Just as a FYI, Blender runs their own PeerTube instance (that you can subscribe to via ActivityPub/Fediverse (so Mastodon and all of those others)) which they fully control: https://video.blender.org/
Reason they created that in the first place was because of a similar accident in the past. Maybe hopefully soon they'll stop using YouTube fully as YouTube doesn't seem to care about solving the core problem of driveby copyright strikes.
Yep, people seem to believe that Youtube is still a platform for crowdsourced videos, by the people for the people.
Youtube is since ~2016 primarly a platform for music clips, a sorta MTV for millenials and GenZ. They absolutely do not give a fuck anymore for content creator and hobbyists.
The faster people will understand that, the less they will be enraged about ContentID/DMCA
I agree that YouTube - like most large social networks - cares only about the large traffic generators, but I'm not sure about your characterization of the content.
I can find high quality creators for almost anything on earth that interests me - programming, ML, music creation, woodworking, and so on.
I suspect this is all about the deprioritization of the little guy.
Google also shuts the door quickly and hard. My personal adsense account was permabannned years ago and 1) I don't know why 2) there appears no avenue to address it
How so? With regular TV, 99% of the time nothing interesting is going on, and 50% of watch time is unskippable ads (despite the service being paid). With YouTube, I can always find something which I find interesting, and there are no ads (even though Premium is way cheaper than TV), only some skippable sponsor spots which some creators choose to put in.
The situation with YouTube is dire, the DMCA situation is dire (in general, but also YouTube's handling of it), there are serious issues with how YouTube treats its creators, and there are serious issues with people being fed disinformation by the algorithm. But in no way is it "equivalent and worse than regular TV".
YouTube also has issues with local laws, for instance recently a video showing full female frontal nudity has been automatically flagged as adult and demonetized (and even partially shadowbanned, to make things worse YouTube flip-flopped on those, which wasn't particularly reassuring for the video maker!), even though full female frontal nudity is typically classified as forbidden to minors of 12 around here (which IIRC includes everyone outside of YouTube kids, because the general YouTube is forbidden to minors of 13 ?). Oh, and to make the matters worse, it was a criticism video, and the nipples had already been pixelated ! (Even though in theory there was no reason to do so.)
In this way it is "equivalent and worse" than regular TV : it's becoming even more sanitized, and in a huge part because of how arbitrary and random all these strikes are !
BTW, with Article 13 (now 17 ?), IIRC there's now a mandatory for big platforms like YouTube mediation system (outside of the control of YouTube) that EU citizens can ask to mediate these issues, before taking these matters to court ?
(But I guess this is all kind of moot, since YouTube, being owned by Google, a US company, is effectively illegal in EUrope since 2015's Schrems 1 ?)
arte.tv looks like a netflix competitor, not traditional TV, but I digress.
Your response argues in favour of the statement "YouTube has none of the issues of regular TV but introduces new issues". If you want, you can make the subjective judgement that the issues introduced are worse than the issues of regular TV, or that YouTube's issues are more harmful to society than those of regular TV. But nothing you have written here backs up the "equivalent and worse than regular TV" thing.
In any case, a website where you can stream TV series isn't what I would consider the "traditional TV model". So it doesn't seem that relevant to the discussion.
Almost every video I watch on YouTube is some balding guy in his basement repairing a computer from the 1980s.
My front page is: an awkward curator giving a tour of a battleship, a candle making tutorial, a 20 minute explanation of how pencils are made, Adam savage selling some kind of sleeping bag, a documentary about how robots are being used to clean up Fukushima, a video about penrose tiles, and half a dozen space news roundup videos.
If you're seeing MTV for millennials, that's because you're clicking on the videos.
If the algorithm is showing you things you don't like, your taste in videos sucks and you don't realize it.
It's the same problem Twitter had. Before meatheads like Elon Musk started knocking heads together, there were a lot of people actually convinced of Twitter's altruism. In reality, the situation was much the same as YouTube.
PeerTube channels also have RSS feeds so you can subscribe using that as well if you aren't on the ActivityPub bandwagon yet (or prefer your RSS reader).
It funny, today I also learned that Singapore and Hong Kong were one of the few countries that ignored DMCA. (I kind of expected Uzbekistan to be on the list !)
Can we not keep Musk discussion to Musk threads?
There seem to be enough of them, and this sort of comment just attracts cheerleading and booing with no analysis.
He seems to be very good at (at least short-term) pivoting platforms away from advertiser-based income. Mainly because all the advertisers are driven away, but still...
Assuming the facts reported here are true, it seems that YouTube is putting its safe harbor in jeopardy by not complying with the counter-takedown:
> Following receipt of a compliant counter-notice, the online service provider must restore access to the material after no less than ten and no more than fourteen business days, unless the original notice sender informs the service provider that it has filed a court action against the user.
YT has this weird format text that you have to EXACTLY copy and paste into the form for it to be processed, Several Lawyers on YT have talked about how to "successfully file a counter notification" and say that if you do not paste that EXACT terminology from their Help Document it will almost ways be rejected
DCMA Claims, and DMCA Counter Notification are required to have certin things in them to be legally valid, My guess is that form text has all of the legally required elements, and if you submit a counter notification that is missing even one element that is required it is perfectly legal to reject it
Remember DMCA is not written to protect you the user, or protect the little guy, DMCA was written for RIAA/MPAA by the RIAA/MPAA
Counter notifications that include all legally required elements but do not follow their form letter are still valid. Yet this probably doesn't mash with Google's "Automate all the things!" strategy, so they are instead shafting everyone and hoping they get away with it due to their wealth even though YouTube is blatantly breaking the law.
I have zero love for YouTube, Google or Alphabet. But I feel like saying "YouTube is blatantly breaking the law" needs to be better researched to be taken serious than "yeah probably".
I never understood how that requirement is compatible with the First Amendment. How is that not compelling speech by the OSP?
OSPs don't have to host content they don't want to host... but if content gets taken down, and then a counter-notification is submitted, the OSP is then required to restore (read: host) the content?
My understanding is that it's a Faustian deal: YT is indemnified by removing its own agency in this regards. If it just follows the rules, it gets a pass. If it interprets the rules it doesn't.
If YouTube didn't have you agree to TOS before uploading a video, you may have a point here. In it's current state though, YouTube has carte-blanche permission to remove anything they want, not just disagreeable content. The concept of free speech does not give you the ability to renegotiate service agreements, unfortunately.
My point is that in some cases, the DMCA appears to require OSPs (YouTube, in this case) to restore content that has been the subject of a DMCA takedown.
I don't see how that is compatible with the idea that YouTube has the right to not host content on their website. It's their website. How can a counter-notification take away - even for an instant - YouTube's right to control what's on YouTube?
They can certainly demand it, but there's no recourse if Google simply says they don't want to host it. Nobody is guaranteed a spot on YouTube by the first amendment, and DMCA doesn't override the pre-existing precedents of contract law. If they truly demand a restoration of removed content, then they are free to do so with servers that they pay for.
Conversely then, how does the DMCA not violate the first amendment by silencing speech? Is there actually any difference in the direction of application of this regulation?
The DMCA takedown system is an exemption to copyright law; violate it, and you lose its safe harbor and go back under ordinary copyright law. Copyright law does not violate the First Amendment because the Constitution specifically allows for it:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
and the First Amendment does not override it; it is specifically worded "Congress shall make no law".
The actual rule is that if YouTube takes something down in good faith belief that it is infringing, they are protected against any liability for any claim over taking it down, but only if the follow the restoration procedures as specified.
If they fail to do that they simply lose the protection of liability if you (or anybody) sues them over taking the work down.
So you cannot successfully sue them over say lost revenue for a fraudulent takedown notice if they follow the correct counternotice procedure. If they don't, then they might be liable, but most likely something in the terms of service or similar would prevent your suit from being a winning case anyway.
However, in other scenarios like where the provider was contractually obligated to keep the content available, if they fail to follow the counternotification procedures properly, you could potentially sue the provider and win.
Does it matter in practice? The OSP can restore the content and then immediately remove it again for a different reason, and I imagine that would honor the counter-notification.
It only counts as non-compliance if they fail to restore the content within ten to fourteen business days, assuming that the takedown notice issuer has not taken the matter to court.
The 10 days is to give the original claimant time to respond, but to do that YouTube needs to forward the counter-takedown to the original claimant, which they have refused to do.
> (B) upon receipt of a counter notification described in paragraph (3), promptly provides the person who provided the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) with a copy of the counter notification, and informs that person that it will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in 10 business days; and
There are a few carve-outs to section 230, as your link mentions:
If you said “Section 230 is why there’s piracy online”
You again may be the NY Times or someone who has not read Section 230. Section 230 explicitly exempts intellectual property law:
Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property.
So when it comes to copyright, the DMCA takes precedence over section 230, and sites that don't follow the take-down procedures spelled out in the DMCA do indeed become liable (loose safe-harbor) for the specific content that they failed to enforce. If the site demonstrates a pattern of not complying, then copyright holders could even argue in court that they are liable for large classes of works without having to provide evidence of non-compliance for each individual work.
There are other carve-outs for CSAM and sex trafficking.
It is true that they don't become liable for all unrelated user content (say libel or harassment) because of this, so in that sense they still have safe harbor in general, but saying that they have lost safe harbor for particular content is a valid use of the term.
> complying, then copyright holders could even argue in court that they are liable for large classes of works without having to provide evidence of non-compliance for each individual work
But in practice, is there any point for any violated users to sue? Any YouTube video unlikely presents any meaningful income for them and going after American company in the court is really expensive.
I get that mistakes can happen, but companies filing frivolous DMCA notices should be barred from this avenue in the future. Further, YouTube's appeals process is fundamentally broken if it can't get such obvious cases right.
Always remember that YouTube is for the most part not using DMCA notices. ContentID has nothing to do with the DMCA and everything to do with the Viacom lawsuit and YouTube’s persistent desire to avoid any further lawsuits of that nature.
It’s a rigged system in favour of traditional copyright holders and anyone who can weasel their way to the other side of the ContentID system to register themselves as a copyright “owner” and are thus blessed by YouTube as special and to be trusted with the task of only making legitimate claims against their own intellectual property… which we all know is bullshit and abused by almost everyone who has access to it. Notable exceptions being companies like Epidemic Sound who have made their access to that system/API into a valuable business differentiator… regardless it’s rigged against the individual content creators that made YouTube into the behemoth it is today.
Which is why it’s all the more important to point out. While this was a DMCA, almost all the normal litany of egregious YouTube copyright stories are from the ContentID program and are beyond any real ability to appeal or legally reconcile. There is no fair use or other affirmative defence… you will bend the knee to YouTube at behest of the so named copyright holder or face the wrath of Google…. All of Google for you never know what else your YouTube account might be connect too… do you dare risk it serf?…
They are quite luck to have the full DMCA process, as unpleasant and costly as it all is for them, at all! Most are not so lucky.
> almost all the normal litany of egregious YouTube copyright stories are from the ContentID program and are beyond any real ability to appeal or legally reconcile
That is factually incorrect.
Content ID claims can be appealed to the claimant. If that appeal is rejected, the person who posted the content can contest the claim. Doing so forces the rights holder to either drop the claim, or file a DMCA takedown.
I am a full-time YouTuber. I have recently done what I just wrote. It's nothing new.
Perhaps slightly hyperbolic… but the perception I had garnered from the content producers I’d seen talk about it, is that the 10 day counter notice period is long enough that the majority of content producers cannot take the risk with time relevant content or live streamed content.
In addition the percentage of people unwilling to risk the legal complications of defending a full fair use court fight, as it is an affirmative defence relying on courts with the USA as the jurisdiction is a widely chilling effect on overseas content producers. If they don’t back down you need to be prepared to deal with American courts and lawyers. Sure they back down some of the time but a lot of people don’t even want to risk it or aren’t even sure how firmly they are in fair use territory and that’s not even brining into the equation how many people misunderstand fair use exemptions and just how might right to reuse content under fair use they actually have and who may be inadvertently risking significant legal exposure should they try to press invalid fair use claims.
I did misspeak, but ContentID is still the bigger evil than the DMCA.
There is some truth to what you wrote, but instead of getting into the weeds on the details, I'd like to take a step back and remind you of something that you might have already considered: creators have a strong incentive to mislead you about this kind of thing. When people think the little guy is getting financially shafted by The Man, they are more likely to do things like sign up for that channel's Patreon page, or join their membership program.
I see a lot of this, including by very large channels who know what they are doing and should know better. And it seems to be an increasing trend. I don't like it.
The first time I became aware of YouTube tightening the screws on Content ID by YouTubers complaining about it was already in 2013 though, Patreon had barely been created by then (though some of its competitors like Flattr, were older).
It shouldn't be just the companies that are barred from filling new notices, but that the copyrighted item itself loses its protection.
But how could a bunch of old people who don't care about tech have put that into law 20 years ago
How would that have worked in this case? User posts Blender video $X on youtube, $idiotCompany files frivolous DMCA suit claiming copyright on $X, Blender loses its copyright on $X?
Perjury is not enforced anywhere but the most egregious cases. Courts are filled with lies told by professional liars and presided over by liars that made a career out of lying. They never eat their own, because it would shine too much light on their own practices.
Perjury based on _belief_ that they own the copyright, as I understand the DMCA. So being an idiot who doesn't understand copyright (or based on an erroneous automated process) is considered a defence.
Of course. Why can't you answer as many times as you want in an SAT? Because it would defeat the whole purpose. More than that: you need to give points for right answers, and negative points for wrong ones, so the expected value of guessing is 0.
Even in the context of the already fucked up copyright laws, this mechanism is especially broken.
> Determined to have his video restored, Bruno accepted the risks and sent another counternotice to YouTube. This time there was no indication that the counternotice was deficient. YouTube thanked him for filing it – but still declined to process it.
Uh, dealing with YouTube is fun on every level.
Not long ago I was helping a successful content creator friend bootstrap a YouTube channel, and since she has a large number of existing videos, I wrote a program using YouTube Data API v3 to automatically upload them. Turned out the upload API has been restricted since a few years ago, one has to submit a lengthy application form and go through manual approval, or all videos uploaded through the API are automatically locked as spam. So I submitted the application, and a few days later, I got an email rejecting my application, which ends in the following:
> To reapply, you may complete and submit the appropriate form once the above concerns have been addressed. Please do not reply to this email.
> Feel free to reach out to us with any questions.
So, I'm supposed to "feel free to reach out to" them, but I should "not reply to this email", leaving the only way to reach out to them the application form, which doesn't have any Q/A field, and incidentally they just rejected it. Did anyone think about their process when they authored that email template? Anyway, I eventually managed to identify the problem and pass the review.
Reminds me of google ads, I made a simple utility site to help people with calendar notifications and after the tenth "you need to change something about your site" without telling me what it was I gave up on the service altogether.
This seems like something the EFF might be able to provide a lawyer for.
They have repeatedly fought for Open Source Licenses in court in the past, and helped get legal representation for people who couldn't afford to fight large companies on their own budget.
Copyright lawyers cost money...
If any company can create such a headache for a case that clear-cut, then how can YouTube not be trusted to be a major source of aggravation all-round?
Just youtube and its mediocre moderation team doing what they always do. Google is a zero support company. They do not care about ordinary people, only about their commercial advertisers, and, even then, only the top percentage of them.
A ban would simply result in them creating a new account. Stopping future copystrikes is just enough pain to keep them where they are while preventing more damage.
> Creative Commons licenses can only be used on 100% original content. If there's a Content ID claim on your video, you cannot mark your video with the Creative Commons license.
Do they add some sort of their own license terms on top of creative commons with this?
I think the point is that youtube will not provide tools for video authors to label their youtube hosted videos as CC if there is any non-CC portion of the video. Which seems at least somewhat reasonable, given the unreasonableness that is copyright.
I wonder if a retaliatory clause in CC licenses where if you issue an erroneous DMCA notice your license is immediately terminated and you can be targeted would help.
Strong copyleft licenses like that don't get a lot of love these days. GPL has something similar.
One problem is that to enforce these kinds of clauses, the original rights holder needs to go around suing everyone as it's a contractual thing. It isn't a law.
I dislike copyleft, but once you decided to go for copyleft, I think a clause like this makes a lot of sense.
Copyleft licenses are inherently trying to coerce the world to be a certain way. A penalty clause like this is probably more effective at changing the world than the normal clauses.
Pretty sure its already purjury to intentionally send a fake dmca notice, which has a much harder punishment than anything a license can do (albeit basically never enforced)
There is some weirdness that makes the perjury clause ineffective in most cases (something like the perjury only applying to some generally-true part of the claim).
There are two parts to a DMCA claim: First, claiming that you own some copyright. Second, claiming that some work being hosted infringes on your copyright. The first part is the bit that is claimed under penalty of perjury, the second isn't. The article doesn't indicate what work ZO'R TV claims to have the copyright on, only that they claim the portion of the video using Blender's content infringes their copyright on whatever work they own. Without the text of the actual DMCA claim, there's no way to determine if the perjury clause is relevant.
Furthermore, turning this into essentially a contract law issue allows for enforcement by the broader community (depending on how the contract is worded, and with whom it formally is, of course), rather than waiting for prosecutors that may not care much about making an example of some Uzbek TV station (IANAL).
And yet YouTube is willing to protect the other party in their "right" to outright steal Blender Foundation content (as that's what they're doing when they claim copyright over content they have no actual copyright over, as is the case here).
I expect it happens about 100 times / day - most just don't make it to here. I've had a false copyright claim on a video I posted - it was a recording of a church service where a historic hymn was sung - out of copyright years ago. The algorithm matched it to another recording of the same tune, but different words, and they claimed copyright. I clicked the appeal button, and explained that it was out of copyright. I heard nothing back.
As the video was only a test, I only expected about 3 views, and it didn't block the video, just take the revenue, I ignored it.
Can we ask EFF to fire a lawsuit against YouTube on that case? Or open a funding campain for that exact case if EFF cannot fund it from their primary stream of donations? This is a crystal clear case, easy win.
It seems like the TV station company has violated the CC license, so why not copyright strike their video and save other people the pain down the line?
I don't think you understand what occam's razor is.
Occam's Razor would be incompetence. Either an automated system is not allowing proper processing of the counter-notice or someone reviewing the situation doesn't understand the license.
A conspiracy would be the opposite of Occam's Razor.
Hmm, at which level of generalized corruption does the premise become inverted ?
(This reminds me of Russian milicemen obviously trying to extract bribes from European tourists, the tourists being completely oblivious as to what is going on, and not understanding what the milicemen are very not subtly hinting at that any Russian would immediately recognize, while the milicemen are increasingly getting frustrated at their usual tactics somehow failing to work...)
Torrentfreak.com seems to have built its business upon benefiting financially from media pirates.
Massive media piracy seems to be what enabled (if not necessitated) the DMCA process in question here. As well as numerous human-hostile technologies and legislation.
I don't know about the situations in other countries, but in the US, this whole dynamic driven by media piracy the last 2-3 decades has always seemed incredibly stupid and shortsighted.
If there's a news story about a DMCA takedown Kafkaesque process, can we get a more objective source?
In this outlet, the story might as well be like the steady stream of now-familiar US political party base-rousing:
Subtext: "Those darned anti-piracy things are so unreasonable! This justifies pirating! Let's pirate harder! Don't forget to use our affiliate codes to sign up for a piracy-friendly VPN scam!"
You're letting your familiarity with the (closed for over a year by now) TorrentFreak comment section dictate your opinion on the sites reporting as a whole.
That comment section was indeed a shithole of pirates looking for moral justification to be pirates whilst using any excuse to do so. TFs reporting has never really matched up with this comment section (and it's possible to read through the lines of their closure message and realize it got closed specifically because of what an utter toxic mess their comment section became).
Whilst it is somewhat slanted, that is moreso in terms of what they choose to cover rather than any factual inaccuracies. In that regard they're no more slanted than other blogs on a similar matter (ie. Techdirt).
Instead of this tiresome "pick a source that is acceptable to my arbitrary and unstated requirements" game, why not point out something specific in the article that you feel is incorrect? This has the additional benefit of allowing the discussion to continue rather than bringing it to a screeching halt.
Reason they created that in the first place was because of a similar accident in the past. Maybe hopefully soon they'll stop using YouTube fully as YouTube doesn't seem to care about solving the core problem of driveby copyright strikes.