That's fine - it's probably necessary for Google to not be constantly dragged into the courts by actual infringement slipping through with small alterations. The issue is that there is absolutely no recourse for an incorrect match. There's no option to say 'no, the algorithm is wrong' or 'the claimant has made a false claim' - the nearest option is to claim fair use, and that kicks it back to the claimant to be able to lie again if it was fraudulent, with no fear of consequences.
There needs to be some process where it can be appealed to a human. I think the best way I have seen suggested is to stake a small amount of money on it to have somebody review it - say, $15 from each party, and then you lose it if it's ruled against you, or get a refund if you win. That should easily pay for half an hour of somebody's time, so they could hire staff to do it.
If the claimant lost and still didn't agree, it could be escalated to DMCA, where there are potential penalties for fraudulent claims (even if it doesn't happen much).
Or you could even turn it into a system where you can post a (prepaid) bond for a video. Ex: $50 gets automatic human review. $500 gets a phone call from a rep. The catch is you lose the bond if you're legit infringing. Make it channel wide and I bet there's a class of YouTubers that would be willing to post multi thousand dollar bonds to assert their legitimacy.
The amount of false positives Youtube's copyright system has generated is crazy. It's clearly broken and wide-open for abuse by bad actors.
Even with the complications of copyright there are so many examples of people having entirely fair-use videos taken down. It goes well beyond just the difficulties of two works one copyrighted/one not matching.
As an aside, without copyright, we could have both Disney and Sony Spiderman movies. The consumer wins, and there's more than enough money to go around for competing studios.
There are some heuristics that could be used but so many of them break down in pretty common cases. Eg: If we say using a small portion of someone else's video in a larger video won't strike it leave out some types of videos like Destin from Smarter Everyday or the Slowmo Guys where the most interesting shot could be 3-5 seconds total or if we just measure by length of copyrighted material vs the whole video we'll wind up with bit 10 hour compilations of copyrighted stuff from different places maybe. It's a hard problem and unfortunately Google (pushed somewhat by the law and somewhat by their own internal decisions) take a flag and contest approach that favors the 'original' creator.
If anyone deserves to be made the poster child for the damage the DMCA and YouTube content ID is causing, it is Rousseau.
And how is it that an hour after this is reported, the problem still persists!? A million people are missing scheduled content. If this happened to a television station as often as it happens to YouTube there would be widespread, vocal, public complaints. Their competitors would also be having a field day.
Edit: I am being completely sarcastic w/ respect to the second sentence. I believe that there are people (those who are enriched by the current copyright system) who do believe that, though.
Youtube could easily copy that aspect of the DMCA and make it very expensive for mis-claimers, and easy to counteract automatic mis-classification. That they don't has nothing directly to do with laws, it's simply Youtube being a bad platform.
That simply is not true. DMCA misclaims are pretty much not punished at all in practice.
(However) I find it really difficult to believe the claimant in this case has no control over what YouTube does, as they have previously claimed. It may have been Content ID that got the identification wrong, but the claimant should not issue a block if it is a false claim.
Anyhow, Rousseau found a way around it by uploading a new version that received a copyright claim from a different company, instead of a block. He'll still have to go through the dispute process, at least we can watch the video because YouTube is not obliged to (and does not) take down the video.
No, it doesn't. There is only one part of a DMCA takedown notice that is made under penalty of perjury, and it's not the part that is usually at issue in a false notice.
From @hyperionrecords regarding a recent unrelated incident. Hyperion's content is the one making the claim against Rousseau's video.
They seem aware that ContentID often misidentifies claims, but there doesn't seem to be a public statement on what they proactively can or will do to help fix it.
Google is a private Corp and can do whatever the hell they want.
The real problem is that tech companies are monopolies and oligopolies and they hide behind "The people can just leave if they want".
The end result is that monopolies beget and work with other monopolies to strengthen each other. So we see YouTube working with RIAA and MPAA on non-DMCA underhandedness and what is clearly fair use (car driving by with 2s of a tune).
That’s the reason I think no alternative service has sprouted up.
Let's give the benefit of the doubt to Google and say they're constantly revising their algorithms; even then, due to the sheer amount of video uploaded to YouTube every day, there will be some of them that are misidentified, it's simply unavoidable IMHO.
I think the improvement can be made on the smoothness and speed of disputing/reviewing these claim, though. This process should be as short and painless as possible, for sure.
In OP's case, considering it only seems to be a couple of hours, I think everything is still OK-ish at this point.
I'm sure YouTube would love to be more lenient. If they could say "anything goes" they'd be thrilled, but we know they cannot because of the LAWS that are protecting IP owners.
IP should be protected, but to what extent?
And the bigger problem is the amount, and rate, of which content being produced threatens everyone's ability to do anything!
Try naming a business. NOTHING is available. If you want to run a competing business in a saturated market, the naming options are almost non-existent, especially if you want to name your company something that embodies what your business does.
Music is having this problem too. When you can take a few stanzas and say you OWN that music, could someone not just use a computer to generate every possible sequence of notes, slap a copyright on it, and own all future music?
Photography, video, games, puzzles, speeches, books..... it's all about to hit a brick wall if we can't be more lenient with IP.
In my opinion, complete works should be awarded a copyright, but sub-sections of works should not.
And software patents..... dear god.
Reply All also has an interesting story about how impossible is it to have ANYONE accountable AT ALL for DMCA takedown machinery that harasses people: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h5ro A person got strikes on his internet connection due to previous owner and there was noone in the insane chain of IP strike machinery that could be appealed to or own up to the mistake.
The current state of copyright is so broken that it's downright evil.
Now that they're fungible, its not making much sense any more. But millions of publishing contracts exist, that enforce the distinction. What do we propose to do about it? Without dismantling fundamental contract definitions.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. I played a bunch of less well defined tactical competitive games when I was younger and even though the rules were not perfect we were able to yield outcomes that sufficiently would be satisfactory to everybody and in many cases also representing of the skills of the competitors, i.e. good games.
The problem with "real world games", e.g. like this question of "who gains the most from a creation?" is not that the rules are not perfect, but that there are many players who don't have the slightest intention to play good games. There is good argument for why the creator should gain the most, or his family, or the company that produced the company in a market worthy format. There is even an argument for that the person should take it who through his cunning or strength is simply more able to take the gain. But there is a big difference between competitors trying to win while enjoying the game and those who want to win no matter the cost to everyone, including themselves.
On the gaming table you simply exclude these people, but in the real world you can't.
On Youtube they will probably not take down a video if nobody claims its protection rights. So someone came and claimed these videos.
And that's the problem in my eyes. If everybody is trying to create an enjoyable environment for everybody else nobody would attempt to "generate every possible sequence of notes [for personal gain]" because it wouldn't even be fun even for that player for long.
Example: I copy 99% of a popular song, but the first 3 seconds of my song = me playing a trumpet at full blast. Technically it's not a copy of the complete works, so I can argue in court that it's a sub-section of the original song. No judge/jury would agree with me, but my point is shown in this example. Even if you specify your definition sub-section to be < 50%, you would still be unhappy, because I copied half your song. What sub-section is OK?
The YouTube/AI issue is that loose/vague laws assume a certain degree of "common sense" among the population. When you try to give a loose task to a computer, it must make assumptions (either with AI, or pattern matching) and will invariably screw up. Computers are not human brains so they don't have "common sense"... yet.
New namespaces like .app should help with the problem, but at the end of the day, the culture itself has a limited namespace.
I've always gotten fairly lucky with .coms for my projects (managed to snag feedsub.com recently, had minfolio.com at one point, etc..), though the ones I've let slip ended up being squatted upon for thousands of dollars because of their potential (I think) branding value, which is a shame because it could've been put to better use since I couldn't follow through with a project.
But have you recently visited pets.com, mail.com, delivery.com, or whatever were the generic names commanding millions in 1999? Pets.com in particular just redirects to a different domain, more trademark-able.
To be fair, this is only really a problem for a new tech-ish company. Most other companies are geographically limited and can operate just fine sharing an operating name with a different company. There are lots of different companies operating as "John the Plumber" (seriously, Google it), "Rose & Crown Pub", or "Pho Noodle House".
1) Reform the copyright system (unlikely due to powerful lobbyists and lawyers)
2) Eventually lose control over the industry to other countries as consumers vote with their feet.
3) Bribe and capture legal system so everyone is forced to pay to the big copyright owners and you can't vote with your feet anymore.
do you have any idea how many songs that would be? your computer won't be finished in this lifetime
I downvoted you because this is not true. YouTube has built their own takedown system that goes above and beyond the legal requirements. They could be more lenient to users and follow the law but instead they made it easier for content to get taken down.
I feel like music education for children starting with pianos, guitars, and recorders is backwards. Get them playing music first. The interest in instruments will come.
But I'd always expected that false matches would be due to some kind of hash collision, not different recordings of the same piece.
Because YouTube doesn't know what the composition is, it only compares to other performances (which are under copyright).
And the fact that two different pianists could interpret and perform a work identically enough to generate the same signature Content ID uses is... astonishing to me, from my classical music background. If I'd had to guess, two musicians normally probably couldn't achieve that even if they tried.
So this seems to just be a crazy statistical fluke? Otherwise classical performances would be getting blocked left and right, given the hundreds/thousands of different performances of the same underlying music? Or is something more advanced that audio fingerprinting going on?
Between an incessant evasion arms race and a content generation industry all to happy to profit from false claims, I just think to myself, "this is why we can't have nice things."
Here is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxDCgFFBk20
Two of the movements have correct copyright claims for the performance, but another of the movements has a claim for a recording by a different conductor and orchestra. I see this all the time.
Like another person said here, we don't know how Content ID works or what exactly it's looking for, but it's clearly not an "exact match" of sound waves or something: it has to catch covers of compositions that are still under copyright, for example [1].
[1] https://diymusician.cdbaby.com/youtube/posting-cover-songs-o...
It's about as far from a professional recording as you can get on YouTube, except for some piano recital videos featuring ugly children inanimately reading their way through the sheet music.
On a slightly more serious note, this is what happens when you force a content host to bypass the normal flow of copyright claims.
YT doesn't, and can't, have enough resources to correct every such situation, so they err on the side of the copyright holders. When they're receiving a billion submissions a day, the innocent ones caught in the net are just a rounding error.
I'm wondering whether Bitchute might take up the slack here.
They surely can't be happy about censoring legitimate content on their platform by mistake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4MuhPqfIk4
He also says one of his videos was de-monetized because Dark Horse was bleeding through someone's headphones in one of his videos.
