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 "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all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.

Comments

Re:Why does this matter?

[FilmedInNoir]

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?

It's broken

[OrangeTide]

Copyright law is broken and doesn't work correctly anymore.

Racketeering? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 "YouTube has thoroughly twisted, contorted, and abused the original meaning of the outdated DMCA 'safe harbor' to create a massive income redistribution scheme, where income is continually transferred from the pockets of musicians and creators of all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.

Translation:

[rahvin112]

Translation:

Google makes lots of money. I think I'm entitled to some of it. The government should make them give me some money.

Re:YouTube as a Service

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why does this matter?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Youtube has a system in place, Content ID, to stop piracy and it works quite well. The crux is that they only allow it's use to musicians who have agreed to license their content to them or at least that's assumed, as they don't publish any rules. Everybody else gets left in the dust and isn't allowed into Content ID and thus their content can be shared on Youtube without permission.

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....

Re:Safe Harbor and ContentID

[omnichad]

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.

Re:She should ask Google to forget her

[markzip]

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.

Re: Safe Harbor and ContentID

[Forgefather]

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.