Slashdot Mirror
YouTuber Says He Was Accused of Infringing His Own Song (cnet.com)
CNET reported this week that a musician, who plays guitar and has lots of viewers on YouTube, received an unusual email from the company alleging that he had copied a tune he wrote himself two years ago. From the report: But last month, Paul Davids says he got a rather unusual email from YouTube. The Content ID system had flagged a tune he wrote himself, two years ago, for infringing on someone's else's newer video. Someone who, it seems, stole his backing track to create a new track of his own. [...] "Someone took my track, made their own track, uploaded it to Spotify, YouTube, whatever, and I get a copyright infringement notice? Wait, what?" said Davids. The story has a happy ending -- Davids used YouTube's appeals system to quickly work things out, and let the other artist keep on using his tune. (Davids tracked him down on Facebook Messenger, and the guy apparently admitted he'd downloaded 'a couple of guitar licks' on YouTube.) But it's weird to think YouTube would flag an old video for infringing on a new one, no?
An "appeal"? Most of them didn't even get a trial.
The way youtube works is that you get a notification telling you something is wrong and you have 48 hours to "correct" the video (except you can't replace a video, you can only take one down and put a new one up, losing all the likes, etc).
After 48 hours your video is reviewed by humans and you're judged guilty or not.
The problem? At no point are you allowed to send them a message, provide evidence, or do anything else in your own defense.
No sig today...
Welcome to the new world where you are guilty until maybe, maybe, maybe proven innocent, and the judge is a secret algorithm.
In a world where copyright "infringement"" is worse than murder, we need a system that turns copyright claims into toilet paper.
If we're going to do this "three strikes" policy, it needs to go both ways. If you copyright strike someone three times, they are successfully appealed, then you need a court order before a takedown happens. Seems only fair.
I've been subject to a youtube copyright detection myself, and that's my experience too. The entire appeals process consisted of a drop-down box of possible reasons, none of which applied in my case (The music was public domain, the copyright having long expired). At no point was there even an option to contact a real person. The process was entirely automated.
Also most of the views of a video happen in the first 48 hours, so it screws the person out of nearly all of the ad revenue they might make.
The 48 hour review window is perfectly designed to screw content creators out of as much revenue as possible.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Yep. How hard would it be for them to let you type a message they can read during the review process?
The truth is they simply don't care. They're not short of content. Your work might have taken months to create, it mean the world to you, but it's nothing to them.
No sig today...
Technically, anecdotes are data; they are just not systematic data, and thus hard to use effectively for meaningful purposes.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
What the Fogerty case established is that your musical style is not ‘alienable’ by sale of one particular song in that style.
Apply punitive damages to both Google and the claimant for false notices.
Make no mistake, all those little "oops, the algorithm got it wrong" add up to a considerable amount of money for the record companies.
With Google trying to get premium content into YouTube, they are massively incentivised to game it exclusively towards the big premium content producers.