YouTube Says Content Owners Made $1B Last Year -- So Music Labels Should Stop Complaining (recode.net)

Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode: Here's the latest salvo in the back and forth between YouTube and the music industry: A report from Google that says its video site's copyright software has allowed content owners to generate $1 billion in the last year or so. Or, in other words: Hey, music guys! Stop moaning about money -- we're making plenty of it for you. Google's formal message comes via "How Google Fights Piracy," a 62-page mega-pamphlet it is releasing today. Google adds that its Content ID tool, which lets copyright owners "claim" their videos that users upload to YouTube so that ad money can be made off it, has garnered $2 billion since 2007. This is Google's response to a growing concern from the music industry that YouTube doesn't pay well, its Content ID isn't a solution, and that the video platform is built on stolen material.

Comments

Google Has No Responsibility -- And Shouldn't!

[Tenebrousedge]

Google has absolutely no obligation to police any other party's copyrights, and the web would be a poorer place if they did.

A copyright is your own private monopoly on a piece of content. It is a granted right, and something of a legal fiction: we have collectively agreed to treat this non-scarce good as if it were scarce, to serve an economic purpose. We, collectively and severally, have no further obligations to you. Neither Google nor any other third party is responsible for your private property, absent a specific agreement to that effect. The DMCA makes no provisions that Google do anything more to protect your property than [a] not to block tools used to detect infringement and [b] to respond expeditiously to takedown requests. ContentID is a wholly voluntary program, whose primary purpose is to reduce the number of DMCA requests they have to process.

Forcing Google to police all content submitted would not only be contrary to centuries of jurisprudence, but it would probably kill off user-submitted content entirely. In point of fact, there's not been any clear ideas proposed on how exactly to do so, because the content industry knows very well that their position is legally indefensible. It's not like they have had any issues buying favorable legislation before, after all. This is a public campaign and not a K street one because they don't want a change in law, they just want more money. This is a shakedown, pure and simple.

Re:Google needs to be responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, Google outright removes just about anything any company complains about, whether the infringement is real or not, thereby depriving thousands if not hundreds of thousands independent artists ad revenue or just removing personal videos with bird noise in the background.

That's the real issue.

Re:Google needs to be responsible

[gmack]

Well you know what they say: "Anything is easy if you don't know what you are talking about"

Re:Google needs to be responsible

[AmiMoJo]

YouTube need to reign in their ContentID system because it's stealing money from the content creators, i.e. the people making the videos. The false positive rate is insane, and the moment it decides a video uses some bit of content all the revenue gets siphoned off and can never be recovered, even when the mistake is corrected.

Content producers are resorting to deliberately including some copyright material at the end, from a company that doesn't allow commercial use such as Nintendo. Just a few seconds of Mario, say. Then Nintendo flags the video as "no monetization", which blocks all the other arseholes trying to leech off if. Unfortunately it also means that the video owner can't get paid either, so it's a choice between being robbed or working for free.