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YouTube Promises Changes To Copyright Claim Policy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube has set up a new team dedicated to weeding out false copyright claims and subsequent erroneous takedowns, responding to community criticism. Complaints have accused the video streaming site of a lazy approach to monitoring content, and using an unreliable automated system, Content ID, to enforce copyright policy. In response to these allegations, YouTube has announced that it will be introducing a workforce focused entirely on minimizing mistakes that delete legitimate videos. The tech giant has also promised to improve transparency into the status of monetization claims, and help strengthen communications between video creators and its support teams.
Should lead to automatic denial of the next 2 claims from the same claimant. The second false claim should lead to automatic denial of the next 4 claims (and so on). I think that would solve the problem pretty quickly.
Facts have a liberal bias.
We purchased the rights to use a particular piece of music for the intro sequence we use on many of our department videos. Every time we post a new video, an automated "third party content" claim is immediately placed against it. I contest it and, after a while, the claim is removed... only to repeat the next time with a new claim based on the same piece of music we've already demonstrated many dozens of times we have the rights to use.
So I'll believe it when I see it.
#DeleteChrome
Until false claims carry some penalty, false claims will continue.
The penalty doesn't need to be particularly harsh. I'd say 3-strikes and you can no longer submit automated take down. After you've falsely accused 3 videos, all further accusations will go into a queue for human review
It would allow a company to police its trademark and take down any flagrant violators, but dissuade automated scripts that flags dozens of videos on flimsy grounds.
That's just my suggestion, there are certainly more options to punish false accusers. Until some punishment is in place though, youtube's words are hollow.
This signature is false.
After receiving thousands of false, incomplete, and otherwise invalid claims from one company, Comcast starting ignoring them. The court ruled Comcast was therefore liable for the claims they ignored. Under current law, the ruling against Comcast was more or less correct (it was borderline, arguable, under current law).
So while "three strikes and you're out " may be a sensible policy, YouTube can't really do that under current law. The DMCA REALLY needs an amendment that strongly discourages improper notices. Something along the lines of "three strikes and you're out" would greatly reduce the number of wrongful claims, which is actually the one big problem with the DMCA. Congress has to do that, though, not Youtube.
If that were fixed, and people were educated about counter-claims under DMCA, it would actually be a pretty good law. The DMCA system works pretty well in cases where the complainant isn't being reckless about filing improper claims.
If you read the linked Google Groups thread, YTSpencer didn't make any actual commitments and didn't ever come back to respond to anyone. This reeks of a company trying to sweep a major publicity problem under the rug without taking any action. The fact that you can literally steal monetization with a copyright claim and the money isn't clawed back when the appeal process finds in favor of the video author means that there's no downside to "jacking" monetization with bogus claims en masse--which is exactly what's being referred to in the thread: an incident where "[Merlin] CDLTD" monetization-jacked as many "Damn Daniel" videos on YouTube as possible and YouTube/Google gladly raked over the bucks.
This is not news. Nothing has changed. There was some murmuring and hand-wringing from YouTube and the status quo resumed its march.
Nowhere do I see "consequences for false flags" or "actually giving people their stolen monetization money back." What a bunch of corporate fluff bullshit.
I'd rather see the law changed so companies (and people) that file bogus takedown notices are fined (or better, face criminal charges, or both)
If fair damages for each infringing song range from $750 to $80,000 per song, then the record industry can afford to hire lawyers to thoroughly vet each takedown notice. Even if it takes 15 minutes to review the video and ensure it's a valid copyright claim, that lawyer will be saving the industry $3000 - $320,000 per hour. They'll all be rich!
I'd like to see a "repeat offenders" classification for copyright claimants like the copyright holders want for alleged infringers. If more than a certain percentage of your copyright infringement claims turn out to be bogus, your claims get diverted for review and won't be acted on until someone's checked the content and checked with the uploader. Same standard for any automated system, if it can't maintain at least the same level of accuracy expected of claimants then it's results can't be used until after human review.
Prior to Content Id, representatives of rightsholders would run automated software to scan new videos on YouTube, identify likely infringement, and automatically send a notice. Whoever uploaded the video could then file a counter-notice. This is the DMCA process.
With Content Id, automated software to scan new videos on YouTube, identify likely infringement, and automatically send a notice. Whoever uploaded the video can file a counter-notice. It's exactly the same as the DMCA process (as actually implemented*) , except that all of the notices are in the exact same format since YouTube generates them, and Youtube can ensure that the software which does the matching does a reasonably good job of matching videos to copyright protected samples. It's the same process, just implemented in such a way that it's more efficient for YouTube.
If DMCA were amended to penalize improper notices, Content Id could (and almost certainly would) be updated to match.
* When DMCA was being debated and public comment was being accepted, approximately nobody predicted that a huge mass of claims would be filed by automated software, so that's not what DMCA was intended to be. That is in fact what happened under DMCA though, and Content Id simply standardised the matching algorithm and the formatting of complaints to be used for content on YouTube.
** I know some of the first people who were involved with trying to create and use software to handle the thousands of infringements of their unique content. They did so with the best of intentions, and it made sense at the time. Then it got out of hand when large media companies send hundreds of thousands of notices without making sure that their systems for doing so worked extremely well first. Not all programmers are great, and some not-great programmers authored some not-great DMCA systems, for customers who found out that there's no real penalty for sending a bad DMCA notice.