Why do we have push-button screw-people-over systems at all?
If the problem is that there are “too many” things for companies to review manually, too bad! If a company is perfectly fine raking in money from massive sales at a global scale, they should be willing to spend a proportional amount of money to do business at that scale. Let them hire their own people to review content in depth. Let them hire their own goons to send legal notices. (We certainly need more jobs for people.)
> Why do we have push-button screw-people-over systems at all?
Because that's the way our shitty representatives in congress wrote the legislation?
Google could face real legal consequences for not responding to a DMCA request. They can't face any legal consequences for complying with a false one (DMCA, or their internal contentId system).
And companies with the DMCA/ContentId bots sending in these bogus notices know that they too are safe. Because a victim would have to jump over the insanely high hurdle of proving the company knowingly misrepresented their ownership of the work. The company can easily claim that is was not intentional, but rather a mistake caused by a bug in their software.
If congress cared about this, they could fix it in a minute: false DMCA takedown request = fine, regardless of knowledge or intent.
Can we fight them back? Can't we collectively submit our own DMCA requests on all their videos? Break the system so they have come to up with a new one.
No. Companies have a legally defensible narrative:
1. People were using Rhinna's songs without permission in large numbers.
2. The company wrote a program to automatically send out a takedown notice to violators
3. Whoops, the program made a mistake. We didn't mean to.
If you, dalore, write a takedown bot, it's obvious from the start you are acting in bad faith because there is no epidemic of people pirating dalore songs.
I do think that companies here are "acting in good faith" in so much as I do not think they are misrepresenting their intentions. I don't think Sony has a conspiracy to increase it's revenue by monetizing Minecraft gamer channels.
However, the law is written in such a way that there is no penalty for companies that write low precision, high recall, dumpster-fire grade take-down bot software.
This is the whole problem. Sick and tired of people complaining about YouTube/Google. For them to "fix the problem" just for their own platform would cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year in man hours to process every single last takedown request manually with no automation. Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.
The laws are broken. It doesn't matter how "big" Google is. They cannot afford to protect the small guy. It's a choice between "hurt the small guy" vs. "go bankrupt". Fix the laws. Don't blame Google.
Manually processing DMCA takedown requests would be a huge hassle, but this is still on Google - even without the DMCA and just with regular IP law they would still have a system like this if for no other reason than to appease the companies they want on Play Movies / Youtube rentals. They have deals with the MPAA / mafia that certainly include draconian contentID as a prerequisite of you being able to "rent" movies on Youtube.
And Youtube has had for years Netflix-styled stars in its eyes. They want to be cozy with big media and trudging all over their individual creators is business as usual if it gets them favorable deals with the "big boys".
> Each takedown request would take many hours of intervention to resolve properly. Who is going to pay Google's legal department $100+/hour to defend their content, when it will take 50-500+ hours to defend a single request? Maybe the 0.01% of content creators, that's who. And those issuing the takedowns are not stupid enough to go after the 0.01%.
Why not Google themselves? If they're willing to take on the responsibility for false takedown claims by actively taking steps to remove a content creators': why can't Google themselves pay for enforcement of truth in the matter? They are creating EULAs and contracts around users basically having no choice in the matter, after all?
Google borders on insane with lacking any sort of manual support.
For example, when you are a paid G Suite customer - you'll need to dig hard to find their support number. Then you'll need to click several buttons making it clear you still need support. You also need to then generate a PIN used to access the phone support.
Similar story with Adwords - if you want support with that, you ain't gonna get it. It's a maze of FAQs and automated email responses with useless information.
If you manage to figure out the incantation to email an actual person, they're some kind of 1st-level support whose purpose in life is to piss you off so much with useless pre-canned responses that you finally give up.
Truely, incredible that they get away with it. Also incredible that they're OK with this given how much profit they make from ads.
By comparison, I've had excellent support from Bing Ads in the past - unfortunately they represent a much smaller number of impressions than Adwords.
Google is OK with it because they do it to small spenders. They have human account managers and a very visible phone number if you spend enough. Not saying I agree with it, but it makes sense.
I give then around $250/m. Obviously not a big spend, but I would expect to get support on the very rare occasions when I need it.
On the other side, Google semes very happy to spam me around once a once with offers of human help to restructure ads and so on. I took them up on this offer once, and it was a total waste of an hour - they were obviously going by script, and suggested changes that would increase my spend for no benefit. They also couldn't help at all with the one thing I actually wanted help with (increasing quality scores for obviously relevant content).
So they do have humans for the little people... but only to encourage you to spend more :/
Except legally, Youtube has no obligation to host these videos, and can take them down on a whim. So a lawsuit has no leg to stand on. While, on the other hand, they do have an obligation to take copyright infringement complaints very seriously - in fact, ContentID came from one of those "expensive lawsuits".
Facilitating copyfraud could invalidate their DMCA protections. Since they choose to provide monetary compensation based on accusations instead of evidence with a system they created, they would also be responsible for the system that they created facilitating said copyfraud that is knowingly taking money from legitimate copyright holders and giving it to false claimants. If any other publisher were to give money owed to a creator, say a book creator, this would be obvious fraud, as it is in this case. I think the case is stronger against YouTube than it will would initially appear.
> Facilitating copyfraud could invalidate their DMCA protections.
[citation needed]
> If any other publisher were to give money owed to a creator
YT doesn't actually owe money to anyone. Legally, they could host the videos, put ads and keep all the money. They distribute money because they want to incentivize content creators to upload stuff, but they do it at their discretion.
The creators uploaded their videos under the premise that they would receive a share of ad revenue. Given that creators retain copyright to the materials keeping all the money and continuing to distribute would seem problematic.
Damages for willful infringement are 150k per work. Pretending that they have zero obligations to creators is an .. interesting perspective that I don't think a lawyer would accept.
> legally, Youtube has no obligation to host these videos, and can take them down on a whim
Well, maybe law has to change.
For example, in my country if you offer a service to the public you cannot refuse a customer for no reason. It's intended as an anti-discrimination law, but also as a way to protect customers from abuse.
I think you don't understand what the anti-discrimination law means. That law lists reasons which you can't use to refuse service - and you're free to use any other reason to refuse service. This anti-discrimination law most probably does not force all businesses to provide services to everyone but only businesses with physical public presence.
Because it works the same in most countries, for a good reason. If they were from one of the very few (less than 10) countries where it's that wildly different, I assume they:
1) can't write on Hacker News (more likely)
2) would say it
3) would not use the country as an example of a functioning country
There are multiple legs for a suit to stand on, either against Google or the claimants. Bonus points if you registered the works with the corresponding IP department in your country (I think it's the Library of Congress in the US)
Talk to a lawyer
It seems people on the internet try to solve everything with buttons and emails and forget there's a world out there with laws and rights and everything else
Even then, the "big spender" level keeps shifting upwards. I remember back in the day it was $5k a month that got you special attention. Now it seems like only $10m+ clients get Google's attention.
In my experience it's not hard, maybe this is because i'm on a >50 user GSuite Business plan, but it goes like so:
1. admin console, click the question mark in the top right
2. "contact support" button is right on the front page
3. Choose live chat, phone, or email
4. enter your question
5. click "continue to phone" (can't blame them for trying to show relevant helpdesk articles first)
6. call the number and enter the pin
This is better than some customer support solutions, Many will bounce you back to the helpdesk homepage every chance they get, and the only way to actually get support is to email support@ or go to a special page (Tip: /hc/en-us/requests/new will work with most zendesk instances).
Because that's the compromise Google chose with the publishers to avoid getting sued to death over the massive and blatant copyright infringement of full TV shows and movies going on YouTube at the time
This is a less technical solution, and less profitable as consequence. It is also subtracting from software's image as magic, which again amongst other things makes it less profitable.
If the problem is that there are “too many” things for companies to review manually, too bad! If a company is perfectly fine raking in money from massive sales at a global scale, they should be willing to spend a proportional amount of money to do business at that scale. Let them hire their own people to review content in depth. Let them hire their own goons to send legal notices. (We certainly need more jobs for people.)