Nothing broken with three strikes from someone fraudulently claiming you've infringed without any proof? They should just implement solely what the DMCA requires (take down on notice, restore on counternotice) and the trolls would disappear. Their masters don't like that because it costs them money to litigate as intended by the law.
I'm pretty sure the actual reason the Content ID and copyright strike system exists because Google was tired of getting sued by everybody. DMCA should've made it so that they effectively didn't have much liability, but they were getting sued by Viacom and probably would continue to be sued by just about everyone else, too (in an era where afaik YouTube remained unprofitable.)
To quote them:
> "[YouTube] goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works."
But media companies didn't like far beyond legal obligations, they wanted more.
And existentially, maybe YouTube was right to do that. Today, YouTube is clearly profitable and it's more culturally relevant than television in many places. But 10 years ago, it was edgy and new, scrappy, it didn't have as much mainstream appeal, and even if they ultimately won all of those lawsuits eventually, it would've left them with a ridiculous amount of legal spending and a bunch of possibly permanently severed relationships with the media companies that had all of the money. I don't think Google wanted to just delete channels of everybody. I think they did want to delete channels of people who were just splitting Family Guy episodes into 15 minute chunks and uploading that, but definitely there's a reason why copyright claims on YouTube today have more cardinality (depending on the kind of claim, for example, it can result in ad revenue going to the claimant, geoblocking, etc. Which also can be bad outcomes, but is a better outcome than just demolishing people's channels.)
Google is a lot more on the evil end of things today than they ever were, but back when all of this went down in 2010-2014 it wasn't so bad. I think YouTube's compromise reflects more than just problems with Google. I think they developed a copyright system that would prevent them from being in constant legal turmoil indefinitely.
> I'm pretty sure the actual reason the Content ID and copyright strike system exists because Google was tired of getting sued by everybody.
The way the DMCA was supposed to work, the claimant submits a notice and the site takes it down, the user submits a counternotice and the site puts it back up, and now if the claimant still wants to proceed, the site has nothing to do with it anymore and they go to court against the user.
But the users don't have any money, and there are tons of them, so instead they went to court against the site. Which is the exact thing the DMCA was supposed to prevent.
Part of the reason for this is that pre-Google YouTube did some shady things that gave them an excuse. But then we have the other problem with the law. If you screw up, the penalties are unreasonable, which allows litigious plaintiffs to extract unreasonable concessions. And the same is true even if you didn't screw up, because the alternative is to spend a crazy amount of money on lawyers because the stakes are high.
The only official number from Google is $15 billion in revenue or 10% of their total revenue. But that’s not much once you consider hosting and traffic costs.
A copyright strike does require the claimant to submit a valid DMCA complaint.
If a creator wants to ignore the YouTube's copyright strike system entirely, and YouTube will get rid of the strike, but that also means that you're accepting the legal liability instead of YouTube.
That's not how it works with content ID falsely flagging non-infringing content. YouTube doesn't actually implement the DMCA process. They have their own bizarro version where "takedowns" don't take content down but instead revenue is redirected toward a troll.
Fran Blanche got a strike for a film with the sound of blowing wind. She's gotten many other strikes from public domain content.
You’re both right. Aunche said that a copyright strike requires a valid DMCA complaint. A copyright owner can have material removed without a DMCA takedown, but it does not result in a copyright strike.
From google:
> Also, Content ID claims don't result in a strike.
Abuse of DMCA has been common since inception but people rarely successfully retaliate because it could trivially run into 10s of thousands of dollars to do so with dubious chances of recovery. Furthermore if they have obfuscated their identity or are overseas you are unlikely to receive any satisfaction.
Take downs ought to required to be attached to a substantial bond per creator not per work that can be recovered in country without substantial litigation. Legit creators could act through an intermediary while paying only a small fraction of the bond under the premise that they would rarely lose the bond and could recover from someone who has a legal identity attached.
Trolls would virtually cease to exist as it would be expensive and futile. Post one fake notice lose your money exit.
Legit companies that presently haphazardly take down programmatically would adjust their strategy after they lost the nth bond.
Simply complying with DMCA takedowns doesn't mean that YouTube gets to make money from copyrighted material that copyright holders didn't send a takedown for. That's why they got sued by Viacom and had to make the ContentID system as a compromise.
Again, if you want to get rid of a strike, you just have to submit a counternotification. If it's obviously bullshit, then you'll get your video reinstated and you're probably not going to get sued. It sucks that you have to deal with this, but the harsh truth is that you just have to deal with stuff like this as a business owner.
There’s a presumption of innocence to consider, though: Until a court has entered a judgment for copyright infringement against someone, they are only an alleged infringer.
