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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 "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all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.
Well you see... I have no idea who Maria Schneider is other than she doesn't know what racketeering means.
Did Youtube demand money from her in exchange for fire, theft, and kneecap insurance?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Copyright law is broken and doesn't work correctly anymore.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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 "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all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."
Pardon me for not shedding any tears, as the RIAA/MPAA members have upped the ante by thoroughly twisting, contorting, and abusing the original meaning of the Copyright Clause of the Constitution, turning into *real* theft from society.
What about these organizations abusing the DMCA by issuing false requests for legitimate content?
I have to agree this is the wrong term. Racketeering is mainly protection money and such. 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. The RIAA's chasing after stores for having the radio on, waiters for singing Happy Birthday, etc, is a much better example of racketeering.
Translation:
RIAA extorts money from google for their songs appearing on YouTube. Nevermind that the majority of these uses fall under 'fair use'.
Then some nobody "artist" comes along and tells google they are stealing from her. Right. I was totally going to buy her album, but I listened to it on YouTube instead.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Maria Schneider's complaint boils down to this: Google/YouTube makes a lot of money. If they didn't exist, all that money would go to musicians, therefore, Google/YouTube should be required to hand over all their money to the musicians.
Ignoring the basic fact that she is wrong and her complaint is absurd, she has somehow managed to not notice that nobody has screwed and cheated musicians more than the record companies. The actual losses suffered by musicians as a result of YouTube or any other "piracy" are microscopic compared to the real money that they have lost at the hands of the record companies.
Please keep in mind that we aren't yet aware what kind of agenda the new Slashdot owners will be pushing here, and this article may be an early astroturf attempt at generating bad press for technologies that even major record labels are using to propagate their media.
Youtube is a threat to their current business model of threatening to sue downloaders for random sums that sometimes number in the millions. Which ironically is more racketeering than Google's monitization of channel revenue.
At this point I see a decline in MPAA / RIAA revenue as more people shift to Youtube as more labels create legitimate channels with clearer royalty tracking.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Google hopes the big-name content holders will accept ad revenue instead of out-right take-downs, which tick off small Youtube publishers and viewers, and risk Google being sued for censorship. However, that ad revenue is tiny compared to the old-fashioned way of selling entertainment.
But that's life in the Internet age: viewers have too many options to be forced to stare at boring, cheesy, blowhard ads for too long. Choice has watered-down profits, and many attention seekers publish entertainment for almost free. The big-name providers have to now compete with cute kittens. Ads have got to be short or unintrusive. The captive audience of the 1970's TV living room is gone, as is paying $5 for a song, but the old-school entertainment companies refuse to accept change, and try to force the old ways back.
Table-ized A.I.
Maria who? what indignities has she suffered again? -free press??
Sick and tired of artists crying because their work is "stolen" or someone is supposedly making millions on their work while they starve for food.
The labels are milking you and tossing you out for the next "hip" thing. Worse, too many so called "artists" do not actually do any fucking work.
They produce their one hit and expect an infinite revenue stream. Even football (not American) players do not feel so entitled.
Once upon a time artists were paid for work. A performance, a sculpture, an act etc. Bands would go on tour and perform! (read work)
So now just because we have ears we have to pay you every time we hear your song? because we have eyes we have to pay you every time we see a movie?
I already paid for the movie/song/series. How? by paying for TV/radio license, for the netflix subscription, for spotify, for fucking cable; I paid for your shit several times over but they still want more. They say I was only renting it per use as per the EULA. Who the fuck reads the EULA that's a fucking joke. It can say I'm renting my dog to Satan no one will notice and because people are known not to read it it says things they;d not agree to.
No additional effort was made for that additional use of mine, what was lost? nothing. It's not like money, It's not like copying a dollar bill. It does not inflate the economy and it certainly does not hurt sales by "making it available". Star Wars is highly pirated movie/content and does that decades long, multi-billion dollar franchise look like it's not profiting?
So now we have a platform (many actually) that spreads some random "artist's" crap for free, leading to additional audiences and additional revenue opportunities for that artist and still some ignorant people keep bitching.
How about you lazy fuckers work? You know, people work. Seen any surgeon that performed one operation then retire expecting money forever? that surgeon studied for many years, trained many years and has to perform yes, *groan* the same operations many times. Crazy huh?
I'll pay to see an act in theatre per performance because you know, someone has to work to perform for my pleasure. I'll pay a band every time I see them because they do something for it.
The entire model of charging "per use" for people to use their sense although legal is actually based in BS. One day we will be able to record thoughts, images we imagine and see and thus transfer them. What will happen then? will it be illegal to think copyrighted content? -this point may seem arbitrary but this is what copyright is, thought.
I recorded a thought and now I want every to pay $9.99 for it. That's cool but unlike hardware thoughts do not seem to depreciate. I could sell a million copies and the price would still be $9.99 -the effort I put it was nothing compared to the effort so many people put in to earn $9.99.
You see if I could automate my job function and sell it no one would need me to do any work any more. In order to earn money I would have to do a new function. Don't musicians do anything beyond record their work and sell that? after all, I already have a mastered copy of their best, auto-tuned performance. Why would I need them again? -unless of course, shockingly they did something new like performs live the way music actually sounds by doing actual work.
I never promised to buy your shit to begin with, the fact I was willing to listen to it on youtube should be flattery enough that I'm a potential customer.
The value of your copy of said work is what people are willing to pay for it. We are no longer willing to pay, fuck you, get a real job and fuck off.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
It seems that a lot of people in the comments don't know who she is, but she is one of my favorite musicians, and certainly one of the greatest living jazz composers.
The irony here is that Jazz isn't supposed to be composed........................
So, what you're saying is that she's upset that YouTube doesn't give away their stuff (in this case, ContentID) for free? And, at the same time, she doesn't want to give her stuff away for free?
Makes sense now....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
tl;dr - It's the DMCA, not Youtube at fault for this.
So, let's keep the Safe Harbor and add severe penalties for baseless claims. Perhaps something combining monetary damages and a time-out period during which that entity cannot make further claims.
A statement made with no understanding of section 230 of the DMCA at all. The section that clearly states that platform providers are NOT liable for copyright infringement on their site so long as they were not found to be willingly complicit in its uploading. The case against Mega Upload hinges on secondary liability, a concept that doesn't exist in the current copyright statutes, and the fact that Mega employees were uploading copyrighted content to the site.
So long as no one can prove that actual Google employees were explicitly aiding the infringement of copyright on their service then YouTube is protected by section 230.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
The lack of fines/punishment for huge numbers of false or fraudulent takedown notices. The law incentivizes false claims and claims against fair use. There's no harm in trying to flag whatever you want.