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Unofficial Answers: Why Does YouTube Seem So Biased? (vortex.com)

Posted by timothy on from the just-random-hate-that's-all dept.

Lauren Weinstein writes with some insight on an frustrating aspect of YouTube's video hosting service: "Why does Google's YouTube seem so biased against ordinary users who upload videos? I've unfairly had my videos blocked, received copyright strikes for my own materials, and even had my account suspended — and it's impossible to reach anyone at YouTube to complain!" No, YouTube isn't biased against you — not voluntarily, anyway. But it could definitely be argued that the copyright legal landscape — particularly in the mainstream entertainment industry — is indeed biased against the "little guys," and Google's YouTube must obey the laws as written. What's more, YouTube exists at the "bleeding edge" of the intersection of technology and law, where there's oh so much that goes bump in the night ...

6 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. YouTube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve. My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.

    Today's internet is exactly what all of us feared; Cable TV 2.0, and it really fucking sucks. Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.

    1. Re:YouTube by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A lot of it boils down to the rise of heavily asymmetric connectivity combined with "no servers" clauses in many ISP contracts.

      That kind of killed the whole distributed nature of things...

      Oh yeah, guess who are involved heavily in the last-mile service market? Cable companies.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    2. Re:YouTube by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, it really wasn't. I was there. The internet was a smattering of academic, government, and large corporate sites which was generally only useful to other in similar fields, and certainly nothing which your average person could find or use. In fact, it was actually a rather exclusive club.

      Do you know what it has now? Github. Stack Overflow. Wikipedia. Online API documentation, programmimg tutorials and example of nearly *everything*. Help forums for both end users and experts alike. Streaming audio and video. MMOs. Downloadable videogames. Awesome stuff that I use every day, both professionally and for entertainment purposes. Okay, it has Facebook, Comcast, and cyber-criminals as well, but you take the bad with the good.

      Sorry, but this mythical "golden age of the Internet" was never there. It was really only even *close* to being true if you happened to be a university employee or student (grad student or higher) with direct access to the net through the major university backbones, and even then it was really only a promise of things to come. While I'm sure it was awesome having the internet more or less as a personal playground, I'll take the internet today, warts and all, a thousand times over.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. It's money. by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Money wins against free, 90% of the time. Money pays people to do work, then free has to do that work for nothing.

    We need the following system in place, by law.

    1) Youtube (and similar sites), must rank all censor requestors that make more than 10 requests a year, by how many requests are found to be invalid.

    2) Those that rank in the bottom 5%, i.e. more of your requests are found to be invalid than 95% of the rest of the requestors), then next year, you must pay a refundable fee of $120 per request. If it is found to be invalid, the person you tried to censor gets $100, Youtube keeps the $20.

    3) If you attempt to game the system (by using multiple logins or other methods), you must pay double that fee.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  3. This is why YT is so messed up by joneil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I posted a video last year, and when I first made the video, I used an old blue song that was recorded 90 years ago and is long out of copyright. You can easily find it on the internet archive. Well of course I get the dreaded "copyright violation", etc, etc. I challenged it, even provided YT with the link to the internet archive and links to information about the song, why it is in public domain, etc. Still lost the challenge.

    So okay, next video I use one on youtube itself. They provide songs you can supposedly use hassle free when you edit your video online. The first couple go fine, but about my 4vth or 5th video i upload, I get a copyright violation notice again. So I challenge it and point out that I used the music as provided by youtube itself in it's own video editing menu. Still lost the challenge. I don't think they even read or pay attention to these challenges at all.

    At this point I seldom use YT for anything now. I totally agree people are abusing YT for many things, but punishing the honest user is not helping the situation at all either. Youtube needs to pull their head out of their arse, but hell will likely freeze over first.

  4. Calm down by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    YouTube is the embodiment of all the "problems" the internet was supposed to solve.

    That's a little hyperbolic don't you think?

    My internet was a peer-to-peer system, with all peers being equal, two-way flow of content, empowering the little guys, the voiceless, and letting unpopular messages be heard just as loudly as the mainstream ones.

    What color is the sky on your planet? A peer to peer system with all peers being equal? Never been true in practice since the internet was founded. It has aspects of a peer-to-peer system but the internet is more complicated than that. Differences in bandwidth alone make a true peer-to-peer internet impossible even if we ignore the legal and economic landscape. Empowering the little guys? It already does. But empowered does not and never will mean equal results. Letting unpopular messages be heard? It does that but only to a point. Getting an unpopular message heard requires an audience and unless you can match the big content makers economic resources you're very unlikely to be able to match their audience.

    Where I once had hope and positivity for the future because technology was going to empower us, I now have emptiness and see nothing but bleakness for the future because we let technology enslave us.

    Ok Neitsche, calm down. Sounds like you were a young idealist and you've grown up and figured out that the world is a touch more complicated than you hoped it would be. It's not all roses but it's not all gloom and doom either. Technology isn't "enslaving us" any more than it ever did. Just because it didn't turn out to be a utopian fantasy doesn't mean everything is bad and we are all slaves.