YouTube Alters Copyright Algorithms, Will 'Manually' Review Some Claims

thomst writes "David Kravets of Wired's Threat Level blog reports that Google's Thabet Alfishawi has announced YouTube will alter its algorithms 'that identify potentially invalid claims. We stop these claims from automatically affecting user videos and place them in a queue to be manually reviewed.' YouTube's Content ID algorithms have notably misfired in recent months, resulting in video streams as disparate as Curiosity's Mars landing and Michelle Obama's Democratic Convention speech being taken offline on specious copyright infringement grounds. Kravets states, 'Under the new rules announced Wednesday, however, if the uploader challenges the match, the alleged rights holder must abandon the claim or file an official takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' (A false takedown claim under the DMCA can result in non-trivial legal liability.)" Update: 10/05 11:24 GMT by S : Google has clarified its earlier comments. The user videos will be placed in a queue for manual review not by Google, but by the content owners.

Comments

outbreakofcommonsense

[Spy Handler]

as much as Google likes to believe its algorithms are infallible, they're not.

Re:outbreakofcommonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The algorithms are almost perfect. They keep Google from getting sued while placating the major content providers enough so that they will host items on YouTube.

Were you assuming that the algorithms were designed to do anything else other than keep YouTube profitable?

non-trivial legal liability?

[NoKaOi]

Has a false DMCA takedown notice ever resulted in legal liability? I'm genuinely curious, we always hear about bogus takedown notices that don't result in anything bad happening to the evildoers.

Re:non-trivial legal liability?

[djl4570]

PBCS got raked over the coals by Thunderf00t et.al. Not sure what all happened to him. This case also pointed to a central problem with false DMCA takedown notices. Persons in foreign countries can claim rights under the DMCA but are not subject to DMCA jurisdiction for making false claims.

Re:non-trivial legal liability?

[stephanruby]

Yes, there was one case I remember, but it wasn't some random take down. It was about a designer initiating a take down on a youtube video because she felt the movie producer/aborigin artist was still owing her money for her design work. The designer lost big in court, especially because the movie producer/artist could prove that he was receiving real income from his art pieces and her take down had a real provable effect on his loss of income at the time.

Re:non-trivial legal liability?

[girlintraining]

Has a false DMCA takedown notice ever resulted in legal liability? I'm genuinely curious, we always hear about bogus takedown notices that don't result in anything bad happening to the evildoers.

That's because they only target people who don't have money. When RIAA started going after peer to peer users (file downloaders), they meticulously selected people for prosecution whom they knew would be unable to mount an effective legal defense. Then, when they lost, they used those cases to establish precident to go after other file sharers in the same jurisdiction. If an appeal did happen, or they targeted someone who did have money, they backed off, offering to settle -- or in the case of a certain infamous law professor who's students worked for free assisting in the defense of an otherwise indigent person, they made sure to make an example out of them by pulling every legal trick possible to cost time and money, and then demanded the maximum penalties across the board, ruining the person's life.

By doing this repeatedly, they managed to do things like neutralize the right to reverse engineer out of the DMCA. They've established that punitive amounts should be used instead of compensatory amounts. They have repeatedly lobbied to establish all of copyright law under the umbrella of strict liability, which requires no proof of intent, and makes no distinction between accidental and intentional harm. They have attempted (and often succeeded) in creating criminal laws where downloading is punished more harshly than rape, assault, or murder.

The reason you don't hear about false DMCA notices is because they're only made against the poor. Copyright law has always targeted the most vulnerable members of society -- the poor and disadvantaged, and punished them disproportionately in the same manner as the war on drugs has. The rich have licensing agreements and lawyers who can arrange settlements. From simple traffic violations to murder, money buys you a clean record almost every time -- unless you get noticed by the media, or you step on the toes of someone with even more money. Right now, in my own county, I was given a speeding ticket. As is common with people with a clean driving record, I was offered a chance to continue it for dismissal, a sort of probation -- if I don't get any more traffic violations, it falls off my record. It was never there. Ah, but there was a $700 "court costs fee" before the judge could offer it.

Don't kid yourself: Our judicial system has been corrupted by money. In time, it will be corrupted by other things as well, as has every other... over a long enough timeframe, every justice system fails. Every empire that acquired the rule of law has later lost it under pressure by the rich, the powerful, and slowly corroded under the weight of its own uncountable rules.

official takedown notice?

[Hatta]

Why isn't YouTube requiring official DMCA notices in the first place?

Re:official takedown notice?

[ExecutorElassus]

Because responding manually according to the required procedure, for the (I'm estimating here) thousands of requests they receive would eat up a huge chunk of their administrative and support budget.

Re:official takedown notice?

[dreampod]

Because they don't have to. Since it is their property they can institute any rules or program that they want (provided obviously that it doesn't break the law) that will help them manage their service or please their partners. In this case they offered a content matching and content removal system to their corporate clients as a means to encourage them to use youtube heavily and stop suing them. The reason youtube is changing their policy is that it has been heavily abused and is starting to generate negative publicity and shift users elsewhere not because they have any obligation to.

They have always accepted DMCA notices but also allowed an alternative non-DMCA process too.

Re:official takedown notice?

[Hatta]

That "unreasonable burden" is the legally prescribed remedy. If you can be sued for doing the minimum required by law, it's not really the minimum required. That means there must be some other law that requires more from Google, which law is it?

Re:official takedown notice?

[ExecutorElassus]

Not entirely. ContentID works by checking uploaded tracks against a database submitted by rightsholders. If the content matches, it gives the holders power to force an automatic takedown, or derive ad revenue from it. However, if the uploader disputes the claim, there was no real recourse if the claimant denied the dispute. Further, DCMA notices have to be manually filed for each uploaded file. Since Big Media is a bunch of whiny bitches, they didn't want to do that, and would much rather google does all the legwork for them.

Re:official takedown notice?

[Hatta]

Because if someone challenges the DMCA complaint and the DMCA complainer disappears, Google is the one who gets held liable.

That's absolutely untrue. The entire point of the DMCA is the safe harbor provisions for service providers. If you take an item down in response to a well formed DMCA complaint there is no valid cause against you, even if the DMCA complainer disappears.

Re:official takedown notice?

[Blakey Rat]

They could only look at ContentID providers who frequently have their claims successfully disputed. To be generous, YouTube could then help re-jigger their source videos to produce fewer false positives (for example, removing the stock Nasa footage from news service source videos). In reality, YouTube would find that something like 30% of them are simply frauds who uploaded source videos they don't actually have any rights to.

Similarly, if someone has been a successful YouTube member for several years with a clean copyright record, YouTube could manually review claims made against their account, and maybe even create a way to say "ok we trust this user, disable ContentID for their uploads".

Right now, as far as I can tell, they don't do any of this basic housekeeping-type work for the average Joe user. This announcement just says they'll maybe start looking into it for the high-traffic users. (Translation: not you. Only millionaires.)

We're not talking about needing an army of 50,000 employees to do this, we're talking about pulling 10-15 guys off click fraud duty (if only Google treated YouTube copyright fraud 1/100th as seriously as they treated click fraud!)

about damn time

[v1]

the alleged rights holder must abandon the claim or file an official takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.' (A false takedown claim under the DMCA can result in non-trivial legal liability.)

Though if they do file a counter-counter-claim, it'd still get taken down unjustly if you didn't have the money to buy back your justice with a lawyer. At least this will reduce the abuse of the system.

It's for reasons like this that I am occasionally happy to see processes get abused, publicly, to a degree that triggers change.