<i>>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even exist.</i><p>Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership.<p>The cause & effect <i>before</i> the buildup of awareness is the <i>incentives that prevent</i> content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place:<p>- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)<p>- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos <i>especially for unknown creators</i>.<p>The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay.<p>[1] <a href="https://vimeo.com/upgrade" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/upgrade</a>
YouTube seems to have three main priorities with their copyright system:<p>1) Eliminate legal liability and risk of lawsuits. <i>Technically</i> all they need to do is comply with DMCA requests, but YouTube would rather not be sued by a major record company or film studio, even if they could win the case.<p>2) Become friendly with major content creators (record and film labels, television studios). YouTube wants a good working relationship with these companies, to ensure that these companies post their content on YouTube. YouTube really wants the views they get by hosting SNL clips and Beyonce music videos.<p>3) Actually help the independent content creators deal with copyright claims. This is a very, very distant third.<p>Because of these priorities, YouTube has decided their best course of action is to offload all of the work on copyright claims onto the independent content creators, in order to keep the big media giants happy. After all, NBC doesn't need YouTube, but a solo channel with 50k subscribers absolutely does.
As a music producer myself who makes music for film, I haven't had too many problems with use of my music in the work I do despite being distributed on all the usual major platforms. This is usually because content ID on YouTube gives credits and royalties to the original music creators, and most of my (remixed) uploads are not monetized once I publish them on YT. My distributer handles royalties for my all original music and pays me based on streams. I also make more money off spotify than YouTube even though I've been on YouTube for a lot longer than on Spotify... Overall though, the best comes from licensing my music in films outside of Internet platforms.<p>I gave up caring long ago about gaining money from views, my most profitable upload was in 2015 when I filmed my parrot falling off my kitchen counter... That video likely succeeded because it wasn't something that would provide me residual success that overshadowed YouTube's normal (controlled) revenue pipelines.<p>I do however mysteriously get my own music blocked frequently on uploads to TikTok, and there is only complete and demoralizing frustration in trying to report the issue, because they don't care about small creators like me because we don't make them enough money probably.... TikTok and many social platforms keep support only as an afterthought, and finding the right place to get problems solved on most platforms is damn near impossible.<p>The social media creator economy is dismal and highly competitive for musicians and film makers right now. One of the biggest copyright issues is people who completely hijack and fake "original content" as their own in order to get views in order to profit or sell popular accounts to influencers later.<p>I'd recommend primarily pursuing contracts with Amazon Prime or Netflix for independent films, rather than trying to battle YouTube because there is simply too much content ID activity on YouTube that is out of control, whereas on the alternate streaming services, they're geared more towards movies than to managing creator communities.<p>If you are a film maker who needs music for a film project, contact music makers directly (producers that don't use samples in the work you need) in order to generate new, original, and exclusive music that they won't license or release anywhere else perhaps, make them sign a contract too... That might help in the future...?
"Guilty until proven innocent" is exactly how "DMCA safe harbor" is designed.<p>Basically, YouTube as a content host, would actively, promptly and sometimes aggressively, respond to the "potential" copyright owner's requests, in exchange of keeping themselves away from lawsuit.<p>This way, they don't need to pre-screen the content upon the uploading, because it's up to the copyright owner to find the illegal content and report (YouTube still do that in some degree with content-ID, though).<p>There will be false-positives, there will be false claims, but they choose to play it safe.<p>Just to make it clear: this whole system is fucked up, and how "aggressive" the host needs to be is a nuance that all parties involved will have dramatically different views. I just feel like lots of people don't understand the principle of DMCA safe harbor concept. It is the consequence of current copyright law; without it, user-generated content hosts can't survive the legal trouble (or they can, but would need significant more legal resources).
> The music was originally purchased under the title of Irish Reel from SmartSound. The identical track for which copyright is being claimed has been re-named Kilfenora Reels.<p>Another huge issue that plagues ContentID is sample-based music. There is a huge number of pseudo-artists who license widely used sample packs, mash together songs with practically zero creative effort and then submit those songs to companies that register their clients' music to ContentID databases. When someone else uploads a song with the same (legally licensed!) samples in their composition to Youtube, it gets monetized with royalties going to the wrong person.
The problem with all of this is that there is no standard method to describe, assert, and validate digital rights as a technical grammar that is 1) computer parsable and 2) human interpretable.<p>A long while ago, while back at Cisco, I suggested just such a grammar, called the Digital Rights Framework. It would be an inventory list embedded as data within a file, or an associated metadata file, that would clearly say "This is a unique name for a digital property with associated rights. This is my relationship towards the creator. These are the rights the creator gave me, or where I got a right from some authorized reseller of this digital property."<p>Basically, we needed an industry standard for this kind of thing in the 1990s. Sadly, me and 10,000 of my closest friends got laid off back then. So all the work we were doing was scrapped (aside from getting a few patents around it). But the need for this sort of rights management and negotiation system has never lessened.<p>Plus, it can't just be something that is done for one tech giant, and each tech giant does it differently. This needs to be a grammar as open as IETF standards, or W3C standards. Something that is extensible and customizable.<p>Because then you'd be able to shove a list of your digital rights statements right in the face of someone who said you were violating copyright and tell them to shove it.<p>Now, how you store and forward these rights is also up for debate. Do these need to be portable? Is this stored in a "wallet?" Or do these need to be accessible, and thus stored in a highly available or strongly consistent database?<p>This is basically the nightmare I and others saw back in the 1990s that we simply never, as a collective tech industry, ever really addressed.<p>It is literally a billion-dollar business for a trillion dollars of annual revenue if someone can figure out how to standardize this and make it simple and readily implementable.
I hate being "that guy", but isn't nearly every private corporation's policy "guilty until maybe proven innocent"? If Chuck E Cheese's get a report that I an punching children to death, they might preemptively disallow me in even if there's no evidence supporting that claim. If one of Best Buy's employees accused me of stealing Blu-Rays, they might not allow me into the store, even without any evidence. If I were a director and there was a rumor that my goal was to get Universal sued, they might not bring me on as a director.<p>I'm not saying that this is <i>should</i> be how it is, and you could make a strong argument that it shouldn't be this way, but I think it predates YouTube.
There should be a certificate system for copyrighted stuff. Buying rights to music? You'll get a certificate along with the piece from the licensor. Upload the license(s) along with the video and the Content ID system could automatically do the check.
I do wonder if there's room for going after the people submitting false claims based on their libelous written claim to Google/YouTube that you're using unlicensed music. There's clearly a money trail to follow for identification.
I am guessing that YouTube isn't the real problem here. If everyone self-hosted their videos, the first thing a media company would do is hire a bunch of programmers to crawl the internet, download the videos (probably in a buggy way costing you megabucks in transfer fees), scan the audio against my music library, and auto-send DMCA takedowns to the ISP that owns the IP address. If it was successful, I'd probably spin it off into its own company, and charge others to use it. Congratulations, you have Content ID! And Google already did this.<p>I think that moving off YouTube would be the same story as other filesharing systems. Napster worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then (and my memory is foggy here) Limewire/Kazaa/etc. worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then public Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. Then private Bittorrent trackers worked for a few years until someone accidentally invited the lawyers. That's exactly what would happen if everyone started hosting video files on their personal domains. It would work for a few years until the lawyers found out about it. (Meanwhile... the lawyers still haven't found out about Usenet, which indeed still exists and is a veritable haven of piracy.)<p>Anyway, the problem is copyright law. Society would probably not implode if you said "movies and music are no longer copyrightable", and these probably would all go away overnight. What you'd see instead would be really competitive streaming services, and probably a lot of product placement in music and movies. (Except, you already see these things. This comment was sponsored by SquarespaceVPN! Sign up now with this offer code that I'm going to say is limited to the first 100 users but is actually unlimited because who is going to deny a customer? Also, did you know that Hacker News <i>knows your username when you log in</i>? Install our snakeoil VPN widget thing for only $34.99 per month and ... some security shit will happen to prevent that! Hackers! News! Scary!)
In fact, Twitch have very sensible approach here: it will mute any infringing material in replay.<p>By taking this hard stance not providing the copyright owners with any way to monetize the material, Twitch discourages trolls from participating. Only a real content holder who is genuinely afraid of losses due to piracy, and is ready to spend resources on it despite no returns, will.
The solution is simple: YouTube will become a media licensing marketplace! That way it knows for certain if you've broken the rules.<p>Plus, it's a nice little side biz, to have <i>de facto</i> monopoly marketplace, enforced by the fear of BS infringement claims like these. It's a monopoly that's very hard to attack in court, because hey you're free to license content anyway you like! Litigation will take decades, and the customers can't afford litigation anyway, so let's do it!
As an indie film/animation/game/music studio the only reason we see for still using youtube is for their free 4k video hosting/streaming. If you look around at the alternatives(Vimeo etc) it gets really expensive to host 4k video given the massive bandwidth.<p>Youtube's overzealous content ID system should push studios etc to create their own original music. We have several original feature films on youtube with all original soundtracks and have no issues with flagging etc as none of our music has been sold to music licensors etc.<p>Youtube's content ID system even goes after sound effect libraries- we had an issue in 2012 where our original animated feature film was flagged because of a wind sound effect that was 5 seconds long. It was an original sound that somehow matched a licensed wind sound. We disputed the wind ^_^ and the flagging/flogging was dropped.<p>It might a drag to hear for studios not wanting to do the extra work but I think creating/hiring people to create all original material is the way to avoid such things on youtube. We think its better for culture as well.
Ah... bullshit. Copyright is civil law. There's no assumption of innocence in civil law. Fundamentally, because there's also no guilt, in the moral sense, only responsibilities and obligations. Practically, it's often a matter of chance which party is slightly faster and therefore plaintiff. If the other filing gets there first, you're the defendant. That's also why the standard of truth is just 50%+x, i. e. "preponderance of the evidence": it's the only standard that works in a symmetric situation.<p>And, at the moment that YouTube takes down your video, the preponderance of the evidence is (sometimes just momentarily) against you, both statistically (most copyright complaints they process are legit) as well as philosophically, since there is <i>only</i> someone's affidavit that they own the copyright in the content, and no reply to it (yet).<p>So, at that moment, YouTube doesn't start investigating because that would be a gigantic waste of resources, considering the uploader is in a far better position to disprove the claim. Forwarding the claim isn't YouTube siding with the accusation. It's them following the process the law set out (and, maybe, being slightly cheap). False takedown request are annoying, yes. They are also a few orders of magnitude rarer than copyright infringements, which I imagine would also tend to annoy some creators. And, crucially, they are the fault of the complainant. Doing anything creates the risk of idiots suing you without cause, and there's just no argument why YouTube should (or could) absorb that risk.
The problem here is copyright duration being insanely long. Works from 1926 should not still be under copyright but they are. YouTube is just doing the best they can do within the confines of our ridiculous system.<p>If copyright were only 20 years with an application to extend in special circumstances (equivalent to patent law), we wouldn't waste so much of our economic power devising and enforcing systems to uphold our archaic copyright laws.
The automated beast that is Google strikes again.<p>Why do business at all with robots? If you can't get someone on the phone, don't do business with that company.
Does YouTube have any system to manage positive rights clearing? YouTube has Hollywood movies available to buy or rent with copyrighted music, those movies have people on the production staff with the role to clear the rights to all the music. Surely those movies don't get takedown notices?
bring back pre-2014/2013 YouTube, back when people could unload content without as much fear of arbitrary take-downs or content violations warnings.
What would be the safest place to publish own music, or videos with own music, licensed as CC, that is, where copying is allowed from start, so that those trolls cannot claim any copyright violations?
I may be interested in making some tech videos in the future, and I'd use exclusively my music, but have no intention of seeing it taken down or claimed as someone else's work.
No problems if using a non mainstream platform would mean 100 viewers instead of 100.000; I don't plan to make a living with that and don't want to feed the Google trolls and their lawyers.
Jim Sterling has an… interesting… solution to this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU#t=24s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYinPJTxBNU#t=24s</a>
Never do a filter sweep on a synthesizer. For some reason, Youtube will slap you with a takedown as it thinks you're steeling off The Chemical Brothers.
The norm on these platforms seems to be this ancienty way of doing justice. Lest they take a risk to protect those who actually form the actual content, in fear of prosecution.<p>My parents are operating an airbnb in their downstairs suite. A few months ago one of their visitors started complaining that they found hair under a heater behind a door, and dust behind the nightstand, and that this was making them uncomfortable and they would leave. To give some context, tens of rentals rentals in, they had an average cleanliness rating of 5/5. The guests stayed two nights, but then left and asked to be fully refunded (turns out there was a storm alert on Sunday that probably was the real cause for the premature departure). My parents refunded the cleaning as a gesture but declined to refund the rest given that it was obviously more of a personal choice than really an issue with cleanliness. The day after, airbnb locked their account and cancelled their reservations for the coming 2 months. An "anonymous guest" had made a safety complaint, that my parents had entered the suite or something like that. Airbnb never disclosed the details, but all the questions were around entering while the guests were in, which my parents were outraged they could be accused of. They had to plead their case that this wasn't right. Fortunately for them airbnb reinstated their account in a few days, but with those 2 months of bookings gone ; plus apparently a strike on their file and some employee telling them "never to do that again", despite not even knowing what the charge was. I scouted the net to advise them, and you can find countless stories of people getting their accounts closed by random guests making false accusations in an attempt to to get reimbursed for random stuff. My only advice was to diversify the platforms, but when the market is so dominated by a single actor, they can apply the ancient type of justice where you aren't allowed to face your accusers, or even know what you are accused of. The only thing you can do is pray that whomever "judges" your case didn't get blueballed the night before.<p>I hope there will be a correction one day, but given the trend I am not hopeful. The future looks like for all sorts of things in our lives will be ruled and arbitrated by mini dictators ruling over their unregulated fiefdoms.<p>I'm even posting this from a disposable account and altered the story in fear that somehow they might get identified and be targets of retribution.
Or what Google could do is auto-identify music in videos (they do this), and then set up automated monthly payments to the appropriate ASCAP or similar licensing body for statutory payments.<p>We already have statutory public performance prices. And we started to adhere to them, the creators could get their money, and the creators could further create content. (You know, like a content Ponzi scheme.)
It’s really scary what we’ve built on the Internet, and it’s even scarier that these corporations are able to go unchecked. Parts of life are already becoming miserable (e.g., automated “customer support”), and it’s just going to keep getting worse, all at the alter of growth and capitalism.<p>I absolutely hate the argument used that scale prevents them to do anything about it, as if crimes en masse are suddenly okay. It’s <i>their</i> problem, not ours, that they’ve built systems that are, for all intents and purposes, uncontrollable. These corporations act like they are the victim in these cases of abuse of their platform.
In this version of the tragedy of the commons, the youtubers themselves are the resource headed for exhaustion.<p>> the revised video had 5 new copyright claims even before upload processing was complete!<p>Maybe there's an opportunity for an integrated offering of licensed music and lawyers to defend the licensee against bogus takedowns?
Not surprised that few commenters here have read the linked article, or the comments at the end of it.<p>This is essentially an attack on Smartsound, Shockwave-Sound, etc. It sounds like those companies want to after whoever is claiming copyright over their music.
The smartest technologists and developers of our generation go to work for companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and others, and what we see are these results. Why can't we do better for everyone?
Life is long, even when these fraudulent copyright owners are 90 years old, their grandchildren will still be footing these extremelly large, non-bancruptable fradulent copyright claim fines.