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Corporate Claims On Public Domain YouTube Videos
esocid writes "Cory Doctorow has written a Guardian column, 'The pirates of YouTube,' about how multinational copyright-holding companies have laid false claim to public domain videos on YouTube. The videos are posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world. These videos were produced at public expense and no one can claim to own them, but multinationals from CBS to Discovery Communications have done just that, getting YouTube to place ads on the video that deliver income to their coffers. What's more, their false copyright claims could lead to the suspension of FedFlix's YouTube account under Google's rules for its copyright policing system. This system, ContentID, sets out penalties for 'repeat offenders' who generate too many copyright claims — but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership."
Give me an rightholder-claiming API, I'm doing a study in greed and subjective inflation of bank accounts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is this is the end stage for the ownership of ideas: that just as there is no longer "public land" in the sense that every piece of land has an owner (even if it is the government), every idea will need an owner?
Do you like Japanese imports?
Counter-notices are an invitation to sue and ContentID suffers from a horrendous number of false-positives. Good luck fighting a GEMA claim by the way (they claim everything, even if the artist in question isn't a member).
but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership
That's just like our legal system then!
when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.
I disagree they have *no* standards. It's apparent that Google wants to make money off content providers and is kissing their giant smelly ass. I think if there is any standard, it's to kiss up to the movie studios, the record labels, and any other big content organization so they can get their itunes/amazon prime equivalent up and running.
This is fucked up.
I just spent a few hours making a video and set it to public domain music. A day later, Youtube blocked it in Germany and said it might put ads on it. The appeals process went straight to the company claiming ownership of the music and was unsurprisingly rejected with no other course of action.
Seriously, fuck GEMA.
Their practices are harmful to themselves, the artists they claim to represent and the users. While other, similar organizations may have been late to the whole internet thing and still don't get it GEMA acts like it doesn't even exist as a media platform or something.
Again, fuck GEMA.
Seriously, these two should sue the pants off of these companies and make money on it. False known claims for youtube and ask for all the money that was made on the videos x 10 (amount + 9x). FedFlix can use libel and ask for all the money that was made on these videos x 10 (amount + 9x).
Once disney and a few others have to pay for EXPENSIVE lawyers AND massive penalties, they might think twice about stealing and lying.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you are short of some good Christmas reading, you could do a lot worse than James Boyle's excellent book, "The Public Domain." It looks at a number of similar issues, critiquing the rise in the enclosure of the public domain, with the call to arms that, without defenders actively arguing in favour of the public domain, it will be gradually eroded by the proprietary claims of third parties, since it has no voice, nor lobbying power, of its own.
He has made it available in PDF under (CC) BY-NC-SA 3.0, so you can "try before you buy" or else not buy it if you do not want to but, in my opinion, it's worth every penny. (Although I feel rather stupid having a hard copy sitting untouched on my shelf, just so James and his publishers receive money, when the electronic copy was worth far more to me!)
David Bollier's "Public Assets, Private Profits" (sorry - Google link) is definitely worth reading, too, for those who care about the preservation of the commons.
Just because the government made something, doesn't mean it was completely legal. Governments can break their own laws too.
Just because the films were made at public expense by the government and nobody can claim ownership of the films, doesn't mean all content used to produce the films was properly licensed for release in the public domain.
The copyright system may be immoral and ethically wrong, the corporations are (probably) still within the legal boundaries. Hate the game, not the players.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What a surprise that the multi-billion dollar advertising company is complicit in displaying as many ads as possible regardless of actual content ownership. Google should be doing more to stop this.
That's a criminal offense. See 17 USC 506(c): "Fraudulent Copyright Notice. -- Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500. "
The Department of Justice is squishy-soft on enforcing this. It's apparently never been enforced. Nor does it create a private right of action, so you can't sue under it.
A little while back I was watching this video of someone playing a newly released game he'd recently imported from Japan on his PSP. (The device and his his desk were in shot, so it wasn't footage ripped from some website.)
...It was removed on the grounds of "copyright infringment" by the developers/publishers.
I mean, seriously? Sorry, but fuck you!
YouTube really needs to grow a spine when it comes to copyright cases and at least determine if something actually requires removing instead of just doing it blindly.
This system, ContentID, sets out penalties for 'repeat offenders' who generate too many copyright claims — but offers no corresponding penalties for rightsholders who make too many false claims of ownership.
I don't think that word, "rightsholders," really would be appropriate in this circumstance. Unless it means something completely other than what I would think -- which is a possibility, given that my spell check doesn't even recognize that it's an English word,
I am not a crackpot.
Yeah, there are all sorts of copyright pirates out there.
GEMA is an example of an organization that lays millions of fraudulent claims.
You can't handle the truth.
Oops- fixed the Google link into something more palatable, but didn't fix the accompanying text.
Another issue with this system is that it's easily trolled. There's people who put false claims in claiming to be a company when they're really not associated with the company at all.
It's a common problem with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic videos on Youtube. Hasbro (the owner) allows them to be up, including full episodes. Someone else claims to be Hasbro and has it pulled, then the poster has to go to real Hasbro to get them to tell Youtube to reverse it. Eventually the account gets "flagged" for repeated violations even though they've all been false positives.
The system just plain sucks at handling this stuff.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Yea, how dare Google cater more towards the people who pay them actual money than the people who use their service for free. I mean, I gave them my zero dollars and all they gave me in return was something close to but not exactly what I want. I hope those bastards rot in hell goddamnit.
Note, right siders always seem to get the shaft.
ContentID, Fair-Isaac is more egregious in that they give little or no points to those paying early.
But if you miss one or two bills, then even if your history says you paid early dozens of times, guess what! They ding you hard!
Wish that Fair-Isaac gets class action sued over that penalty heavy system they monopolize as a close source score on your credit!
John Corzine probably has a high score, and you probably have a lower one, hmmm. something is wrong here, mighty wrong, ContentID wrong again!
No good deed goes unpunished. Welcome to be part of the ninety-nine percent.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
Why put this stuff on YouTube at all? Why not post it to the Internet Archive and other archival sites?
(Of course, false copyright claims should be prosecuted as fraudulent and punished accordingly.)
How dare people demand ethical behavior from Google in a capitalist economy! The horror!
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Come on, Soulskill and esocid. Its Cory, not Corey. 10 out of 10 for attempting attribution, but couldn't you at least cut-and-paste the name correctly?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Youtube has no standards AT ALL for this kind of stuff... it's why you can't use them to seriously host anything. But then again, it's a free service... so...
They have standards... filing a takedown notice results in a takedown. Filing a false takedown notice theoretically carries the penalty of perjury (theoretically because in spite of plenty of instances of false takedown notices, it's never been enforced). You may file a counterclaim to put it back up.
These are the standards put forth in the DMCA, and the ones which they follow.
The *AA engage in bullying, theft, "hollywood accounting", and false claims of ownership or copyright violation to generate revenue.
My God. They're greedy. Apparently the writer of this article was the last innocent who didn't realize that.
The question is not whether they're greedy pilfering thieves laying false claims, but what can be done through the courts to sue the bastards for their attempts to steal public domain content and claim it as their own. I want to see the *AA paying the government who paid for the public domain content to collect copyright violation damages at least as high as what these bastards come after individuals for.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
From a Libertarian perspective I fail to see a problem with this.
So if FedFlix or whomever has a problem with this, let them or whoever else wants to pay for the litigation pay for it. The government should just keep its nose out of it.
Hell the government has no business wasting my tax dollars and creating the videos to begin with.
FedFlix should create "derivative works" who would then not be in the public domain.
Adding one image at the begining telling "FedFlix brings you !", and one at the end with "Thank you for watching" and maybe a small watermark would be enough and trivial to automate.
This would create an "infringable" copyrighed notice, and then anybody who would want to benefit from the FedFlix "marketing" to push their adds would be "infringing" could be "expulsed" and potentially be "banned" from youtube (it would be fun to see FedFlix asking google "why isn't this dangerous repeat offender "CBS" banned ?
Of course it seems "pointless" but just as the GPL is using copyright to implement copyleft, you need sometime to use private means to promote the public domain.
I wonder why they didn't do it ...
We've actually come a long way in the last decade in terms of being able to make public use of the public domain in the U.S. The vast majority of works that are PD in the US are ones that were copyrighted after 1922 but reverted to the public domain because their copyrights were not renewed. It used to be that if you came across a book from 1927, you could be almost certain that it was PD (simply because, statistically, few books had their copyrights renewed), but you wouldn't have any way of making sure, because the renewal records weren't online. But the good folks at Carnegie Mellon, Project Gutenberg, and Distributed Proofreaders did all the hard, dreary work of digitizing the records and putting them online in searchable form. So for example, a creative-commons-licensed physics textbook that I wrote includes a drawing of a boy hanging by his arms from a bar. The drawing is from a 1927 physics textbook, which I know is PD because I was able to check online that the copyright was not renewed. Another great thing about living in the US is that our law says that a faithful reproduction of a PD work can't be copyrighted (Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 1999). I have a portrait of Isaac Newton in my book that is a photo of a 17th-century oil painting. I got a nastygram once from the museum in the UK that owns the painting, saying I was violating their copyright. Sent them back an email saying, "Sorry, not copyrightable in the country where I live," and that was the end of that.
It gets a lot harder when you're dealing with sound recordings and moving pictures. The records aren't digitized by the government, and even if they were to be digitized, it would not necessarily be easy to index and search them. Unlike a book, a sound recording doesn't always have any clear labeling as to its title. Indexing sound and movies is a hard problem. It requires a ton of computing power to do well. What we really need is someone with a super-huge CPU farm who is willing to put tons of computational effort into indexing these things. I wonder who has the facilities necessary for that? Uh, Google, that's who. Google owns YouTube.
Here is a PD video I put together of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsing -- a classic staple of American physics education for three generations. About 10 years ago, you could only get this by paying a ton of money to an educational video company. I found two newsreels about the bridge at archive.org, one silent and one with music and narration. I spliced them together. Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
About a year later, I got an email from YouTube saying that the jazz tune I'd used in the video (Boot It, by Bennie Moten) actually wasn't PD. I was originally annoyed and sure they were wrong. But I looked into it, and it looked like sure enough, it was still in copyright. Archive.org had apparently not realized that a certain percentage of Bennie Moten's work was still in copyright. The rights holder is selling the recording online. And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
So although it sounds like FedFlix has a problem, my own experience with YouTube was that they performed a service for me that nobody else was willing to perform: they figured out whether an old piece of music was actually PD. The end result is that it's a big win for everyone.
And I can't help feeling that Cory Doctorow, as in many of his hand-wringing advocacy pieces, is being a little overwrought. The problem here is not that FedFlix is being su
Find free books.
I think Corey Doctorow expecatations are too high for Googles ContentID system. It is an automated system. It shouldn't be handling ownership disputes. This dispute can only be handled in court. If I were Google I wouldn't create a 1 click lawsuit button either.
What part of "free service", "no SLAs", "no guarantees", "use at your own risk", ad naseum do you not understand?
You are defending a company for stiffing their entire userbase in exchange for cash from a third party.
It's a dick move for ANY business to make regardless of whether it is profitable or not.
There may not be a private right to sue. It is possible that the goverment can bring the suit. That is why Fedflix is making a public stink about it and sending documentation to the Archivist of the United States.
This sounds like it needs to be counter exploited, and hard.
The only way to establish precident for enforcement of false copyright claims, is to have a phyrric entity serving in the public's interest do exactly what big content is doing, but directed at big content.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it. Using this copyrighted "song", file DMCA takedown notices of every single big media production featuring a musical score, claiming that they are profiting illegally from a partial inclusion of your copyrighted "song".
Keep spamming the shit out of eg, the CBS and pal's youtube offerings with dmca notices, exploit the one-sidedness of the reporting system in the same way they exploit it against far use and public domain assets, and keep after it in earnest.
After a few weeks of that, the big media giants will sue. When they do, they will use their lawyers to win, and in so doing, establish a poisonous precedent against this practice.
The only way to get the assfucks to work for you is to socially engineer them into painting themselves into a corner.
I suggest that we (ordinary people) endeavor to do exactly that.
They're stiffing their entire userbase? Hyperbole isn't really the best way to make your argument. It is, however, a good way to make sure no one actually reads what you have to say. In any event, when a corporation (or a person or a small business) has to decide between their users and their customers, the people who pay the bills are going to win 9 times out of 10. That's just reality, regardless of how "dick" you may think it is.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/28/0124213/better-copyright-through-fair-use-and-ponies
Hasbro need to tweak their merchandising if they're to capitalize on the older fan base. Canonical ponies, and complete seasons on blu-ray with extras.
No self respecting brony is going to buy a PINK Princess Celestia.
Sounds good. Get on it. Oh wait, you meant someone else do it, didn't you?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
What part of "offering a free service doesn't grant you the right to be unethical" do you not understand?
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Youtube gained popularity and numbers on shoulders of the small guy - vids posted by all sorts of home productions but is bowing to a few powerful content owners. Looks like they got their priorities in the reverse order.
Anyone here ever considered laying claims to random videos?
1. Claim 10,000 random videos
2. Collect ad revenue
3. ???
4. Profit!!
AccountKiller
All we need is an organization to operate under.
This would shield individuals from the litigation the same way that corporations shield board members.
I would happily become "employed" by such a "company."
What I lack is the knowledge of proper process to create such a sacrificial company.
Its not unusual for the Government to allow a contractor to assert copyright, as long as the Government itself has unlimited rights. It really depends on whether the the Government, in the form of the contracting officer, gave permission to the contractor. The Government only keeps contract records for about 6 years 6 months (except in special cases), so depending on how old the particualar work is, the only conclusive record (i.e. a permission letter from the Gov't) may be in the hands of the contractor. Other contemporaneous proof would likely be if the work was registered with the Copyright office when produced, which would lead one to beleive that permission was granted at that time. If no registration was made contemporanously, then likely (but not conclusively) no permission was given and there would be more credence to the idea that they are claiming copyright without permission.
There is also an implied, "do the right thing" clause that, when violated, can get a real nasty backlash. Its human nature, not contract law, get used to it.
I tried to download it, but NBC Universal claimed copyright and blocked me.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If the default behaviour is to claim infringement over every non-infringing work you've published to YouTube, then I'd have to say the detection system is fraudulently broken and arbitrarily taking the side of big media.
A police officer who wrote jaywalking tickets to everyone on the street, assuming that they must have crossed from the other side illegally, would rapidly be subject to lawsuits from an outraged public and stripped of their badge. It sounds like YouTube's software does just that.
The fact that you can defend yourself against that abusive bastard's harassment in the court of the system interface does not excuse them from failing to properly train their "software officer" on the disadvantages of harassing people for not breaking the law.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Look, when Google starts to lose money (or in the extreme case, employees) because it is being "unethical", that's when things will change. "Stiffing their entire userbase" will lose them money, but the stuff mentioned here is not going to "stiff their entire userbase".
Google is an ad company. They're not stiffing their user base, they're delivering product.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's their corporate motto and all! Therefore this story is a lie.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
google is like newspapers.
you have the company,The client, and the customer.
the thing to remember is that you the end user is the customer not the client. you are less important than the client, and as such the client rights superseed anything you might say. Even if you go somewhere else, you are still just the customer.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Where's the mod-option for "tragically true?"
every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation
That's quite a lot of combinations. Are you sure you don't want to guess every possible permutation of all 1024-bit keys first? That sounds much easier.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Look up how to form a LLC, pretty easy to do actually. And there's companies to help you do it. XD God bless America.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
God, I am so sick of seeing this "observation" trotted out in every conversation about Google. Google is not only an ad company.
"You aren't the customer, you're the product" contains some truth, but it's facile. The whole truth is that Google is engaged in a triangle trade with two different groups of customers. It sells services and content (search results, video, email service, etc.) to Internet users in exchange for their attention to ads, and it sells that attention to advertisers in exchange for money. We belong to one group of customers. The advertisers are another group of customers. Both groups are getting something good in the bargain and both have the right to be treated fairly.
google how to start an LLC. takes about $500 and $250 / yr
You can narrow it down a bit if you make some simplifications, such as, 4:4 time, with maximum 8 notes per chord, 16 chords per measure.
You could do it systematically, creating "choatic symphonies", each one being a permeutation of the possible space.
I agree, it would be a set of very long arrangements, but the sequential nature of the permeutation would lend well to parallelism, since the generation processes don't really need to share data, just a mathematically derived set of entry points which can be found in polynomial time.
Theoretically, I could have my 8 core i7 "composing" 8 symphonies at a whack.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it. Using this copyrighted "song", file DMCA takedown notices of every single big media production featuring a musical score, claiming that they are profiting illegally from a partial inclusion of your copyrighted "song".
Problem: Copyright applies to the recordings, not to the score. Hence why many copies of Bach or Chopin are still under copyright - they may have been *written* centuries ago, but they were recorded *now*, so the copyright is *now*.
If it weren't for that, what you propose would've effectively already happened naturally via old music entering public domain.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it.
Okay, let's take a look at the math for what you propose.
Our incredibly limiting assumptions will be:
1) Ignore harmony and focus solely on melody
2) Melody is defined as single note per beat
3) Only deal with songs <= 4 minutes long
4) Since this is a geek site we should cover electronica, so we need to represent tempo up to 150 bpm
5) 8 octaves are available
Taking Western notation, we will map the 12 notes per octave (ie. lettered notes plus sharps and flats) * 8 octaves. We will also represent silence for one beat as one "note". Therefore, there are 97 notes in this representation.
150 beats/min * 4 minutes = 600 beats. This implies that there would be 97^600 possible songs. Call it order of 10^1200 possibilities. (what's multiplying by an extra few billion times between friends?) This is a reasonable approximation for "infinity" for all practical purposes, as there are presumed to be "only" around 10^82 particles in the entire observable universe.
Yes, I have made some trivializing assumptions with how to model the permutations here, but don't forget that we have also simplified the model to exclude many aspects of music (multiple notes played simultaneously, longer songs, etc), which would cause the number of permutations to explode.
And then they buy a law that copyrights will not be lawful for individuals or new businesses or anybody except the select few.
They will change the laws to what they want it to be.
Your idea might work if all were equal by the law. As we know, some are more equal then others.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Then how can warner bmg file a takedown notice against someone singing or humming or arranging the music to "happy birthday"?
If the arrangement (sheet music) is not what is protected, and instead only individual phonorecordings, then license for live performances would be a nonsense enterprise.
While drastically more computationally intensive, it should be possible to create a bruteforce lyrics generator as well, using an unabridged dictionary as input.
It applies to any kind of content, the recording AND the score are copyrighted, just not necessarily to the same entity.
An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it.
In the 70s, George Harrison was successfully sued for "subconscious" plagiarism for the song "My Sweet Lord". According to the courts, Harrison stole a three-note sequence used in the title refrain from The Chiffons' "He's So Fine".
The "every possible combination of notes" approach would need to check to make sure that combinations weren't already claimed.
Google's doing what they're required to do by law (the DMCA). If they don't, then they're opened up to potential liability. They're between a rock and a hard place on this - on one hand, they have a bunch of litigious jerks just waiting to pounce on any misstep, and on the other side they have a ton of people screaming "freedom!". It's kind of lose-lose, and attitudes like yours aren't helping much.
Problem: Copyright applies to the recordings, not to the score.
Oh? Try to publish the score to a modern piece of music and see what ASCAP and SGA says.
I don't understand. What is unethical about it? They certainly don't have the right to defraud, that's for sure, but if they're honest about what they are providing, and they ARE being honest about it, then what is the problem? It's not like they are keeping you from using another free video hosting service in addition or instead of their own...
This isn't about capitalism, it's about people expecting more than promised and getting bitchy about it when they can't have it.
I do agree that it IS user-unfriendly for Google to do something like this, and that the content posters in this case are justified in being annoyed by this behavior, since it feels pretty slimy and it could affect their use of the system. However, people need to be taught the lesson that you can't trust someone to do something that they never said that they would do and then act accordingly. If they want to take the risk, then good for them, it may well pay off.
On the other hand, if the multinationals are lying about their ownership, that smells like fraud to me. And fraud is a crime just about everywhere.
Wouldn't the big music companies just sue you then when your random monkey composer creates Beethoven's 8th and you try to claim it as an original work?
I read the internet for the articles.
Since the other comments were not informative at all - There are separate copyrights for the recording and the score, often owned by different companies.
Smart artists who still want major-label backing will given in to RIAA contracts, but retain publishing rights. RIAA is left to police the album recording only, and the artist can either police or ignore any other representation of the music. Underinformed artists sign away all rights, and the RIAA or more likely ASCAP can go after any other version of the song as well.
Harry Fox, ASCAP, and BMI are usually the ones which "represent" songwriters, trolling bars to see if they are performing music (karaoke, live bands, or the Happy Birthday song) withoput having paid a performance license.
There are Bach scores in copyright because they have had editorial marks or updated notation (a direct copy with a new cover would not qualify). There are Bach recordings in copyright because they were recorded recently. The opposite is true as well. Many fine recordings and scores are public domain because they happened long enough ago.
Google will do what the other corps tell them to do. Do no Evil is in regards to profits only.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Its human nature, not contract law
And that matters to you and me. It only matters to a corporation when it starts to affect their bottom line.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
You do know, of course, that the copyright on the music (notes, not performances) of Beethoven's 8th expired long ago (It was composed in 1812). Then again, that does bring the discussion back on topic of claiming copyright over things in the public domain...
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
That's just the easy part. You also need to be able to get legal representation of the right kind. If you can't afford a lawyer, you won't get the precedent that you need.
You will have to be very careful to:
a) Have someone show up the the trial or the case will be summarily dismissed without any precedent being set.
b) Have a lawyer who keeps the argument on-track enough so that the corporation's slimy lawyers can't avoid the counter-arguments that you need to have heard in court.
c) Avoid having a judge order you to attempt to settle or go into some sort of arbitration or dismiss the case as frivolous. Judges will not like your attempt to game the system and clog up their already huge caseloads and will make it very difficult indeed to get the right precedent that you want. Since they write the decisions that create the precedents, it's as much about painting a judge into a corner, as it is the corporations.
d) Have a lawyer who can stand up to possible ethics and professional charges when they try trickery like this. There are rules, even among thieves.
e) Not win your case.
Point E is sort of funny, but you can easily end up doing the work of the corporations for you. And both the respondent and even the judge may well collude to give you a victory, especially if they understand your motives.
An LLC requires multiple partners, so a solo man operation is still a no go. Need other people to comit
The initial comment to which I was replying said the following "how dare Google cater more towards the people who pay them actual money than the people who use their service for free" (note the sarcasm).
/dev/null ... in which case that would actually show Google doesn't care about its users as much as people expect (note I'm not saying that this is happening, I'm just following the argument).
I was exposing the opinion that just because some people pay Google to do something, it doesn't offer a free pass on Google to do "something" (where something is actually something "bad"). Any money > $0.
If we use the logic in the initial comment that "a service provider is correct in doing what the customer that pays more demands" then we can extrapolate it to a situation where a murder victim doesn't have enough money to counter the offer of a killer's client and is shot in the head instead.
Of course that is an extreme situation in that it doesn't make any sense. Nobody would say the killer was correct... and I can anticipate some criticism that "Google is not killing anyone". It is not.
On the other hand, for your argument to make sense we have to believe that Google actually doesn't know it's infringing harm to innocent people (that shared public domain videos which were claimed my corrupt big labels as theirs exploiting the law). I find that very hard to believe.. because to believe in that I would have to accept the fact that all complains Google receives go to
What would be "right" of Google to do then? I guess that actually placing a human being with a brain and some experience in copyright claims to handle the complaints from big labels would make sense instead of blinding trusting a greedy corporation to the detriment of a single user trying to share something useful with the rest of the society.
So perhaps it was not obvious what I meant about unethical behavior and that adjective could be out of place but it doesn't change the fact that Google is not doing the "right thing" (tm).
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Shouldn't Beethoven's 8th be public domain by now?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
There is always a way to make it right (or less wrong). The law requires Google to do something and that something, when done properly, will cost Google to decrease profits because they would have to invest in someone with an actual brain (i.e. a human being) to accept the complaints, analyze and act accordingly (perhaps requesting the big labels to submit additional evidence and/or reject it right away). That is a cost of Google offering the service it does, with the law that government decided was to be followed. Life is not fair, right?
The fact that Google seems to automatically take down videos at the first sight of a complaint from the big labels explains what's happening but it doesn't justify it. Users have the right to be treated fairly and some users clearly are NOT. That doesn't mean Google is always wrong or always right.. it means this specific situation needs addressing (since it happens so often).
The small user (or let's say, the less paying customer) is demanding a fair treatment. Right now the balance is pending on way only.
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(I'm posting anon to prevent shenanigans with my content currently on YouTube.)
I have actually had success dealing with YouTube's automated system.
In one case, a company tried to claim copyright over a public domain cartoon. In my counter-claim, I specified where I got the original footage, noted the year it became public domain and stated that the audio was completely my own (no "soundtrack" backdoor to a copyright claim). They had my video back up the very next day and it has been up since.
In another case, a portion of audio in one of my music tracks was flagged by the automated system. I sent citations of US Parody laws and an invitation to discuss any dispute with my attorney (CC'd him as well). The video (with said audio included) was back up the same day.
Perhaps I just got lucky twice in a row... Perhaps the claimants decided that pursuit of me wasn't feasible... Perhaps the dispute system actually worked... Perhaps the claimants weren't copyright warehouses who have no other source of business...
Whatever the reason, I'm satisfied with my resolutions and actually felt somewhat like YouTube "had my back" on these. I honestly don't see the lack of fairness that commenters seem to imply. I agree that there should be a penalty for abusing the system on both sides, but I feel that reasonable responses do work in the current system.
The problem is that you have to be the person whose content has been removed due to a false claim in order to "have standing" in the situation. If you instead start posting all sort of content which you are willing to stand up for on the claims of it being in the public domain, then you will have standing in that situation.
Unfortunately that takes time and considerable effort, not to mention willing to spend a fairly decent amount of money toward the litigation that inevitably will come from that action. You can counter-sue for court costs and related costs of the litigation, but you have to win first. Even if your cause is just, there is always the potential you will lose your shirt together with anything you may own (house, car, etc.) so it isn't something to try lightly.
You also have to ask yourself: Are there better causes with which to spend my time and effort fighting? I can think of a great many other things I would rather do than to fight an obscure provision of copyright law that can be undone tomorrow even if I win through simple legislation and some generous contributions to a local congressman or member of parliament.
It sounds like a damn good idea to me. Where do I lay claim to these videos?
google how to start an LLC. takes about $500 and $250 / yr
Depending on the state, what kind of business you might be performing, and other factors as well. Still, it isn't that expensive or complicated to start a "company" if you really want limited liability in a commercial activity.
Your argument that the musical score will be near infinite in length doesn't hold if you use a phonorecording format that has infinite playback time as a target. You just seek the song to the timestamp index in the permeutation's progression, and press play. If you have all eternity to sit and listen, you can do that too.
In that case, your algorithm is essentially transcendental and normal. Difficult to prove that it will include all possibilities, so you may as well just copyright Pi instead of inventing your own (it's at the same state of proof as what you propose). As a bonus, you can sue everyone who produces anything at all after that date, because you just apply a "trivial" (*cough*) mapping from the offset within your musical notes to textual or binary representation.
I am being somewhat satirical, because even if you were granted such farcical copyright protection, you would still have to prove that the other material infringes by being able to cite your time offset. You couldn't make some hand-wavy assertion that "it's somewhere in there, you dastardly infringer!"
Look at the Pi-Search system that indexes the first 200 million digits of Pi and search for a your favorite up-to-120-digits-long number. Just for fun:
"The string 1234567890 did not occur in the first 200000000 digits of pi after position 0."
That's a 10 digit long number. Didn't occur within the first 200 million digits of Pi. Most songs are going to be more than 10 notes long. The odds of finding the "infringing" material rapidly drop to essentially 0 for any nontrivial search key.
Your approach is impossible. You may as well try to copyright Middle C and then presume that you can sue anyone that "infringes" on your copyright by including that musical note in their work.
Adding one image at the begining telling "FedFlix brings you !", and one at the end with "Thank you for watching" and maybe a small watermark would be enough and trivial to automate.
Don't try this at home, kids. Call your lawyer first.
contact me for my investment fund. i'm going to dump money on a video sharing website where 90% of investment will be on legal team. and the business model will be milking RIAA for false ownership claims.
Successful musical copyright infringement cases have been made off of the commercial use of as little as two measures of music from another song. Submitting to the Library of Congress a list of all possible variations of notes and note patterns for three to four measure "songs" might just be an excellent way to become a genuine copyright troll in the same manner that patent trolls do their work, and it would be far easier to "prove" prior publication. With life+70 years as the current copyright regime, it might even be a fun game to play.
Keep in mind that copyright registration is only $50, and on top of that you can even send in multiple songs as a "compilation". Really, this sounds like a very reasonable business plan to me.
I would never do it for personal ethical reasons, but who cares about ethics when you stand before a judge?
The purpose of this action IS TO LOSE, but to lose by forcing the content producers to prove that the very practices they are actively engaged in are not legal, and need to be policed.
The purpose is to force them to argue against their own standard operating practices in court, win, and afterward be legally barred from continuing those practices.
By filing with a phyrric entity, the created corporation can disolve after losing and can claim chapter 13 bankruptcy. The single asset (the infinite progression, mathematically complete playback space of all possible musical notations) can be sold for a trivial sum to somebody like the eff after such loss.
The point of creating the corporate entity is that you have a non person "person" you can sacrifice, without endangering the actual people involved.
If the court goes after the individual people, it would be a much bigger and more dangerous precident to big business than the one initially sought after.
A similar situation happens for textual copyright, where a book can be "revised" with merely adding an index, footnotes, or even "corrections" from an errata sheet or resetting the text of the document. The "revised" document can then be copyrighted. That perhaps only the index or footnotes are subject to copyright doesn't even have to be disclosed, but copyright is still effectively claimed.
I've seen copyright claims on books where the only thing I could see that was original was the copyright notice itself. Sort of like what is happening here with these videos.
Everyone knows that something being free completely exempts it from all criticism (somehow).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
How about this... Compare their treatment of Google Books... A project they are running themselves. THEY infringe all kinds of content on Books, but then go to measures to BUY warehouses of books, and limit page counts tether than take the material DOWN.
There is no option to "escrow" your YouTube videos sources ahead of time.. Which clearly many of these Archive channels could do, or at least prove the work was abandon.
But not one YOU can read. It would need translated. The originals are usually held by libraries that get "antiquity rights" so that you can't record images of the art and then cut them out.
So much for "public domain" on ancient artifacts!
IIUC, the problem is the wording of the law. What it takes is one person to make the (fraudulent) claim and another person to file the claim while plausibly believing the claim of the first person.
IIUC, the penalties only apply to the person filing the claim if he doesn't believe the claim is valid. Nice, huh? So if the judge decides to believe that you knew you didn't own the copyright, or that rather that the person filing the DMCA objection didn't believe that the entity he was representing owned the copyright, then the penalties apply. But if the judge decides to believe that you filed the claim "in good faith", then there are no penalties.
If I'm correct, there aren't any penalties for making a false claim, only for filing a claim that you know or believe is false.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They're stiffing their entire userbase? Hyperbole isn't really the best way to make your argument. It is, however, a good way to make sure no one actually reads what you have to say. In any event, when a corporation (or a person or a small business) has to decide between their users and their customers, the people who pay the bills are going to win 9 times out of 10. That's just reality, regardless of how "dick" you may think it is.
Underrated comment. Would vote up, but already used my points.
The area is really murky one here. Google has to listen to both sides, but they do have to operate under DMCA, take down the content and let the poster counter the takedown.
As far as userbase goes, they aren't really stiffing the whole userbase just some people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sounds good. Get on it. Oh wait, you meant someone else do it, didn't you?
Anonymous
"You're the product, not the customer" is a slogan created by astroturf marketing trolls to allow the old guard (like Microsoft) to attack companies (like Google) that offer products in competition with theirs, but for free.
Which isn't to say that Google is perfect. But let's take the specific example in question: The law makes it so that there is a large legal incentive to take down videos upon request, and basically no legal incentive to question the take downs. Now, in theory, Google could hire an army of lawyers to review each of the thousands of take down requests they get every day, and try to contact the poster of the video to get their side of the story, etc. But let's face it, that's prohibitively expensive. And even that creates a much higher risk that they make a mistake, refuse to take down a video that it turns out was actually infringing and then end up having to explain it in court after getting sued by some Hollywood asshats like Viacom. The situation is messed up, but it's caused primarily by stupid laws, not stupid Google. You can blame them for not doing more, but it's not like they're going out of their way to screw you over. They just don't have any good options.
And that's the problem for Microsoft and their ilk. People like Google. They're not perfect, but they're less imperfect than most of the alternatives. And public opinion matters, so "the alternative" needs some talking points that paint competing companies with "free" products in a bad light. Hence: "You're the product, not the customer."
There is really no point. The ContentID system is broken, ineffective, and meaningless to the average user.
Adding advertisements over your content is also pointless to fight against, and it has nothing to do with copyright ownership in any way. Google will sell you space on a video based on demographics and how the content is tagged. To my knowledge you *CAN* pay to have your advertisements played over every video in a channel by specifying that as a demographic. That could certainly lead to some abuse.... but since advertisements are going to be there anyways.. I don't see what is to be done about it since everyone has equal opportunity to do the same. If CBS wants to sink millions of dollars into placing their ads in competing YouTube channels that is their prerogative.
You are not allowed to upload your own advertisements in the videos. The TOS is quite specific about that.
The real problem is that YouTube is *free*. It is very hard to compete with free, but it is even harder to compete with the branding. As a business you will get far far far far better service and features from a company like BrightCove. However.... BrightCove is not nearly as recognizable as a brand name.
Speaking from experience every single video that has been uploaded by a system I designed for a client has been flagged as being in violation by the ContentID system. Every single one. The client has a royalty free license to the content (music) and the ContentID system does not even identify the correct copyright owner.
After numerous exchanges with YouTube I came away with the following:
1) The video will not be taken down.
2) The account is not at risk for suspension simply due to the flag.
In my neck of the woods YouTube is a required evil. The API is sandboxed, limited, and in perpetual development. The policies for content are in constant flux and you cannot be really sure of just exactly what is going to happen. The API itself was offline for several hours one time and there are periods of time (6-12 hours) in which the API denies all requests period. It's almost random. The best you can do is good error handling and a queuing system. YouTube API devs are quite friendly and helpful, but even they are limited in what they know about the rest of Google and powerless to change many problems.
It's been almost 2 years now and tens of thousands of flagged videos later my client has yet to experience any action from anyone.
To my knowledge your type of revenge is happening on a day-to-day basis already. That registered content owner has been receiving tens of thousands of notices just from my client over two years. Now how much money does it take to pay somebody to review those notices? Hint, more than a 99c cheeseburger.
People leaving Youtube because Google is being a cunt would hurt their ad revenue. They still sell us to the advertisers, without the users, they won't see a dime.
That's actually part of the beauty.
It would necessitate enforcement against false positives. "No, honest, we really did think we owned it!"
But then again, it's a free service... so...
That's not an excuse. Stop treating it like it is.
Care to point out what any of that has to do with "ethical behavior"?
It's pretty easy to file an LLC.
Has anyone ever issued a DMCA against one of the big media companies for something that was actually the copyright of one of those media companies?
No it doesn't.
Then how can warner bmg file a takedown notice against someone singing or humming or arranging the music to "happy birthday"?
The music to that is still under copyright. And the arrangement can easily be copyrighted. The difference between that and a Bach or Chopin song is that those were written before the idea of copyright, so they would be under public domain. A performance, being a new work based on the original, can still be copyrighted.
IMO they are stiffing their entire userbase. Reducing the breadth of content devalues it for everyone.
Doesn't someone have to "sign" the takedown notice? If they issue a fraudulent take-down notice, and profit from it, that should be relatively easy to prosecute. (Ok, it's probably fraud, not theft. )
People are willing to trade fines for profits, but less so jail time.
Seriously, you need to reread your posts before you send them.
You are complaining about how someone is managing their free service which no one is forcing -you- to use.
It's like complaining that they had the nerve to give you only 4 free doughnuts baked yesterday instead of 12 fresh from the oven.
Where oh where is the DA with enough integrity and gumption to charge these, uhhh, persons, with criminal fraud and perjury? Because that's what they're committing.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I don't think so...maybe it varies from state to state...but no corporation laws I've seen require you to be more the one person..?
I did a regular corp...and filed subchaper "S" status for it to do contracting under, and it is just me...perfectly legal.
I did the S route for extra employment tax savings, but it is about the same for LLC I do believe...at least that's how the lawyer explained it to me...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
client and customer mean the same thing.
what you probably mean is that we're the "product". our web visits are the product that the companies (the client/customer) are buying.
And that matters to you and me. It only matters to a corporation when it starts to affect their bottom line.
Motive is hard to fathom, it's a dangerous can of worms. If we can get corporations to behave properly, who cares why they do?
How is this hyperbole? The videos in question are of government origin, produced using your and my tax dollars, paid for by us (if you are also a US Citizen and taxpayer). Google is allowing people to fraudulently claim stuff you and me paid for and have paid for a legal right to see. Yeah, it's not their entire user base, it's only the entire taxpaying population of the US and of any foreign power who also signed the Berne convention. It doesn't include North Korea or Burkina Faso or wherever , but it sure as hell includes literally billions of people, so again, how is this hyperbole? And while you're at it, you can give away your rights all you want, but please stop being so eager to give away mine.
Who is John Cabal?
Stoked with legions of DMCA wielding shark^M^M^M^M^Mlaywers, entertainment companies instruct their sharks^M^M^M^M^M^Mlaywers do simple searches of the internet, then send out takedown notices. The sharks^M^M^M^M^M^Mlaywers get to bill for every instance regardless of whether they are within their rights or not, and since YouTube simply pulls anything down they get notices about, the public commons takes a beating, what should be in the public domain is squatted by entertainment companies, and society at large is poorer for it. Copyright and patent reforms were badly needed 20 years ago. The public commons basically doesn't exist anymore.
What part of "unethical" makes you think it's illegal?
An engineer can design a suspension bridge without having the ability to weld.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
What a ridiculous approach. You haven't given them zero. You gave them your attention, and therefore a revenue stream.
Let's spell it out for you. No audience=no money from advertisers. So...you've directly contributed to their ability to make money.
If you win even better. You get to prevent the big labels from uploading anything anywhere and they all go out of business, at which point you can dump all your 'songs' into the public domain.
Aiding and abetting MPAA et al.'s false copyright claims on US Government-produced videos IS defrauding the American Public!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
None. That's beside the point and wasn't even mentioned at all.
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Google Books is not infringing copyright.
In most states you can create an S or C corp for under $200. Your secretary of state's web site probably has the forms online.
Or they could just reasonably stop taking requests from a company that submits fraudulent ones.
New book by Jason Mazzone shows how to stop false claims to copyright in public domain works: "Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law" (Stanford University Press, 2011). http://www.copyfraud.com
How do you expect that to stop those companies from then submitting a couple of non-fraudulent requests and then filing a lawsuit when they don't comply?
What is unethical about it?
Bowing down to powerful thieves. Did you not read the summary? The big media companies are STEALING the public domain. To use their own flawed rhetoric, It's as if you hopped into a police car, drove it off, and claimed it was your own.
WE, THE PEOPLE own these videos that the media moguls are claiming ownership to. Claiming ownership to something you have no right to is theft.
Covering up a crime is a crime. You still think it's ethical?
Free Martian Whores!
Because you have ammunition to say that they're abusing the systems you put in place.
Google has the same rights as sites like Hotfile to expect the rightsholders to do their fair work in researching violations.
Well if they are saying that we are supposedly STEALING that which WE, THE PEOPLE owns anyways, isn't that at least defamation of character? Might not the litigation equivalent of a Death of a thousand cuts be more appropriate?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It seems pretty obvious that the law doesn't allow you to refuse to execute a valid take down just because company issuing it has issued a bunch of fraudulent ones. The DMCA take down process is "optional" but if you opt not to do it, you lose the safe harbor and every take down you refuse becomes a prospective lawsuit. And I don't see any scenario in which a company loses every single copyright it holds for having issued a bunch of fraudulent take downs, which means that you're still on the hook for the valid ones. Even if they're all fraudulent, the legal fees incurred for opting out of the safe harbor will make the operation unprofitable.
This is misleading as the situation is actually much worse than you describe. Only the complaining party must be authorized to act on behalf of the owner under penalty of perjury. The rest of the take down notice is assumed to be accurate:
(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
The penalties for a false take down notice under 512(f) require the complaining party to have knowledge of misrepresentation of the notice but that is why you have your lawyer sent the complaint and not yourself.
That may be reasonable but that is not what the law requires or allows. Whether the complaints are historically false or not is irrelevant for the safe harbor provisions.
Catering is one thing, aiding and abetting fraud and theft is another. Given how common this is, it's no longer plausible that Google is unaware that the studios are making fraudulent claims.
Consider, if a locksmith gets fooled once in a great while into helping various people steal a car, they will have some 'splaining to do but will likely be ok. If they repeatedly help the same serial felon steal cars even after being notified of the situation, they become an accessory to the crime and go to jail.
Problem: Copyright applies to the recordings, not to the score. Hence why many copies of Bach or Chopin are still under copyright
Incorrect. You can and always have been able to copyright a score; the score for Rhapsody In Blue (George Gershwin) is still under copyright. However, a recorded performance of the out-of-copyright Bach can be copyrighted, but that doesn't transfer copyright of the score, only the recorded performance.
Free Martian Whores!
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
It isn't completely free, we pay by looking at ads. Google is nothing without people looking at its ads.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I doubt Google makes much money off of me just glancing at an ad (if that) and then forgetting about it. It's free to me, anyway (money-wise).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!