses to you will mostly be people who haven't read the details of the
Diebold case and assume that it set a precedent for false claims of
infringement; it didn't, and it's still basically impossible to get someone
penalized for that.

The issue, as other commenters noted, is that the only claim made under
penalty of perjury is that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to
act on behalf of the copyright holder, of a copyrighted work.

The claim that someone has infringed your rights (or the copyright holder's
rights) is _not_ made under penalty of perjury. The only way to get someone
penalized for it is, essentially, to get them to admit in court "Yeah, I knew
it wasn't infringing, but I sent a notice anyway out of malice". Which is,
well, pretty much what happened in the Diebold case. Other issuers of mass
automated takedown notices are dumb, but not quite _that_ dumb.

------
Ygg2
Didn't people discover sound of rain is copyrighted as well?

Along with bird song, <s>children smiles, and joy?</s>

~~~
sharemywin
[http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-face/](http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-
face/)

I'm just sayin'...

------
amelius
If you watch static long enough, then at some point you will be able to read
the collected works of Shakespeare.

So this probably also holds for copyrighted works.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)

------
aheppy
There have been similar experiments & results posted before. Seems like a
consistent issue with the platform:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325)

------
peteretep
Surprised Google don't detect white noise, and stop if being copyrighted, if
for no other reason than the bad publicity this generates.

~~~
ianai
From their perspective, the purpose of the platform is not to host white
noise. I could see them seeing white noise itself as such an extreme corner
case as to be not defendable from their content identification. One could
imagine a ddos of white noise in an attempt to overwhelm their system. (Devils
advocate.)

~~~
JustSomeNobody
They let people upload video/audio, I'm sure their definition of corner
case[0] is very narrow and I'm not sure this would qualify. It's really no
different than computer generated music.

[0] I don't think corner case is appropriate terminology in this discussion. I
think it should be edge case. But even still, I don't think Google would think
this is an edge case.

------
gxs
My favorite recent copyright story is the Happy Birthday song.

It may be common knowledge by now, but Warner copyrighted this song from the
1800s and profited for years until someone challenged it in court.

I've been waiting for someone to post one of those "this was way more
complicated than that and this is why it wasn't as outrageous as people make
it seem", but nothing yet.

This in a addition to the Micky Mouse laws really makes the system feel
flawed, even though it has its clear benefits.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-
birthda...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthday-
copyright-suit-settled-n477671)

------
Panino
Bogus claims are an ongoing issue and this same basic article (about static
videos in particular!) has been posted before -- which is not to say it
shouldn't be posted, but rather that Youtube hasn't fixed this known, albeit
difficult, problem. Is it considered WONTFIX?

It's one of the reasons that makes me self-host videos, which is actually very
easy to do with HTML5. Check the examples section here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video)

It's just a few lines of HTML and you're done. Try it with a test video --
it's surprisingly easy.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
What if one of your videos goes viral? Would that not get very expensive?

~~~
Panino
The videos are only of interest to family and friends.

That said, I've seen a few stats of top-page HN links generating 10,000 or
more unexpected visitors, and a 1TB cap with a 20MB video would easily handle
that.

But if that weren't the case, if I were making professional videos intended
for a mass audience, then I would just add more servers with appropriate
bandwidth. Scaling for your own content is vastly different and easier than
scaling for _everyone 's_ a la Youtube or imgur.

------
Asdfbla
This seems to be one of the less surprising false-positives of Youtube's
copyright detection algorithm. You match millions of hours of copyrighted
material vs. noise, seems like you have a multiple testing problem and at
least one thing will inadvertently match somewhere in the 10 hours noise video

Wonder what Youtube can do here, except speed up dispute resolution. With
datasets of their size, false-positives seem inevitable.

Do copyright-owners just set the system to auto-monetization or -takedown? If
so, maybe Youtube should change their policy to require more manual action
from copyright owners.

------
JustSomeNobody
So original creator posts videos of static. Then another company says, wait,
we have a copyright on that and so they start getting revenue from the videos.
The original creator now looses revenue while they go through a process to
counter the notice.

This is fair, how?

Why should the other party automatically start getting revenue? Why can't that
money go into escrow and whichever party prevails gets that money?

The problem is Google has no incentive to make this better.

------
manmal
Do the authors mean that the claimant had uploaded their static noise video
before 2015? Or were the videos matched after the fact?

~~~
shaki-dora
It doesn’t matter. You can’t copyright white noise. Unless you’re John Cage,
or possibly Donald Trump.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I can't see any reason that a work comprising primarily of white noise
couldn't be copyrighted.

What you can't do is stop others copying your idea (as long as they don't copy
your implementation), nor stop others implementing the same thing who don't
copy you.

Now, a work needs in most jurisdictions to be distinctive, but IMO the length
of the work would _inter alia_ be enough to make it distinctive, or perhaps
use of a specially designed noise generator. But when you release "10 hours of
noise" and I copy your _idea_ and make "9 hours of noise" there will be no
tort there.

~~~
icebraining
In the US, the threshold of originality seems to be a bit higher than that.
E.g. this logo was denied copyright registration:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/medi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/media/File:Best_Western_logo.svg)

Refusal letter:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.inf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightAppeals/2006/Best%20Western%20Logo.pdf)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's not that simple though, Cage's piece -- Silence 4'44" \-- I don't think
was tested, but taken as a whole I'd grant it copyright. It was art that
caused reflection on the nature of a "work", it was designed to be "played" by
a musician with any instrument, it was 273s long presumably to reflect on
whether silence could ever be absolute. I suspect it was also intended to
encourage the listener to observe ambient sounds as if they had meaning. That
makes it distinct as a performance piece.

That logo is, within the field of logos, indistinct, boring if you will, if
you sat down 100 logo designers I bet you'd get a few that look very like it.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with it but having copyright but for a logo RTM
is probably a stronger right anyway.

In short I don't think just being white noise is sufficient, but I don't think
it excluded a piece of itself.

~~~
EtDybNuvCu
Importantly, if I sit down at a piano for a few minutes, stare at the keys,
and don't play, I have _not_ performed Cage's work. There is a subtle nuance
here.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Exactly, you have only performed Cage's work if you set out with the intent to
play Cage's work. This obviously makes it impossible to determine if a
particular performance of silence is a performance of Cage's work without
reading someone's mind, but that same issue of determining intent comes up a
lot in legal matters.

------
coldcode
I sleep with a powered air filter running (HEPA and charcoal) every night and
its a perfect noise (maybe not exactly white but minor variance) to sleep by.
I should upload a recording and see if anything complains.

~~~
icebraining
They don't complain, they just insert ads and gain money from your recording.

------
inertiatic
Probably by 65daysofstatic, I mean it's part of their work!

------
ouid
When the "copyright holder" decides to monetize a video, google gets a cut,
right? Doesn't this create an incentive for google to prefer false positives?

~~~
gizmo385
Google already takes a cut of ad revenue regardless.

------
SCAQTony
How do you copyright leftover radiation from the big bang (since that is how
white noise is generated) when the "static" is 13.8-billion years old?

------
raverbashing
Sounds like an opportunity for copyright "trolling": upload videos, wait for
the strikes and removals, sue.

~~~
ouid
Right, but what's wrong with that? you can't win the suit if the people who
issued the request are acting in good faith, so you can't trick them into
issuing a takedown if they are not acting maliciously.

in the early days of the do not call list, you could make quite a lot of money
off of bad actors who ignored it. there was incentive to get your number on
both the do not call list, and cold calling registries, and very quickly made
malicious telemarketing untenable.

------
caycep
I wonder if this can be considered the precursor to adversarial attacks on
neural networks?

