> & thx for your patience as we sorted it out
But they haven't really sorted it out, have they? False copyright strike claims have been plaguing creators for years. This is just another case of someone needing social media and a huge reach or an inside connection to Google employees to get human eyes on a situation and "resolve" it, with no recourse on the lost revenue from the time it was down and no real guarantee it won't happen again.
Google is not paying my Admob money even after 5 months has passed (no violation, self-close of account)
Through the Kafkaesque maze of non-existent Adsense support, my case (they say) finally got escalated to a payment person at Google. Yet, I didn't hear update for the past month.
You can't ask anything about your case and you can't get any time projection on when you'll hear anything back.
If you don't have big traffic or huge social reach, you are expendable and can get stuck in a never-ending hell.
This was (and still is) the IBM model for B2B software; and it was also the industry-standard model for game developers (interacting with the platform owner through a "publisher" — essentially taking the role here of an integrator.) It's probably still the industry-standard model for musicians to engage with big record labels.
I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for this model. Their focus on "scaling services as much as possible using as few human support staff as possible" means this model is essentially perfect for them. But they ignore it. Maybe because they think it'd make them look like a dinosaur?
(I know they do do it in some places — we use GCP, and apparently, to be able to switch from card-based billing to invoice-based billing, we're required to also switch from direct GCP support, to a support-contract with a GCP reseller. So we'd be paying the reseller — the invoices would be riding as accounts-receivable on the reseller's books, rather than on Google's!)
Your point is spot on, if you don’t have a huge social media following you might as well be invisible. This has to change, hopefully via law. Because it isn’t just a google problem.
We need to reform the legal responsibilities of sites like Youtube to enable them to take a more considered approach.
This isn't really true. The main grievance people have with Google is that they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's impossible to escalate to a real person. They enable this type of abuse because they make it easy for people to abuse the DMCA system with impunity.
Even massive channels and companies have a hard time fighting back. A recent example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/bungie-slams-you...
If every false DMCA notice resulted in a fine for copyright holder, or even better, filing X false DMCA notices resulted in a copyright holder's ban from filing more DMCA notices, then I think the problem would resolve itself in short order.
Even given those things, Google is complicit in the legal landscape being what it is today. Google has regularly defended the DMCA, and claimed it's working well. They're the largest lobbying organization in the tech world. They've even spent time and money defending other providers (e.g. Hotfile) in court for not implementing filtering, arguing that it's not necessary to receive DMCA's safe harbor provisions, but have implemented content identification and filtering in-spite of that.
This wasn't just a DMCA take-down of specific material (which for it's faults, does have an appeal process and some legal remedies.) This was a complete account ban imposed by Google, where the only functioning appeal process is going viral on twitter. While we do need to change the DMCA to hold issuers of fraudulent or abusive take requests more responsible, in this instance we also need to hold Google responsible for choosing to create an automated copyright strike/ban system that is clearly ripe for abuse and that does not have a functional appeal processes for the average user.
Sure they can. They choose not to, for obvious reasons. If they were able to confirm, after the outcry, that the takedown claim was "abusive" -- by whatever criteria -- then there's no reason they couldn't have done that before they outcry. But the cost of doing that would start to chip away at, well, you know what.
https://mobile.twitter.com/danbri/status/1545760855052193792
The reason - they quoted a small Richard Feynman clip from an archive BBC show. After fixing it took 12 more hours to unblock the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axuGfh4UR9Q
Way to go BBC, protect your rights, make sure nobody cites any of your precious videos. /s
I wish I could be more sympathetic, there are people sharing information and entertainment on youtube that is priceless. But they're working for a faulty employer with a poor history of worker rights. Worker beware.
Most of my YouTube watching is things like Anton Petrov's 15+ minute science videos, PBS Space Time, hour+ live streams, DefCon/Blackhat/Other Conference talks, and a hundred other things that I don't think are available or desired on TikToks platform (and maybe not even supported? I'm not sure what the max video length is on TikTok).
I don’t blame people for being skeptical. It’s easy to forget that big companies die due to being transcended, not replaced. The YouTube killer won’t look anything like YouTube, and tiktok fits that bill nicely.
Case in point: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR2KUDn8/?k=1
Google is realizing how bad it is that they can’t index TikToks, the same way they realized how bad it is they couldn’t index tweets in 2015 or so.
I honestly don't think something like YouTube ever could be profitable without destroying the product that exists today. I don't believe the primary purpose of TikTok is to make money.
You could already upload short videos, why would a shit UI for short videos be a plus?
In this case, it sounds like it was a malicious action by an actual human being, but I've seen a lot of great content creators say things like, "I'm only going to play you 3 seconds of this song to avoid having my channel removed." Seems like there's gotta be a better way.
Video "channels" should be like podcasts: hosting and discovery largely separate. Subscription, client-side.
YouTube shouldn't exist.
Bitcoin is an exception to this and it was most likely made by one guy as a FOSS payment solution which would compete against Visa/Mastercard, commercial banks and central banks all at the same time. On the other hand Satoshi could've patented his ideas and go straight to the VISA and try to sell them the Blockchain story but he decided to make it FOSS and truly decentralized.
By your brilliant logic, Hacker News shouldn't exist.
Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
Content creators are the only ones with the power to build up a competing platform such that youtube has to stop hurting the creators or risk losing their monopoly status as the de-factor video hosting platform.
Imagine if this content creator chose an alternative and linked to it in this tweet and everyone else started doing similarly. At the rate youtube is harming content creators, doesn't seem like it'd take long before users instinctively checked the competitions site anytime content gets taken down which might eventually turn into overthrowing their monopoly if they don't fix their issues.
Coupling discovery and hosting means you're either killing your business by trying to do this, or finding temporary refuge with another soon-to-be monopolist that'll start abusing you in the same ways before long.
I've been watching quite a few videos from a fairly popular Youtube channel, tldrnews. At the beginning of a lot of their videos, they've been advertising an alternate video platform, Nebula, with exclusive and more in-depth videos. Thing is, even though I might want to watch those videos, I've never been tempted to even click on the link.
It's not that Nebula costs money. Even if it were free, I don't really want to be watching videos on other services. I hate the way YouTube is run. I hate ContentID, I hate the copyright strike system, I hate the recommendation algorithm, I hate how difficult it is to get a real human to deal with the issues on the site. But everything's there, and that's what I want most of all.
It's a strange position to take, especially when I wish everyone would go back to having their own sites rather than just post on social media, but when it comes to video content, I want it to be like Star Trek. I want to be able to search in one place and be able to find exactly what I'm looking for.
I know it's greedy and irrational, but I want everything centralized into one service so I don't have to think about where to go to watch a thing. I want a monopoly, but without the problems that come with a monopoly, and I suspect a large enough percentage of users feel the same way that other platforms just can't get off the ground.
Podcast model. Client handles discovery and "subscriptions" and all that. Hosting is separate. YouTube's immense control comes from controlling all of that, but there's no reason you have to have a single provider to get the everything's-in-one-place effect—you can instead empower client programs. That kills the "ugh, but I don't want to go to another site..." effect because it's simply not an issue. You click "subscribe" and it's in the same "app" as everything else, regardless of where the videos are hosted.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/digital-trails-how-bungie-identifie...
The Bungie case was regarding actual DMCA takedown requests.
So was the Lofi girl stream given "takedown notice" and how it contributes to the 3-strike system: https://twitter.com/lofigirl/status/1546058721792507906?s=20
It never goes beyond that ever. What about restitution to the people who were wrongly taken down? Why is false DMCA takedowns so prevalent if it's illegal per DMCA? Turns out NO ONE has ever been convicted of a false DMCA claim, and that's by design. In fact, the phenomenon has its own name: Copyfraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud
That's what happens when we let businessmen write our laws. A fix to how Google handles DMCA isn't enough, DMCA is fundamentally user hostile. We need to fix this at the political level.
That aside, do we know the claim was really bogus? The article doesn't seem to mention that. It does seem like a rather easy grift to just nab a bunch of MP3 files plus some artwork from DeviantArt, throw them into IceCast or whatever, and go live on YouTube. I've listened to a few similar streams (not this one in particular since the "lo-fi hip-hop" genre isn't my thing) and just kinda always assumed the whole YT meta was basically a bunch of pirate radio stations.
(1 day ago; 94 points, 16 comments)
It was more like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
Centralised services are fine to use as content delivery networks but they are not reliable as single sources for your material. Self-hosting - i.e. where you own the domain through which the material is distributed, you can choose to leave the actual hosting to a hosting provider since you always have the option of redirecting the domain to another address should the hosting provider fold in some way - gives control over a far larger part of the distribution chain, if the copyright police wants to block you they'll have to move down in the protocol stack to take down your internet access. We're not there yet and should it ever come that far there are ways around that as well (IPFS, I2P etc.).
"Oh, you don't like it? Are you going to leave? No? K then."
YouTube makes its money because there are eyeballs on screens. As long as somebody is making content for those eyeballs, and the eyeballs remain on YouTube, there is literally z e r o incentive for them to change.
