[HN Gopher] Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream
___________________________________________________________________
Lofi Girl: YouTube sorry for taking down music stream
Author : ddpunicorn
Score : 162 points
Date : 2022-07-12 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| batmaniam wrote:
| The DMCA has provisions that is supposed to protect against
| copyright false claims. But every article I read about false
| claims always ends with some kind of definition of copyright.
| Like in this article, 'What is Copyright?'.
|
| 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.
| econnors wrote:
| Bungie is seeking damages against false claims:
| https://www.engadget.com/bungie-sues-destiny-2-youtuber-lord...
| nerdponx wrote:
| Great, Bungie is a big corporation that can pay lawyers for
| things like this. Individual creators are not in an
| equivalent position and cannot reasonably seek damages for
| false claims, unless additional legal framework is added to
| support them.
| mrkramer wrote:
| After all this publicity Lofi Girl will become even more popular.
| nafizh wrote:
| There should be remuneration for people whose material is
| wrongfully taken down, even if temporarily. I bet that will force
| these platforms to deliberate more before taking any action.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Lofi girl legit had a massive community. My teenage cousins use
| the live chat as a hangout zone.
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Isn't the saying "innocent until proven guilty"?
| ProAm wrote:
| This isnt a court of law, it's a third party platform and you
| are subject to their whims and TOS.
| deelowe wrote:
| yep. A big WTF from me when this happened. lofi streams have
| replaced SomaFM for me for several years now.
| resfirestar wrote:
| The abuse of this system is only going to get worse as high
| profile cases like Bungie's [1] highlight how exploitable it is,
| even against big companies. It seems to me, as an outsider to
| YouTube's systems, that the system of "copyright strikes" (which
| is not prescribed by the DMCA, it's a more recent demand
| concocted by MPAA and RIAA lawyers) has caused a lot of harm to
| good faith creators while determined infringers simply make a new
| account when one gets banned. Is there any real helpful effect of
| using strikes that copyright owners couldn't get from just taking
| action on individual videos?
|
| [1] https://torrentfreak.com/digital-trails-how-bungie-
| identifie...
| judge2020 wrote:
| > the system of "copyright strikes" (which is not prescribed by
| the DMCA, it's a more recent demand concocted by MPAA and RIAA
| lawyers)
|
| 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
| lom888 wrote:
| The company I work for builds websites for small and medium
| sized businesses throughout the US. For a period of about two
| years we would host a copy of a video that we made for the
| customer on YouTube and use it on customer websites. There came
| a point where a handful dissatisfied customers claimed
| infringement for some of these videos and our YouTube channel
| (thousands of videos) was terminated without appeal, even
| though the customer had always provided authorization and the
| contents for these videos. Fortunately we'd decided to self-
| host our videos before the channel was terminated but there
| were cases where we lost content that we'd created.
| mirashii wrote:
| From a tweet:
| https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1546419223466999809#m
|
| > & 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.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| Yes, they absolutely have not sorted it out. However, currently
| when you're working for a social media company this sort of
| behavior while not normal, has to be accounted for.
|
| 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.
| aetherson wrote:
| They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not
| really something that Google can sort out. They have a legal
| responsibility to respond to these copyright claims, with major
| penalties if they don't -- this is from DMCA and its
| successors, from an era of... I don't want to say "copyright
| maximalism," but something closer to copyright maximalism than
| the balance is today.
|
| We need to reform the legal responsibilities of sites like
| Youtube to enable them to take a more considered approach.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They can sort it out readily simply by implementing the part
| of the DMCA they don't support yet. If the falsely accused
| were allowed to submit a counternotice with instant
| restoration none of this trolling behavior would be happening
| kevinh wrote:
| The DMCA doesn't support instant restoration for a counter-
| notice. They have to wait for a ~2 week period for the
| copyright owner to have time to sue alleged infringer.
| akhmatova wrote:
| _They haven 't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not
| really something that Google can sort out. _
|
| 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.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| We just need to fine copyright holders who abuse the system.
| Currently they are free to file as many false DMCA notices as
| they want, with zero drawbacks or consequences or costs for
| the filer and the burgen of proof on their victims.
|
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I agree with this.
|
| I have heard that some folks use DMCA as, basically, a
| "protection racket." Not sure why they would do that,
| because there are probably easier (and less risky) ways.
|
| But, as long as there's no penalty for filing a false DMCA
| claim, there's nothing stopping the "blunderbuss approach,"
| which is hugely popular, with lawyers.
| ticviking wrote:
| It seems to me like a reasonable starting point for a
| solution is to allow hosts to bill claimants for
| "reasonable costs" (I assume that's legally well defined)
| for false claims.
|
| That provides an incentive for companies to respond to
| the screaming demand from their users to have better
| review.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Yes they could, hire a team to review every individual claim
| to a high standard. They just don't want to pay the costs of
| running a service correctly.
| nhinck2 wrote:
| That's not how the dmca works.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > They have a legal responsibility to respond to these
| copyright claims, with major penalties if they don't -- this
| is from DMCA and its successors
|
| 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.
| richbell wrote:
| > They haven't sorted it out, but it's also fundamentally not
| really something that Google can sort out.
|
| 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...
| derefr wrote:
| > they've automated _everything_ to the point where it's
| impossible to escalate to a real person
|
| Well, yes, because any place where you _can_ escalate to a
| human, would be flooded with people trying to step around
| the whole automated edifice without ever first trying to
| engage with it. People would post links to it on various
| forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get a Google CSR
| on the line" (even though that person is only empowered to
| do a very specific thing, and probably doesn't have
| internal contacts for their equivalents in any other
| department), and then those CSRs would be demoted-in-
| practice to level-1 triage, even though level-1 triage is
| supposed to be the machine's job.
|
| As it so happens, Google _do_ offer plenty of ways to
| engage with them -- they just can 't "say any of them out
| loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as
| above.
|
| I'll give you a hint for three such side-channels, though:
|
| - There are _public_ product discussion and bugs mailing
| lists (Google Groups) for many Google services. The
| engineers working on these products monitor these lists.
|
| - Some things you'd _think_ Google develops in private, are
| actually developed in public. Examples:
| https://github.com/googleapis;
| https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform. You can file issues
| on these repos!
|
| - When Google engineers and, especially, Product Managers,
| put their public @google.com email addresses on conference
| presentations, they do that for a reason. They _want_ you
| to reach out with questions /concerns about the thing
| they've built!
| colpabar wrote:
| >As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to
| engage with them -- they just can't "say any of them out
| loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as
| above.
|
| This seems pretty ridiculous though, right? Imagine a
| system like this for any other service. A self checkout
| with no help button, but they'll totally help you if you
| do the konami code on the screen and say the pledge of
| allegiance.
|
| I don't get why we act like google being too big to
| support all its clients is _our_ fault. They are choosing
| to be this big, and they can choose to have better
| customer support. It would just cost them a lot of money.
| derefr wrote:
| > Imagine a system like this for any other service. A
| self checkout with no help button, but they'll totally
| help you if you do the konami code on the screen and say
| the pledge of allegiance.
|
| You're being flip, but there are actually plenty of
| things like this.
|
| For example -- you know those arcades full of UFO-catcher
| machines, where the games are rigged so that it only
| allows you to grab the thing after N tries?
|
| You _can_ pump 10 dollars into the machine, and maybe
| still not get it... _or_ you can just politely ask the
| attendant to get you the thing out of the machine after
| trying and failing once. And they will, because -- unlike
| a carnival side-show operator who owns their
| booth+merchandise -- for a gacha-store employee, it 's no
| skin off _their_ back if everyone gets a bear.
| Unacknowledged public side channels!
|
| For another -- it's a common belief that Adobe is
| perfectly fine with individuals pirating Photoshop, and
| really only go after _companies_ who pirate. They think
| of individuals using the pirated version of their
| software, as future professional users in training; where
| the company those professional users work at, will
| inevitably buy them a Photoshop license. Adobe won 't
| give you a Photoshop educational license (or at least,
| they didn't used to have such a thing) -- but by pirating
| it, you're essentially taking advantage of an
| unacknowledged public side-channel left there by Adobe.
|
| But really, in the Google case, it's not just about it
| being an unpublished side-channel; it's also specifically
| about engineers being okay with being reached out to by
| _other engineers_ , who are signalling by their method of
| outreach that they understand engineering culture, and
| so, implicitly, that they _understand the engineering
| problem implied by their request; have already tried to
| solve the problem themselves; etc_.
|
| It's the same reason that people in NOCs have
| _unpublished_ numbers to get people in their peer NOCs on
| the line in case of a network outage. They 're fine with
| people reaching out with a problem, if those people are
| going to tell them something _useful_ that they _don 't
| already know_.
|
| The Google engineer is fine being told that their code
| breaks in edge-case XYZ. But they _don 't_ want to be
| asked how to empty your trash in Gmail. And they
| _especially_ don 't want to deal with demands and threats
| from people who have been scammed out of money over
| email, who want their money back, and think it's Google's
| legal responsibility to do that for them.
|
| > I don't get why we act like google being too big to
| support all its clients is our fault.
|
| It's "our" fault in the sense of Google being an American
| corporation incentivized to maximize profit; and profit
| maximization implying maximization of _margin_ by cutting
| / avoiding cost-centres (e.g. support costs); and
| consumers enabling that by preferring services that have
| those lower-margins over services that have higher
| margins. Your ability to use email, today, for free, has
| higher Net Present Value than your future unanswered
| support questions.
|
| Or, to put that another way: it's capitalism's fault. But
| not _capitalists '_ fault, per se. It's the fault of
| people doing what's economically rational. It's
| economically rational to use Gmail instead of a paid
| email service. It's economically rational to build your
| following on YouTube instead of Dailymotion/Vimeo/etc.
|
| People can complain all they like, but they still _do_
| it, rather than doing something else, because a free
| product with no support still optimizes better for their
| preferences than spending a single dollar on an
| alternative does.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to
| a human, would be flooded with people trying to step
| around the whole automated edifice without ever first
| trying to engage with it.
|
| This is because Google has no culture of human support,
| so when an agent does become available they're flooded
| with backlog. If Google started providing it, especially
| where money is involved, the backlog would eventually be
| caught up and this would no longer be a big issue. But I
| suspect they will never do it until forced by law because
| of the cost.
| derefr wrote:
| > But I suspect they will never do it until forced by law
| because of the cost.
|
| I would go further: I suspect that Google would just shut
| down many of its services if they had to provide human
| support, because the cost of serving the sheer number of
| people Google serves, with any level of effectiveness,
| would turn the the products from positive-margin or at
| least acceptable-cost loss-leaders, into highly-negative-
| margin.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| But in this case, those problems need to be disclosed
| upfront. Google should have a big banner upon signup that
| says "this is a fully automated service and you have no
| recourse if the automation goes wrong", to warn people
| against relying on them for anything critical.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| They probably do, but it's somewhere in 10MB document
| written in legalese indistinguishable from Klingon.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| To that I say, good--if you can't support it, you
| shouldn't ship it. At least when it comes to taking
| people's money or promising to revenue-share (like
| YouTube creators).
|
| In any case, Alphabet's net earnings in 2021 were
| $76,000,000,000. They could hire 760,000 people at $100k
| cost per year and still break even. It wouldn't take
| anywhere near that number to introduce humans into
| critical loops like copyright strikes and ad revenue
| customer support, so they could easily- _easily_ --afford
| it. I think they just don't want to, because they'd
| rather make all the money and they don't institutionally
| care about people ground up in the cracks.
| richbell wrote:
| > Well, yes, because any place where you can escalate to
| a human, would be flooded with people trying to step
| around the whole automated edifice without ever first
| trying to engage with it. People would post links to it
| on various forums saying "hey, doing X allows you to get
| a Google CSR on the line" ...
|
| Okay, and what about the thousands of people who
| legitimately need help? Do you really think it's
| acceptable that people have their content stolen or
| falsely flagged, or their channel demonetised or banned
| without recourse?
|
| The only reason the scenario you've described could
| happen is because Google has made it impossible to talk
| to a real person in the first place.
|
| > As it so happens, Google do offer plenty of ways to
| engage with them -- they just can't "say any of them out
| loud", or they'll be bombarded and rendered useless, as
| above.
|
| I'm aware of these. None of them are an acceptable
| alternative to having actual human support for paid
| products.
|
| Furthermore, even if I were to concede that your first
| point is valid that still wouldn't excuse large channels
| or corporations having to navigate a Kafka-esque
| nightmare to get basic human support. It speaks volumes
| that Bungie's team of lawyers couldn't even stop someone
| from filing false DMCA claims on their behalf without
| considerable effort.
| derefr wrote:
| > Okay, and what about the thousands of people who
| legitimately need help? Do you really think it's
| acceptable that people have their content stolen or
| falsely flagged, or their channel demonetised or banned
| without recourse?
|
| Yes. Or rather, these particular commercial relationships
| _shouldn 't exist in the first place_ -- they're
| fundamentally untenable.
|
| As I say in my sibling comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071124#32073569),
| Google shouldn't be attempting to work with independent
| creators at all; there's no way to make it work. It
| shouldn't _allow_ people to directly post on YouTube. (At
| least, monetized. They could still support it for
| hobbyists who aren 't out to make money and are
| explicitly opting out of any support.)
|
| Instead, YouTube should be directly engaging -- and
| encouraging the consolidation of -- MCNs, into a small
| collection of reseller-partners; a collection small-
| enough that YouTube _can_ scalably listen to those
| partners ' complaints. Where those partners then act as
| collectors and filters for complaints, only raising to
| YouTube's attention the problems that actually seem to be
| _YouTube_ problems rather than PEBKAC problems.
|
| Am I reinventing mainstream media? Yes. Because
| mainstream media _scales_.
| mirashii wrote:
| Let's pretend for a minute that Google's DMCA system is
| actually necessary to comply with the law (other commenters
| below poke a number of holes in that claim, I don't need to
| repeat them here), and that it's the DMCA that's the primary
| method by which copyright strikes happen (also questionable
| and discussed in other comments).
|
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| You miss the context of "in the face of anti Section-230
| and worse bills".
|
| How is defending /not/ filtering being complicit anyway?
| That is about as strong a "personal choice" a stance a
| company can take.
| mirashii wrote:
| Section 230 only provides more legal shield, not less.
| The OP to which I responded did not name other, non-DMCA
| legislation.
|
| A much stronger statement would be defending their right
| not to do it and then, crucially, not doing it.
| bluGill wrote:
| What we need is the ability to face our accuser. YouTube is
| more or less doing the right thing execpt they are not giving
| anyone the legal contact information of the accuser. If I
| post something, and it is reported I should have the option
| to take my accuser to court for a false accusation.
| tpoacher wrote:
| why do they have a legal responsibility to respond but are
| somehow exempt from the legal liability from acting in a
| harmful manner while failing to assert the legality of the
| claim?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Because that is the legal obligation they have. They have
| an obligation not to host reported infringers. They have no
| obligation to host you.
| code51 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| 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.
| derefr wrote:
| In the old days, bigcorps just wouldn't engage with ISVs
| directly at all. Instead, as an ISV, you'd engage the
| services of an 'integrator' or 'reseller' -- a smaller-scale
| but still-large entity that you'd have a support contract
| with -- where _the integrator_ would then have a support
| contract with the bigcorp. If you were having an issue with
| the bigcorp 's product, you'd complain to the reseller, and
| then _they 'd_ complain to the bigcorp. And because the
| bigcorp only had a few such resellers as clients, each
| reseller would actually be able to get the bigcorp on the
| line.
|
| 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!)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I'm honestly not sure why Google doesn't push for
| ['integrator' or 'reseller' -- a smaller-scale but still-
| large entity that you'd have a support contract with]
| model.
|
| Isn't this kinda what multi-channel networks are?
| derefr wrote:
| Kind of, but not really.
|
| YouTube MCNs are more like book publishers: none of them
| are very large in _number of supply-side entities
| aggregated_. Some of them have "popular" talent that
| could very well get YouTube's attention on their own, but
| none of them are doing collective bargaining for
| thousands of creators. So there are still tons of them;
| so YouTube _doesn 't_ really relate to them on a first-
| name basis.
|
| Like book publishers, MCNs mostly offer one of two
| benefits: either "we do the hard business parts of
| running a content-creation business for you" (not a lie,
| though it's a bad deal); or "we have at least one very
| popular creator, and so by joining with us, you're at-
| least-theoretically taking advantage of the attention
| _they_ get. " (When that's tenuous, as the popular
| creators aren't beholden to these groups and might leave
| at any time, and if they do, there goes your trump card
| in dealing with YouTube.)
| aliqot wrote:
| I have the opposite problem. I changed my payment info
| without telling Adsense so they send menacing paper letters
| that threaten the process of escheatment if I don't claim my
| funds. I decided I don't want their services in my life, and
| when it came to accepting their money I was fine with leaving
| that behind as well. Apparently when enough monthly checks
| stack up it causes problems. I've moved since then, so I hope
| the new tennant was wise enough to just send them some new
| payment info.
| duped wrote:
| Have you tried hiring a lawyer to send a letter to their
| legal team?
| code51 wrote:
| I think the only letter the legal team expects through
| google-legal-support@google.com is a notice of sueing them.
| I really don't have the power to sue them in a US court.
|
| Do people have success when they notify (not sue) the legal
| team about Google acting against their Terms of Service?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so, why can't you sue them in your country?
|
| If you are a citizen of another country doing business
| with Google it should follow that your country's courts
| have jurisdiction, if you're in the EU I imagine any EU
| country has jurisdiction (not because I imagine you are,
| but just as an example of how you might be able to pick a
| better jurisdiction - but that of course would be up to
| talking with a lawyer about)
| ecshafer wrote:
| If the amount is low enough you can sue them in small
| claims court in the US, which the amount is dependent on
| the state. Small claims court is geared more towards
| people self defending.
| code51 wrote:
| I'm not based in US so even contacting a lawyer about
| this thing is expensive.
|
| Lawyers here are not willing to handle international
| cases except big business cases.
| zdragnar wrote:
| This may not apply to where you are, but you really don't
| need a lawyer for small claims courts in the US, since
| the monetary values are relatively small.
|
| That said, I'd be surprised if your court system required
| you to lawyer up for every (relatively) small contract
| infringement- contracts essentially become pointless for
| anything less than 20 hours of billable time from a
| lawyer.
| kazinator wrote:
| That's the mechanism that Youtube copyright claims should
| go through.
| ticviking wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer and this isn't advice... but it seems to me
| that kind of non-payment is probably the kind of thing you
| can resolve pretty quickly with appropriate legal action. A
| simple letter to legal saying, "your terms say you'll pay me
| X, it hasn't been paid. I'd like you to do so or I'll have to
| look at taking all appropriate steps to get paid." Will often
| get the right person to look at the issue. And if that fails
| actually filing the appropriate action almost always does.
| somehnguy wrote:
| Adsense held my funds for 6+ years in a never ending loop of
| bank account not valid->can't edit this bank account. Same
| kafkaesque maze of non-existent support. Beyond frustrating.
| One day it just suddenly let me fix the issue. No idea why.
|
| 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.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _One day it just suddenly let me fix the issue. No idea
| why_
|
| Wild guess: a bugfix was merged and deployed.
| code51 wrote:
| 6+ years... wow.
|
| I'm afraid I'll end up like this:
|
| - unable to use Adsense/Admob for years
|
| - and not getting the money
|
| - money becomes basically nothing because of inflation
| Drakim wrote:
| I'm banned for life from using adsense because my brother
| thought it would be a fun prank to repeatedly click the
| ads on my blog. I reported it myself before the next
| payout and received a generic "you have violated our
| policies" and a ban that's still there to this day some
| 15 years later.
| hn1337 wrote:
| somehnguy wrote:
| Yeah. I should probably note that I wasn't continually
| working on the issue. It was attempted sporadically over
| that time period - mainly because google's support maze
| ..err I mean 'system' is so terrible.
|
| I would spend ~20 minutes following different resolution
| paths, get mad at them not helping at all, forget about
| it because this level of frustration is not worth $100 to
| me, repeat a few times a year. Don't get me wrong, $100
| is $100 - I just wasn't in dire need of it I guess.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I saw a whole long thread on Twitter of screenshots of (big)
| creators themselves getting copyright strikes for their own
| work and being like WTF. It seems a lot more rampant than
| people may be aware...
| diob wrote:
| I'm absolutely convinced that copyright is holding back
| progress at this point. It's only ever wielded by giant
| corporations, despite folks arguing it's to protect the
| little folks.
| visarga wrote:
| Just a couple of days ago there was a Noam Chomsky interview
| on the Machine Learning Street Talk channel. The whole video
| is almost 4h long, including a long intro. The MLST crew
| worked for months on it, posted it, and it got promptly
| banned.
|
| 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
| guerrilla wrote:
| Damn that opening was beautiful. Like this format, never
| heard of this show. Noam is so old now though... Still
| listening, a lot more philosophical than I was expecting.
| He really quoted Bakunin? :) Thanks for sharing.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| That poor kid has been studying for two and a half years now. I
| really hope she's able to pass that test; it seems like a real
| nightmare.
|
| 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.
| cjbconnor wrote:
| Lofi girl is part of Lofi Records (https://lofigirl.com), and I
| think they only play their own songs.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Oh, okay, interesting. I didn't realize there was a whole
| record label behind it.
| metadat wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049137
|
| (1 day ago; 94 points, 16 comments)
| buildsjets wrote:
| Not dupe. That article is about the stream being taken down.
| This article is about the stream being restored, and YouTube's
| reaction.
| metadat wrote:
| Oh, thanks! I've updated accordingly.
| lucakiebel wrote:
| There has to be a way to make copyright takedowns less harmful to
| creators. It's crazy that mostly anyone can take down a stream
| like this that easily
| the_third_wave wrote:
| There is: don't rely on a single hosting provider for your
| material. Use Youtube as a CDN for material originating from a
| self-hosted Peertube instance and you're protected. Add some
| patronage/sponsorship/subscription options to replace or
| enhance any lost income from Youtube and you're set on that
| front as well.
|
| 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.).
| gravitate wrote:
| I downloaded this with YouTube -DLP which is a (working) fork of
| YouTube-DL, so I have a local copy I can play when coding & can
| play it in offline environments without needing a YouTube tab
| open in my browser which gets in the way of web development. It
| plays in VLC which isn't as distracting. I love that kind of
| music for getting in the zone. It's clear that many people have a
| tab open listening to this due to the way YouTube shows all the
| active listeners in the stream. I prefer my local copy though.
| rasz wrote:
| Here is a video capture of recorded apology:
| https://imgur.com/gallery/i2NpK
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| That's not at all accurate.
|
| It was more like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
| tmountain wrote:
| It's a pretty terrible situation for folks that build their
| livelihood curating a channel to have to accept the risk that
| their channel could be taken down at any moment due to a false
| positive regarding copyright violation. Making matters worse, it
| sounds like there's no real recourse beyond taking your grievance
| onto social media and hoping your channel has enough clout to get
| Youtube's attention.
|
| 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.
| corrral wrote:
| > 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.
| slillibri wrote:
| In theory that would be great, but video is in general much
| larger than audio. There would be no way for many channels to
| even get started, given the costs involved. I expect most
| people getting started on YouTube would be driven out of
| business simply by the bandwidth costs alone.
| corrral wrote:
| I'm confident hosts would step in to make money if
| YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were broken.
| Folks tend to like making money. No reason they couldn't
| put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube does, to
| cover costs for creators who want free hosting. All kinds
| of angles to provide free hosting to feed the ol' marketing
| funnel, just like all kinds of other hosts, like limiting
| quality (so, drastically reducing bandwidth costs--SD video
| with modern codecs can be _tiny_ )
|
| I find the push-back on this baffling. It's like if web
| hosting were all but completely controlled by one
| monopolist and questioning that drew all kinds of "LOL how
| could web hosting even work without one monopolist
| controlling the whole thing and dictating what can and
| cannot be hosted, it's impossible, you're nuts, no-one
| could ever start a hobby website again without that
| monopolist".
| Goronmon wrote:
| _I 'm confident hosts would step in to make money if
| YouTube's monopoly on combo hosting+discovery were
| broken. Folks tend to like making money. No reason they
| couldn't put their own ads on the videos, like YouTube
| does, to cover costs for creators who want free hosting._
|
| Who is buying these ads on this new video site that no
| one is using yet?
| corrral wrote:
| You posit the alternative, that no-one would figure out
| how to make money off this market? I find that
| implausible. If we take that objection aside, the
| question looks a lot like "how does a business possibly
| start?" which... well, look at the site we're on.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yeah I don't like your solution. Not everyone has plenty of
| money like HN commentors tend to have. Some are fine with ad
| supported channels. They just want youtube to cut the funny
| business and require those who are claiming "copyright
| infringement" actually show real, concrete proof of their
| claims.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| [para removed due to tone]
|
| Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on
| things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and
| Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
| corrral wrote:
| You're not following me. I'm not saying youtube channels
| should be podcasts. I'm saying that the problem with
| YouTube is its monopoly, driven by coupling hosting and
| discovery in one platform, and a podcast model that
| separates those would improve the ecosystem and solve most
| of the problems with YouTube being able to dictate terms
| for _an entire super-popular form of creative content_.
|
| > Secondly, podcasting seems to be centralising recently on
| things like whatever-Apple-podcast-store-is-called and
| Spotify, so that analogy isn't great.
|
| Right, and podcast fans largely hate that trend.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| My bad, I misunderstood your comment. FWIW I agree on
| both counts, but I'm also saying is that podcasts are
| falling to centralisation pressures that plagued video
| since the very beginning.
| corrral wrote:
| > My bad, I misunderstood your comment.
|
| Heh, no big deal, that "like" in the original was crucial
| and easy to scan past. These things happen.
|
| > FWIW I agree on both counts, but I'm also saying is
| that podcasts are falling to centralisation pressures
| that plagued video since the very beginning.
|
| More generally I think the Internet and the markets
| growing on it would be a hell of a lot healthier if we
| outlawed the creepy & dangerous mass data collection that
| encourages lock-in and monopolization, and the video
| market specifically (including streaming services like
| Netflix and friends) if we outlawed certain kinds of
| vertical integration there. Economy of scale is quite
| enough to push things toward monopoly, no need to have
| those factors amplifying the effect and increasing the
| harm of such monopolies.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Only a seriously out-of-touch elite dude will claim that
| something which organically became popular shouldn't exist.
|
| By your brilliant logic, Hacker News shouldn't exist.
| corrral wrote:
| People are upset about Spotify trying to own the podcast
| market. Meanwhile Web video is already in the position
| everyone dreads podcasts reaching, and has been _for its
| entire existence_. Assuming folks aren 't wrong about RSS-
| based host-anywhere podcasts being better than having the
| entire market controlled by one provider, seems obvious
| video'd be better with the same model.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The why is obvious - the bandwidth involved isn't quite
| so hospitible to small scales as podcasting. Either we
| need to revive Moore's law or start flogging electrons
| and photons for not going fast enough.
| corrral wrote:
| I know (believe me, I know) that bandwidth is expensive,
| but I'm also pretty sure YouTube's margins leave plenty
| of room for competitors to come in with less-effective
| monetization schemes and still turn a profit. There's no
| reason a host couldn't put ads on videos hosted under
| some kind of free tier, after all. I'm _quite_ sure we
| wouldn 't end up with _no_ free hosting. Worst case, I
| think it 'd tend to be quality capped to SD-quality or
| something, and that's worst-case.
| [deleted]
| mrkramer wrote:
| In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking
| would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs
| with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it turned
| out that centralized commercial services are better than FOSS
| distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google won; they
| offered better services because they were centralized
| commercial services which were constantly updated and
| improved all because ad revenues were skyrocketing and all
| the best engineers decided to work for them instead of trying
| to pursue decentralized/distributed FOSS solutions.
|
| 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.
| corrral wrote:
| > In the pre Facebook era people thought social networking
| would be distributed over thousands and millions of blogs
| with the help of RSS but that didn't happen because it
| turned out that centralized commercial services are better
| than FOSS distributed ones. That's why Facebook and Google
| won; they offered better services because they were
| centralized commercial services which were constantly
| updated and improved all because ad revenues were
| skyrocketing and all the best engineers decided to work for
| them instead of trying to pursue decentralized/distributed
| FOSS solutions.
|
| I think they mainly won because they figured out that
| capturing a huge amount of data about user behavior (i.e.
| industrial-scale spying) was incredibly lucrative. That's
| also part of why, despite being free services, they despise
| anything that might take your activity (so, valuable data)
| somewhere else for even a second, so, open standards and
| any kind of inter-operation. This let them provide free
| services with _tons_ of income to put into development and,
| vitally, promotion.
|
| I think the key insight from there is that that sort of
| situation doesn't just discourage _use_ of free
| alternatives--it discourages _development_ of them. I 'm
| certain we'd have more and better free (and paid!)
| alternatives, and _way_ more developers putting free work
| into that space for protocol and client /server
| development, if not for the huge moat that is creepy data-
| hoarding to feed monetizable AI. Competing--even on a
| volunteer basis--against unassailable behemoths with what
| may as well be an unlimited advertising & development
| budgets is discouraging, to put it lightly. I'd never think
| of working on that kind of project right now, because the
| market, enabled by the legality of mass-scale stalking by
| corporations, means it's pointless _no matter how good_ a
| product you make.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I think back in the day Larry Page saw that Altavista was
| free and he wanted to compete against it so he chose
| Google to be free and when millions of users started
| flocking in with millions of data points ads were the
| next logical step.
|
| The same situation is with Zuckerberg and MySpace. When
| Zuck saw MySpace and other social networks at the time
| being free he made his own version of free social network
| and again when millions of users started flocking in with
| millions of data points ads were the next logical step
| and therefore surveillance capitalism emerged.
|
| Tbh idk if Google and Facebook would be so successful if
| they were subscription based or would some free
| alternative come and destroy them.
|
| Take Netflix and YouTube as example; they are both modern
| versions of TV and they both compete for screen time but
| YouTube being free and being fueled by essentially free
| user generated content is in much better position
| business wise than Netflix will ever be. Netflix needs to
| convince people to subscribe, they need to do movies
| contracting, they are spending billions to create their
| own content etc. And I think at this point YouTube is
| close to surpassing Netflix by revenue.
|
| >I think the key insight from there is that that sort of
| situation doesn't just discourage use of free
| alternatives--it discourages development of them.
|
| I agree with you but at the same time look how TikTok
| rose from the ashes of Vine. And now TikTok is the
| biggest Facebook and YouTube competitor for digital ad
| spending in the last decade.
|
| I think if you want to compete against behemoths you need
| to dive into niches they do not dare to explore. For
| example imagine search engine which would allow you to
| search for "ad-free" websites. Google would never think
| of creating such feature yet implementing it would be
| unimaginable because they run the ad show on the web.
| kzrdude wrote:
| In established society, the defence should be that some of the
| aggrieved channels take Youtube to court, right? Has that ever
| happened?
| [deleted]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| YouTube screws content creators over, and content creators
| complain, and then go right back to YouTube, so that YouTube has
| no incentive to fix anything.
|
| _" 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.
| toolz wrote:
| I wish these creators with other social media presence would use
| their platforms to move their audience to something besides
| youtube (they can even keep their youtube presence).
|
| 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.
| StewardMcOy wrote:
| I think it's a really, really tough sell to move people off
| YouTube. The network effects are just too good. I might be
| projecting my preferences onto the masses here, but I suspect
| this is a common feeling.
|
| 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.
| corrral wrote:
| > 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.
| StewardMcOy wrote:
| I really like the podcast model, but compared to the scale
| of YouTube, I'm not sure it can hold up. It's not just
| hosting, but search as well, for 500 hours of video per
| minute.
| corrral wrote:
| > I really like the podcast model, but compared to the
| scale of YouTube, I'm not sure it can hold up. It's not
| just hosting, but search as well, for 500 hours of video
| per minute.
|
| If only there were some company dedicated to providing
| search for resources that others host online. Perhaps if
| they had a mission to make the world's knowledge more
| accessible. :-)
|
| Plus, I'm pretty sure if you excluded stuff that's never
| likely to be watched by many folks except the odd fluke
| that gains viral notoriety (think: training videos, home
| videos that aren't aiming for virality, schools filming
| sports & activities and posting them, that kind of thing)
| you could cut that number to 10% or less of that. Most of
| the content going up isn't intended for a wide audience,
| I'd bet. An at-least-as-good video-podcast client
| wouldn't need to index or present the vast majority of
| what gets uploaded to YouTube. Much of that would be fine
| over on one of the lesser streaming services (Vimeo, say)
| _now_ , but only ends up on YouTube because it's
| synonymous with user-uploaded Web video for most folks.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Okay, but how would you compete with "free hosting" on
| YouTube?
| corrral wrote:
| > I wish these creators with other social media presence would
| use their platforms to move their audience to something besides
| youtube (they can even keep their youtube presence).
|
| 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.
| buzzwords wrote:
| YT couldn't care less if creators are unhappy with anything at
| the moment. There is no real competition, so creators have to
| just deal with it. I hope for a real competition, where there
| will be a mass exodus.
| nmz wrote:
| There's plenty of competition for music streaming, internet
| radio is easy to find, the only impediment is installing VLC
| and finding a stream. which if you know how to google is easy
| enough.
| BudaDude wrote:
| This is becoming less true, TikTok is a major competitor. Yeah
| there is Youtube shorts, but its largely just reuploaded TikTok
| videos.
| corrral wrote:
| That's just trading one master for another. It'd degrade to
| be similarly bad. A podcast-like model would provide a lot
| more freedom--host anywhere, promote anywhere, with clients,
| not monopolist web platforms, controlling "subscriptions" and
| such.
| bob1029 wrote:
| YouTube is such a hard market to crack. 99% of the problem is
| simple information theory and getting bits from A to B. The
| actual software isn't that difficult.
|
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Maybe for certain segments/formats, but TikTok doesn't do
| long-form videos, does it?
|
| 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).
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It sure does. They enabled 10min videos, and at this point
| it's a meme that creators are getting roasted for doing
| part 2's. (I.e. breaking up a long video into multiple
| parts for no reason.)
|
| Not only that, but lots of tiktok accounts are literally
| just reuploading full youtube videos from channels like
| Kurzgesagt. Not happy about that, but it's also a sign of a
| successful platform. Facebook had the same situation going
| on.
|
| Most of my tiktok watching is exactly the same as yours on
| youtube, by the way. My educational playlist is at 242
| entries, whereas the lol playlist is around 160.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Interesting, I guess that goes to show how long it's been
| since I've explored what TikTok offers. Thanks for the
| info.
| input_sh wrote:
| In short:
|
| 2016 launch: 15 sec
|
| 2017: 30 sec
|
| Jul 2021: 3 min
|
| Feb 2022: 10 min
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > just reuploading full youtube videos from channels like
| Kurzgesagt (...) it's also a sign of a successful
| platform
|
| No, not really.
|
| Ripping Youtube content is trivial, so you basically have
| a raidable pool of high-quality content that you can re-
| upload and monetise, that you didn't have to pay for in
| any way.
|
| If you're seeing a lot of Kurzgesagt vidoes on TikTok,
| all that means is that someone found out their
| monetisation success rate for those stolen videos is high
| enough that it makes financial sense to carry on doing
| it.
| malka wrote:
| Indeed. It means that there is an audience for longer
| videos on tik-tok. Which is bad for youtube.
| [deleted]
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Tiktok is not a competitor to YT. It's much more focused on
| shorter-form content, and it's much more addictive. For those
| two reasons alone, it's not a 1:1 competitor to the Youtube
| monopoly.
| post_break wrote:
| Let me know when I can learn how to fix the radiator fan for
| my 2008 ford on tiktok, then I'll agree with you.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I'm delighted to see that people are recognizing what a
| threat tiktok poses.
|
| 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.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| Oh damn, that's something I've never even considered
| before. I didn't even think of using TikTok as a search
| engine.
|
| Damn, I was legitimately trying to not sign up for TikTok
| but if it can actually beat out Google in a search for
| terms like that, that's actually huge
| kzrdude wrote:
| Nebula is the competition, right? But it's used as an add-on,
| not replacement of youtube right now.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Wendover's video from today looks a bit closer at the ecosystem
| as it is now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoWcQUjNM8o - says
| Youtube is the best option for creators right now
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