The word "copyright" is slowly transforming into a more generic meaning where a big company silences a little company/individual that it doesn't like. This case doesn't seem to have anything to do with actual copyright. Did the company specify exactly what content they believed was copied?
If you have a kid under 20, ask them what "copyright" means. They'll probably describe it to you in terms of corporate bullying rather than anything that has to do with intellectual property or copying.
> When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges:
> “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”
> That is, in a world of uncertainty, where other people’s unpredictability can erode your profits, mire you in scandal, or even tank your business, “IP” is a means of forcing other people to arrange their affairs to suit your needs, even if that undermines their own needs.
Adam Smith is said to have written division of labor taken to extremes will turn humans dumber than the lowest animal
Hard to see how he was wrong. Low skilled individuals exist in a state of helplessness. Like turtles in their back. Can’t solve a problem; need a committee to form a problem solving committee.
This is more of a YouTube thing. They are very trigger-happy on copyright and implement a "strike" system that will quickly get you demonetized. It's fairly easy to file a strike against anyone and the target has little recourse other than taking down the video even if it has nothing to do with copyright.
It's not DMCA so you don't even have the right to counter-file. And of course since it's Google there's no one you can call or email to get real help unless you're a super popular channel with an assigned rep.
> Youtube needs a better mechanism for punishing false claims.
[rant]
Youtube *can't* have a better system, because it's based on (A) how DMCA takedowns work, (B) how Safe Harbor platforms are supposed to work, and (C) how Viacom vs Youtube made YT extremely reliant on Safe Harbor to prevent another stupid lawsuit from big corps.
To have a better system in the first place, *at the very least*:
- Safe Harbor protections must be boosted so that ALL copyright problems must be passed over to users, and thus shield the platform from being in *any way* liable for those violations. Lawsuits that target platforms should be automatically dismissed if they're about copyright complaints, unless it's about enforcement of the above procedure.
- DMCA takedowns must require the claimant to submit public evidence of both (a) the offending snippet & (b) the contrasting source.
- DMCA takedowns cannot be made for any content slice shorter than 20 seconds.
- (Most importantly) Copyright claims must be "innocent until proven guilty", i.e. the claimant must be the one to prove fault, and not requiring the defendant to prove innocence.
> Youtube can have a better system by having it be straight DMCA, such that claimants have to actually submit DMCA claims that can be counterclaimed.
[rant]
NO, IT CAN'T.
The next Viacom would then claim that YT was violating / not fulfilling their Safe Harbor duties, resulting in ANOTHER stupid lawsuit.
A failure to make Safe Harbor bulletproof WILL continue to allow these cancerous lawsuits to exist. The Funko DMCA dumpster fire that resulted in itch.io's website being taken down is the most recent example of this, as they went after the domain registrars for ALLEGEDLY not fulfilling their Safe Harbor duties.
Neither your hypothetical Youtube lawsuit nor the itch.io takedown have any lawful basis. Thus your argument is that if Youtube doesn't bow to the bullies then the bullies might be mean. That is quite different from Youtube not being able to stand up to those bullies.
This sort of system would be get support from a sizable majority of people across political lines. The fact we don't see it implemented shows just how little public opinion can matter when it comes to the laws we have to live by.
Because it is considered one of the biggest problems on the platform.
Creators are frustrated that unless they are big enough to get YouTube to notice them they at minimum have to dox themselves to remove a bad DMCA claim.
Honestly in a world with Content ID they don't necessarily need the current system to remain as is to make the big publishers happy, who already get preemptive blocking of content without lifting a finger.
> Creators are frustrated that unless they are big enough to get YouTube to notice them they at minimum have to dox themselves to remove a bad DMCA claim.
Unfortunately, creators have very little leverage over YouTube, nor any realistic ability to move to a different platform. The can be frustrated all they want, but until YouTube has a reason to fear creators leaving the platform en masse, there's little pressure on them to change.
One might argue that having tons of popular entertainers who are frustrated with the platform, and there being no exclusivity agreements with those entertainers (AFAIK, and contrary to the way Twitch treats its top streamers) would create an opportunity for competitors to pop up.
That said, I don't think there is realistically anything YouTube can do do materially improve things under current laws. They can provide a real person to talk to about why the bogus claim is being taken seriously, but they still have to take it seriously.
If we want Google to fix this for us, they will have to do so via lobbying to change the laws, or at least some kind of creative but successful lawsuit that dramatically changes how they are interpreted. The product people are not capable of fixing this, it's in the lawyers' and courtiers' court (so to speak).
> One might argue that having tons of popular entertainers who are frustrated with the platform, and there being no exclusivity agreements with those entertainers (AFAIK, and contrary to the way Twitch treats its top streamers) would create an opportunity for competitors to pop up.
I wish, but it's not that easy. A potential competitor needs to not only start off with the ability to handle all the video uploading and delivery, but it has to also provide the audience and monetization. If YouTube was strictly a content hosting service there wouldn't be much of an obstacle in this regard, but it's also the discovery platform that audience members go to in search of content. The network effect is too strong because hosting and discovery are bundled into one.
Sure, I understand that its unlikely, but is Google willing to bet its multibillion dollar business on that? They would have to be pretty damn sure. $low_probability * $enormous_potential_losses = $still_pretty_big_expected_losses
For instance the three strike system that results in your entire channel being demonetized is not required by law.
Additionally they could work with creators to get them in touch with people who can help rather than relying on social media to forward them the worst instances.
I’m sure that creators would like to have a person to talk to, but it doesn’t seem that alphabet needs to provide one. Will they make more money if they did?
> They'll probably describe it to you in terms of corporate bullying rather than anything that has to do with intellectual property or copying.
Unless they dream of becoming a content creator or a vlogger, in which case they'll describe it as a Law of God, protecting the tiny Content Creators from the evil sinners who Steal and Plagiarize, and that occasionally gets abused by the corporate lords we all sharecrop for.
> The word "copyright" is slowly transforming into a more generic meaning where a big company silences a little company/individual that it doesn't like.
This has basically always been the case and is what copyright is, by design, for.
“This doing of something about disputes, this doing of it reasonably, is the business of the law. And the people who have the doing of it in charge, whether they be judges or sheriffs or clerks or jailers or lawyers, are officials of the law. What these officials do about disputes is, to my mind, the law itself.”
While that is true of some YouTube take downs I believe this article is referring to a DMCA takedown request which while using a YouTube specific form is based off Copyright law.
> If you have a kid under 20, ask them what "copyright" means. They'll probably describe it to you in terms of corporate bullying rather than anything that has to do with intellectual property or copying.
Instead of the original intention which was to grant the right to copy.
Copyright should be energising capitalism, not killing it. But yet here are!
Not granting the right to copy, controlling it was the entire point. The ability to produce copies of existing works never needed protection because it's a natural right that follows from the human ability to create. And that ability never needed limiting because creating a copy involved a large part of the same painstaking work that the original required.
Copyright was only introduced after the invention of the printing press. The whole point of copyright was to limit the persons/entities allowed to produce copies of a work, because suddenly the ability to copy became a lot cheaper than the ability to create.
I disagree with you argument — _we_ don’t know what the copyrighted portion was, but that doesn’t mean no such portion exists. Likewise, asking-kids-under-20 is not a method I’d generally endorse for legal issues.
Per the article, it is unclear what was copyrighted. It’s possible that YouTube knows but is not making it public, or maybe even YouTube doesn’t know. I definitely feel that YouTube’s handling of copyright issues is annoying, I feel like the creator should be told what YouTube knows. But that’s not an issue with copyright itself.
Youtube doesn’t know, because the DMCA doesn’t require the complainant to be very specific. The right course of action is to deny the complaint and make a counter complaint to youtube. This forces Youtube to reinstate the video, and forces the original complainant to take their complaint to an actual court. A copyright bully will simply never do that. They’re relying on people to give up at the first step, without making a counter complaint.
Pretty sure when you submit a DMCA you submit to US jurisdiction, and since YouTube's copyright strike are their version of "DMCA", and they are a US company, I'd venture to say it's probably still US law they are under for this as they even site fair use[0]
You need to read the "earlier coverage" link for this to make sense. For starters, "Tom Evans" is the manufacturing company, not necessarily just a random dude. But I guess Mend it Mark embarrassed the hell out of this company, so they're lashing out in the finest corporate-approved tradition for YouTube.
I watched the original video (big fan of Mark), and it was a perfectly ordinary repair video, albeit for a ridiculously overpriced piece of audiophile equipment. There was absolutely nothing in there I remember that could infringe copyright, unless simply opening up and taking a video of the inside of a piece of equipment can now infringe. He didn't even disparage the preamp. Unlike much audiophile nonsense, he noted it was genuinely properly designed electronics (albeit very very expensive).
I'm guessing part of the embarrassment is from this part:
> which the manufacturer claimed ‘could not be fixed’
which Mark definitively proved wrong. But also, he doesn't have to explicitly disparage the equipment if people can just look at it and make their own conclusions. Even if the actual design is sound (I'm not remotely qualified to judge), you have to admit it looks a bit janky.
As for valid copyright claims, you're probably looking for reason where none exists.
Archive.org has been weirdly broken for weeks. That error can pop up on almost everything when you try to get things one way, but if you try to get the same file another way, it downloads happily. I'm worried.
Apparently Tom Evans is a dude at the company though. Their website looks as well put together as the amp in the video: http://www.audiodesign.co.uk/index.html
I figured that was possible, hence "not necessarily", but he seems to be acting in the role of company here. At least for me, having a name that sounds like "just a guy", rather than a more conventional manufacturing company name, threw me way off for a little bit. :D
This video is great. One of the better uses of the Internet.
Google/YouTube/Alphabet should be doing everything they can to encourage high-quality educational content like this, rather than being party to suppressing it.
Anyone with a return address and big cash flows is ultimately a slave to the civil court system, with all of its inherent flaws (such as claims without merit being able to cost you thousands of dollars that you cannot recoup).
It is in the best interest of large hosting companies, datacenters, and UGC sites to shy away from anything that remotely smells of liability because the costs can instantly far exceed the revenues from small customers due to the flaws of the US legal system.
Many other civil systems use a “loser pays” model for funding lawyers, but if you get sued in the US and win, you still have to pay for your own lawyers unless you countersue (and your opponent is collectible). This opens up a very obvious denial of service attack.
In this case, doesn't the injustice work for Alphabet (not that that's just)?
Can't they just establish a "we will not negotiate with terrorists" kind of reputation, and when they see abusive misuse of DMCA, then the abuser is facing very deep pockets of Alphabet, who is motivated to make a lesson of them?
Google's current approach to copyright on YouTube was adopted following their settlement agreement with Viacom [1]. While the terms were never disclosed, that settlement probably constrains how Google can handle copyright policing on YouTube.
I agree, but the incentives for Alphabet to encourage content like this isn't there. The content that is encouraged is that which keeps eyeballs glued to YouTube.
I watched the entire thing and the only item that seems even remotely like infringement is the service manual containing the Tom Evans name that Mark made himself.
Let's not forget the $485 wooden volume knob that:
"dampens the "micro vibrations created by volume pots and knobs that find their way into the signal path and cause degradation.
"With the signature knobs micro vibrations from the C37 concept of wood, bronze and the lacquer itself compensate for the volume pots and provide (Good Vibrations) our ear/brain combination like to hear…way better sound!!"
The SHAKTI Electromagnetic Stabilizer (aka “the Stone”) has three internal trap circuits (Microwave, RF and Electric Field) to absorb the broadest spectrum of EMI. Placement on automotive CPUs has measurably increased engine horsepower.
It also improves resolution for virtually all-major components in high definition audio/video systems. Music reproduction is clearer, with more liquidity, dynamics and focus. The improved inter-transient silence allows the listener to hear ambient cue information essential for accurate perception of stage depth, width and unwavering imaging. High quality video systems will benefit from SHAKTI devices near power supplies, projection guns and laser disc/DVD players. Reduced color noise and improved convergence alignment are some of the improvements that can occur. In automotive applications, where space allows, the unit should be securely taped and/or cable tied to the top of the CPU.
"Seemed"? It has been for a long time, audio enthusiasts that aren't suckers just keep on buying from Genelec/Neumann and other proven manufacturers publishing relevant measurement data.
Because the FTC is budgetarily starved intentionally and doesn't have the time to go after every minor false claim out there. It's also a somewhat losing game because all they really have to do is have a single measurement showing a car did produce more horse power after placing the slab on the chip, which is extremely doable because measuring generated horsepower is far from a perfectly repeatable measurement, and they could slip out of any case brought by the FTC or winnow it down to a minor fine for less than the profits from their sales.
They have dyno charts on their website! It made between 2.7 and 3hp on the two vehicles they tested, which is pretty much the amount of variation you'd expect between two dyno runs. Total rubbish.
I didn't scroll far enough to see those but that's exactly what I'd expect. Minute "improvements" that are really just statistical noise from a dyno due to tiny variations even if the test(s) were genuine.
I like to think of audiophile gear as woo for men.
I wonder sometimes if humans just have an innate need for magical thinking and if we eliminate it from most areas of our life it just finds some other place to pop up. If that hypothesis is true, then audiophile gear is a net positive: it's an almost entirely harmless place to indulge in nonsense magical thinking with no harm to anything but your pocketbook.
I'd rather people spend $1000 on HDMI cables than trying to use homeopathic medicine to cure their cancer or taking away rights from people because it goes against an ancient fiction book they really like.
I watched this episode, hilariously terrible construction of what I’m sure was a thoughtfully designed amp.
The thing had pcbs stacked using plastic m2.5-like standoffs that had snapped. Apparently the product designer claimed Mark couldn’t fix it. Mend it Mark can fix anything that is fixable, truly a master repairman.
And my own experience working on the design of complex projects as an architect. A good job will still include stupid mistakes when designing a one-off project because there are always gaps in institutional knowledge and time and money constraints.
$25k is a lot of money to spend on home audio. It is not much income even for a side project. Never mind a manufacturing business with engineering and advertising overhead in addition to logistical and fabrication costs...and I think the devices in the video are manufactured in limited annual numbers so there's not even an economics of scale.
I love Mark's channel, but videos that embarrass non-celebrity individuals is not why. Youtube drama doesn't seem to be his strong suit, and while what happened isn't justified, it is not terribly surprising now that I've thought about it.
Anyway, it might have been someone who bought one of those amplifiers who filed the takedown. Because owners were also likely to be embarrassed by the video and also likely to have the wherewithal to file a takedown.
I don’t think the intent was directly to embarrass anyone, but the standoffs and loosely stacked pcbs really did seem unfortunate. It was dropped, Mark repaired it and it was quite likely just as good as new minus the enclosure damage.
Audio equipment definitely has this issue of extreme pricing for questionable things. In all likelihood the amp on a chip is the best designed amp for the money. Sure discrete stuff might have a better noise floor and reduced noise. I’d argue few people could tell the difference.
Sure I think Mark’s primary intent was to repair the device.
But Mark also took the opportunity to mock the builder and their customers.
(He does the same when he comes across other people’s repairs that are not as good as he is capable of). But this time the target was not an unknown person.
His comments weren’t just bouncing around his workshop walls. They were heard around the world and capable of putting people out of work for the sake of better YouTube analytics.
The time, space and cost of design, parts acquisition, manufacturing, testing, advertising, shipping and customer service come out of that revenue.
Despite the richness of Welsh culture and the wisdom of the Welsh people, the capital and technical knowledge required probably exceed that of the average Welsh salaryman.
Oh God more Audiophile snake oil idiots. I feel sorry for Mend it Mark putting up with YouTube's copyright stupidity triggered by these idiots. I thought his well natured response video was a lot of fun. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIrCaeVtvI)
I hope Mend it Mark can continue to work to be less dependent on YouTube/Google, his training courses are hosted on Wistia for example.
Apparently they sent the device in themselves. I suppose they were expecting "cup the balls" sponsored content treatment rather than an unbiased video.
Clough42 gets free 3D printers from manufacturers sometimes to review, and every once in a while he tears the product a new one. And every once in a while the company actually uses said negative feedback to improve the product
In this case, Mark tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, explaining that even if the circuit is a reference design, spending time to match components might make it better than it would be otherwise. It wasn't a bashing, but seemed like a repair video in good faith.
I remember the first time I saw audiophile cables that had an "electron flow direction" marked on them and I kinda knew right then what this was all about.
Even leads for monitoring brain activity don't do that stuff. And they are monitoring literally mV. Leads and contact patches are often made of silver to capture that stuff too, and they have actual reasons to use silver.
Huge fan of Mark here. His YouTube and Patreon are a wealth of knowledge for repairing electronics. He’s an expert in everything from electronics to machining and plastics fabrication. And his demeanor and presentation style is just lovely. I hope this nonsense increases his visibility and he gains some fans.
I watched the Tom Evans video when it came out, and my guess is that their sham “copyright” claim comes from showing their logo or some written words on one of their PCBs.
I remember a video he made repairing a very ordinary, mid 90s, cost-reduced Sony Walkman, where he very carefully spent hours reproducing a tiny bit of metal that had worn out in the internal mechanism. Rescuing something that (even when bought) was mostly e-waste.
Looks like he made his own service manual for this piece of gear and it has the manufacturer's logo on it without their consent.
Which he prepared for the client in decent presentation quality.
One of the most admirable things to do, above and beyond most repair professionals, looks like Mark really is a cut above and it shows.
The top instrument companies have always recognized the advantage of partnering with the rare individual who can service their complex and unique products, and have been the most willing to provide schematics and discounted parts in order to make as many into authorized service centers as possible. To enable field calibration and service, or bench work without having to send their own people or ship the unit back to the main repair depot.
The lesser outfits, not so much.
If you've got money-making instruments to sell, you really don't want to work against someone who has the talent to fix defects without even having any factory documentation. That's hard to come by, they could be your best ally. Imagine what could happen with full factory support.
And Mark prepared his own documentation! How much more respectable can you get?
Posting it on Youtube is the only real mistake, unfortunate but true.
Obviously, Youtube is not a respectable enough place, oh well, who knew?
From the commentary it does look like the circuits are not more innovative than the "generic" guidelines published by the component manufacturers to encourage engineers to adopt their semiconductors for various intended purposes.
When these analog devices were first emerging, some of these data sheets were widely published back when some of the example circuits were still under patent. There was every expectation that if you copied one of them, you would have to license it before you could legitimately include it with your own product. For these preamp components, patents have all expired now so that's not a consideration any more. However it's possible that somebody 30 or 40 years ago might have drawn up a PCB of a completely generic circuit that exactly conforms to an example public-domain schematic, no longer under patent by decades, but that pattern on the PCB could easily still be under copyright for decades to come.
You create your own original artwork, you own it, even if the circuit is exactly the same.
Thus I would say the patterns on the PCBs are only legitimate to reproduce in much less than their entirety, like passages from a book. That could be a pitfall, but I don't think more than a few relevant excerpts were casually shown in the video.
The only remotely creative aspect of the preamp was the use of discrete voltage regulators for almost every component in the audio path. It has a comical number of voltage regulator ICs.
There hasn't been much commentary about the electronics, but I found it amusing myself about the amount of overkill on the multi-stage voltage regulation scheme. Those components drawing more wasted power from the external supply than the audio circuits themselves.
I know overkill is important in some audio circles, but did I say massive external supply for a preamp?
This kind of signal handling does not require a high-current audio circuit where there may need to be a very sizable power supply. When that happens it may be the best idea for the power components, especially transformers and other potentially noisy components like voltage regulators to be enclosed in a separate chassis from the sensitive audio semiconductors and their carefully laid out signal connections. You don't have to be an audiophile to recognize when this might be needed, don't ask me how I know ;)
What I like to do is make the external supply good enough so that no significant power components are needed inside the instrument chassis, other than ferritics and capacitors for local storage/delivery and filtration of anything that might come in on the (well-shielded) cable like it was an antenna or something.
I figure I'm not the only one around here to have designed their own personal phono preamp after looking at numerous opamp datasheets, these are actually not easy.
I needed one to work with 78 rpm records, not audiophile material :\
Actual vinyl polymer at 33 1/3 rpm was even more challenging even though the RIAA equalization was standardized by then. I figured might as well, if I'm going to do some serious soldering it would be good to exceed minimal objectives.
RIAA is functionally a very steep well-defined mathematical curve[0]. Traditionally implemented using all analog components in a much lower-noise arrangement than usual. It requires quite a high gain preamp to recover the bass from the microgrooves where it has physically been pressed so much more lightly than the other frequencies.
I just used one audio circuit board since I was indulging in the opposite approach to overkill. From what I've heard, the fewer active analog components that your signal passes through, the fewer compromises it may be subject to anyway ;)
Audiophiles would think I took a lot of short-cuts which is true, I could surely have gotten better channel separation using two boards instead of one. But it did take a little rig about twice as complex just to perform the development experiments on, which was re-architected a number of times, one of the advantages of a non-PCB free-form soldered breadboard.
Well I have nothing to brag about the way I cheated on my own power supply for this project. I would say it really does take about as complex a power supply PCB or more than it does for the audio PCB. Screw that, I used batteries :) Needed to be portable anyway like a laptop. Plus batteries have no hiss or hum, that was easy. Actually I got lucky because I was able to achieve my goal of digitizing vinyl at the standard CD format of 44.1 KHz 16-bit, while introducing lower analog noise than a CD can reproduce. IOW transparent for that application, and see what collateral damage there is otherwise :) There was plenty of headroom with two 9V batteries giving 18V peak-to-peak before clipping. Plus the batteries lasted a long time since very few components were on the final board, and it's just a preamp.
Now I shouldn't complain about having loads of PCBs stacked in overkill configuration until it almost topples under its own weight, using blank copper boards for shielding within a plastic enclosure. Not when mine sits on a teflon sheet inside a mere small cookie tin, and the shielding is still usually OK when the top is removed :)
For a while there you could even still smell the cookies.
and a single-board amateur project to learn from where it looks like there are some power components on the PCB, probably not much more complex than my lab effort otherwise. They cover using a single 9V battery during their prototyping as well as the migration to A/C adapter and virtual ground for the opamps. I used a pair of batteries wired for true bipolar +/- 9VDC and stopped there. Also notice how much bigger the plastic caps are than tantalum would be:
Edit: Left out the part where I would use a Dremel to cut out the RIAA section from the populated PCB of cheap scrap record players that people were once discarding quite commonly. These were small little "partial" PCBs too and quite dissimilar, but made them work on their own before building to my final specs.
I have a 25 year-old preamp that I made from what were at the time premium quality Burr-Brown opamps and it's better made than this thing appears to be. And as of yesterday, it still sounds awesome. OK, the input pots are getting a bit "crackly" but that's an easy fix.
No idea what the sound quality on this unit is like, but for $25k I'd expect far better build quality!
Ignore all the fluffy words just look at the specs. I use an affordable TPA32xx Class D module with a good meanwell power supply and I (professional audio engineer) can't hear any difference to e.g. the stuff Neumann put into my active KH120 monitors.
I don't think some random hifi shop is going to outspec the best class D module Texas Instruments or Analog Devices can come up with. But sure, if fooling yourself with Hifi is your hobby, proceed.
I get that the most likely is that Tom Evans didn't like it, but could the copyright claim not be for the khruangbin^ track that he plays at the end to test the repaired channel?
I remember when I had a few friends who were making/mixing music they had to be very careful when uploading to YouTube due to automatic shazam style fingerprinting
I took a few music-centered copyright classes in college and thought I had a decent understanding of copyright. How in the world does this qualify for copyright claim? Is it that taking a photo/video of the physical device is making a derivative work? That too doesn't seem to make sense.
Or is this just another bogus claim, like the one UMG made against the Esoterica channel recently against their own recording and arrangement of a Debussy piece that's 150 years old?
It seems to me that there needs to be some sort of escrow that large copyright claimants need to put into when making these claims. If they make bogus claims, that should go to the person they accused incorrectly of a copyright violation. This would balance things out a bit, as currently last companies can just go claim anything they like, bully others, and have nothing behind it.
This has barely anything to do with the legal concept you studied. A “copyright strike” is not a legal concept; it is a YouTube-specific term, used in the opaque bureaucracy that is YouTube/Google ToS violations, rules adherence, and ad revenue eligibility.
If Mend It Mark actually earns revenue from his videos (the more, the better), he can sue under standard tort law, no contract involved, for the losses.
I think it doesn't. But YouTubes copyright system is not a translation of how copyright actual works. Usually, these attacks are on YouTube and YouTube alone, as their system enables this.
I’ve wondered whether the main customers for this type of equipment are audiophiles that use motivated reasoning and placebo effects to justify their purchase OR if this is being purchased by “installers” that build systems for the ultra wealthy who don’t know any better
The people who buy truly believe that it is what it says it is. The mind is a powerful thing, and it is often (mostly) bought by older men who do as a point of pride. It does absolutely no good to try to explain to them why it can't do what it says it does, they have so many escape hatches that they can jump out of any one of them. It doesn't really matter though -- no matter how much the people selling the overpriced crap might be scumbags, the people buying it wouldn't be donating the money to a hospital or something otherwise. These aren't gambling addicts who are spending the money they need to pay the mortgage, these are rich old men with more money than sense.
You're getting downvoted, but this is exactly the reason people buy it. There is even an economic term for this phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Assuming this copyright strike has a legal leg to stand on, could it simply be that he goes through the manufacturer's web site blurb word by word, making fun of it? This could be construed as profiting from unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted content, could it not?
Long time fan I watched this video before it was struck and there was no infringement in the video unless opening a device and showing the inside constitutes infringement. Bad job YouTube.
If you have a kid under 20, ask them what "copyright" means. They'll probably describe it to you in terms of corporate bullying rather than anything that has to do with intellectual property or copying.
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