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.

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?

[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.

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.