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YouTube Is Guilty Of Criminal Racketeering, Grammy Winner Says (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader cites a TorrentFreak report (edited and condensed): YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering. That's the headline-grabbing claim of Grammy award winning musician Maria Schneider, who claims that the Google-owned site is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to siphon money away from musicians into its own pockets. Over the years, Google has transformed into the new bad guy and the pressure is mounting in a way never witnessed before. The U.S. Copyright Office's request for comments into the efficacy of the DMCA's safe harbor provisions has resulted in a wave of condemnation for both Google search and the company's YouTube platform, with everyone from the major record labels to the MPAA and back again attacking the technology giant. Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider really ups the ante by stating that YouTube is guilty of the same criminal acts that Megaupload is currently accused of. "YouTube is guilty of criminal racketeering," Schneider wrote in an open letter to the platform. "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all types, and siphoned directly into their own pockets."Digital Music News has more information.
Hate break it to you miss, but it's the label under which you signed that's siphoning money away from you. If it wasn't for YouTube and other streaming services, your audience would be substantially smaller.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
You've mis-understood her complaint. She has a legitimate gripe here: either the DMCA is irredeemably broken, or YouTube's implementation of it is. Their system is:
1. Make baseless DMCA complaint about someone
2. Get all their ad revenue until they successfully fight the complaint - several days at least for high-profile YouTubers, perhaps forever for normal people
3. Keep all that revenue after the complaint is found to be baseless
4. Profit!
There are dozens of videos from movie and game reviewers about this, who are constantly barraged by baseless takedown notices.
Here's a good start to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This search gives many, many viewpoints (from dozens, perhaps hundreds now, of YTers affected by this mess): https://www.youtube.com/result...
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How does this affect me? Why is this important to anyone except Maria Schneider? I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rather than insulting me. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone here is up to the challenge.
No, you are getting modded down to -1 because you ask the exact same question over and over again regardless of the topic, indicating that you are more interested in trolling than getting an actual answer to your question. The only reason I am responding and quoting you is so people can see and recognize your pathetic attempts at begging for attention.
Please people, stop responding to this guy.
The crux is that they only allow it's use to musicians who have agreed to license their content to them...
I don't know how you got the idea that there was some form of licensing going on. YouTube is not reproducing the works covered by ContentID, so they don't require a license for the works.
...as they don't publish any rules.
You mean these rules?
Google scans every video uploaded to YouTube against its ContentID system. That's a few hundred hours of video per minute. This is also not the only way to enforce ownership rights on YouTube. Google is under no legal obligation to provide their ContentID service. It is the copyright owner's job to enforce their rights. Google cannot do that for them without an explicit agreement, and they have no obligation to make any such agreement with anyone. It is not part of the "Safe Harbor" exclusions, and it would not remotely make sense if that were so, since the point of those exclusions was to prevent service providers from having to police their networks.
that "Safe Harbor" law requires technical measures to be made available to everybody.
No, it requires that the service provider "accommodates and does not interfere with standard technical measures". They are not obligated to provide any such methods.
No matter how much content owners would like for the onus for copyright policing to be on service providers, it is not the case and will never be the case.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
If Youtube was telling musicians that they better have their videos on Youtube or else Guido and the boys will come rearrange their vocal chords, that's racketeering.
I believe her argument is that Google will only "protect" her works if she gives them a license to use her works. That could be considered racketeering or extortion.
That said, Google asks for this because it is up to the copyright holder to defend their copyright. It's not Google's job. And, frankly, I'm sure artists would bitch if Google was using their works without their authorization.