[HN Gopher] YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by...
___________________________________________________________________
YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting
spoofed email
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 193 points
Date : 2024-12-30 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _No one knows how much copyright abuse occurs on YouTube.
| According to YouTube, about 6 percent of removals from July to
| December 2023 were abusive, along with 10 times more attempted
| abusive removals. But if a significant number of users never flag
| abuse--out of fear they could be sued for contributing to
| copyright infringement--then the true figure could be higher._
|
| Sounds like the YouTuber won a DMCA fight with YouTube, as well.
| gurchik wrote:
| How does detecting the emails were fake address the DMCA claim on
| his YouTube channel? It's my understanding that YouTube won't
| intervene in DMCA claims even if the claims were false.
| notatoad wrote:
| the most important thing here seems to be that the fraudulent
| claims were retracted by the person who sent them, and the
| statement from nintendo that the claims were not legitimate.
|
| but it's not true that youtube won't do anything about false
| claims. both the DMCA and youtube's pseudo-dmca takedown
| process care that about the identity of the person making the
| claim. if you claim "i am an authorized agent for Nintendo of
| America" and that's not true, then they'll throw out your
| claim. as long as you are who you say you are and are an
| authorized representative of the company you claim to
| represent, then google tends to trust you even if you're
| claiming ownership of content you don't actually own.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you claim to be an agent of Nintendo and are not that is
| criminal - as in jail or even prison.
| nullc wrote:
| Virtually no one is prosecuted for perjury generally, much
| less in the context of DMCA abuse.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which is the problem. I'm no sure how to get somd more
| but they seem needed in this case
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It didn't really. What actually solved it was contacting
| Nintendo directly. A spoofed email in and of itself is
| meaningless.
| xmodem wrote:
| > According to YouTube, about 6 percent of removals from July to
| December 2023 were abusive, along with 10 times more attempted
| abusive removals
|
| I uploaded the recording of my father's funeral to youtube, to
| share as an unlisted video. It attracted two copyright claims -
| for hymns written in the 18th century.
|
| These were claims - not takedown requests - but I didn't think it
| was appropriate to share a link to the family that was unable to
| attend in person that would serve them ads. So I instead made the
| video private and shared it a different way.
|
| But if I don't contest the claims, how can youtube possibly count
| them as abusive?
| onemoresoop wrote:
| What I don't understand is how can they ransack through
| unlisted and private videos?
| equestria wrote:
| Google does the "ransacking" for them - ContentID.
| itronitron wrote:
| Funny how the companies doing the scanning to enforce
| copyright are also the same ones building generative AI
| capabilities off the copyrighted data.
| can16358p wrote:
| Probably YouTube scanned it, found something potentially
| actionable, automatically informed the representatives. The
| video was unlisted, which is not private, technically totally
| accessible to anyone with the link.
| diegof79 wrote:
| I can confirm from my experience that Google also
| automatically scans private videos.
|
| My YouTube account was recently mistakenly suspended;
| luckily, after a few minutes of panic, Google reinstated it.
|
| I discovered the suspension because my kid wanted to see a
| video on my TV's YouTube app (LG webOS), which showed an
| error without further explanation. Trying to find out what
| happened, I saw an email from YT about my account breaking
| the ToS with a video. "WTF!? I got pwned!" was my first
| reaction (followed by panic as YT uses my Google account).
| But, no, the culprit was a screen recording in 2015 that I
| did at work to showcase a UI prototype about a key-based VPC
| setup workflow I was working on. The video was private and
| unlisted, and I didn't remember it as I did it as a quick
| capture to share an idea with the team. I hypothesize that
| the video got flagged because the algorithm confused it with
| a "crack/hack tutorial."
|
| I was happy to see my account reinstated the same day.
| However, the whole experience didn't leave good taste: a
| small algorithm mistake can make your life miserable, and you
| don't have any human or support to correct it. Also, the
| "private" moniker in YT videos is an illusion.
| thephyber wrote:
| I have refused to create any content on YouTube for this
| reason. My Google account is too valuable to my digital
| identity.
|
| When Google banned a user because their Google Drive was
| used to share a picture of their child's skin with the
| doctor for diagnosis reasons and Google flagged the account
| as CSAM, I felt vindicated that I don't create content for
| YouTube. Not because I believe my content would get banned,
| but because their automated systems catch irrelevant
| content and the user experience of those instances is like
| a DoS on your digital identity.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Just use a separated google account for your channel?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| RIAA types are terrified of the idea of secret networks of
| people sharing private links
| jeroenhd wrote:
| And rightfully so, back in the day I watched more than a
| few episodes through secret delisted playlists. They still
| exist, presumably hidden so that one of those AI copyright
| bots ("companies") can't take down every video in one fell
| swoop.
| deadbabe wrote:
| How do you find them?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Back in the day I found them on forums that required
| accounts. I've long since switched to other mechanisms
| for pirating content not available in my region, so I
| wouldn't know where to find them these days.
|
| Presumably, there are Discord servers for that kind of
| thing, seeing as Discord has mostly replaced the forums
| of yore.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What I don't understand is how can they ransack through
| unlisted and private videos?_
|
| Can they just iterate through the URL keys?
| youtu.be/v=a0000aa youtu.be/v=a0000ab
| youtu.be/v=a0000ac youtu.be/v=a0000ad
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Sure, you just need to go through the 74 quintillion
| possibilities. Every day.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Only if the 74 quntillion possibilities exist. There's a
| pretty good percentage of 404s.
|
| Plus, they don't have to do it every day, and clearly
| don't, since some people get dinged for videos they
| uploaded months or years earlier.
|
| It's not like these organizations don't have the cash for
| the system to do it. It's not going to be one guy in the
| basement of the building overclocking a 386.
| david_allison wrote:
| I'm getting content ID copyright warnings [not strikes] on
| audio recordings from the 1940s/50s.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Ahem:
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap14.html
| david_allison wrote:
| Thankfully I have appropriate permissions
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > audio recordings
|
| Recordings are copyrightable even if the underlying music is
| public domain. If you record a performance of Mozart's 40th
| symphony on your phone, you can be sued for copyright
| violations by the concert hall. (Don't be surprised that
| concert halls perform for more than just the attendees.)
| techjamie wrote:
| It gets a little complicated around old pieces like that.
|
| As usual, I am not a lawyer, consult a legal professional
| before making any decisions based on this information.
|
| Even though an old work like that is in the public domain, if
| it was played as a recording, whoever owns the rights to the
| recording still has a claim to copyright.
|
| But even if it was played live and sung by the attendees, that
| doesn't necessarily mean the sheet music is public domain.
| Pianos from hundreds of years ago didn't play exactly like a
| modern piano, so there may have been an intermediary step where
| the original piece was modified to work on a modern piano when
| the sheet music went to print. The modifications to the sheet
| music could grant the person who sold the book a copyright.
|
| Doesn't necessarily mean the person has a valid claim, but it's
| not impossible.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Pianos from hundreds of years ago didn't play exactly like
| a modern piano, so there may have been an intermediary step
| where the original piece was modified to work on a modern
| piano when the sheet music went to print.
|
| This is preposterous.
| grayhatter wrote:
| Welcome to US copyright law
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Transcription (and arrangement) can involve a pretty
| serious amount of creative input. How do you think they
| should be handled instead?
| mort96 wrote:
| I certainly don't think transcribing an old piece should
| mean that you now own the piece for the next 160 years.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| They don't own the piece. Anyone is allowed to transcribe
| the old piece for themselves, and then own the
| transcription they created.
| mort96 wrote:
| Same difference. It makes 0 sense that they own anything
| played based on the transcription for 160 years.
| immibis wrote:
| Irrelevant. All playbacks of the piece will be copyright-
| struck, regardless of the transcription used.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| But there'd be a finite number of ways to transcribe a
| piece. This someone would be able to claim the only ways
| to faithfully play the original public domain piece.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| In that case, the law is not incompatible with you both
| owning your own transcriptions, even if they are
| identical. You might need some proof that you created
| your own if sued, but that's the copyright system.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why not copy and say it's independently created? It does
| make it incompatible.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You don't own "the piece", you have a copyright claim to
| the specific parts you contributed of the specific
| arrangement/transcription you produced for the duration
| of copyright. Someone else can take that original work
| and create their own transcription/arrangement that you
| would have no claim over. ContentID is unable to reliably
| distinguish these two.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't see the difference. It means that if you
| transcribe a piece, I can't play the piece you
| transcribed based on your transcription for well over a
| hundred years. That's the bullshit.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| No; if you create your own transcription, and it just
| happens to be identical, you own the copyright on your
| transcription. You can't steal someone else's, but you
| aren't forbidden from making your own, even if the end
| result is the same. (Better be able to prove that you
| made it yourself though.)
|
| Transcription takes time and effort. Time and effort
| equals a copyright.
| mort96 wrote:
| You start your message with "No;" yes the rest of your
| message does not refute anything I said.
| ziofill wrote:
| This is so confusing. What stops people from copying
| music verbatim (with little effort) and obtaining
| copyright? And once someone has done so, if I try to do
| it too how can I claim I was transcribing the original
| and not the copy, since it's identical? And if two
| identical transcriptions can exist, how to adjudicate
| which one to credit?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Copyright isn't exclusive, so the original rights holder
| you derived from would still have claim. You only have
| copyright on the derived work over the creative input and
| changes you provided, if any. If two people
| _independently_ make the same creative changes, they both
| have copyrights on distinct works that happen to be
| identical. There 's a well-known blog post on this
| subject called "What colour are your bits"
| (https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23) that goes into more
| detail, but the gist is that the copyright is not solely
| determined by a work's representation in the world, but
| rather by the process to create it (of which the
| representation is simply a product). If this needs to be
| adjucated, it's done by the courts.
| everforward wrote:
| This is true, but I believe exceedingly uncommon. There's
| a requirement for a creative element, and if there's only
| one way to adapt the music to a modern piano it shouldn't
| fulfill that requirement and be eligible for copyright at
| all. I would be unsurprised if copyrights like that
| existed, though.
|
| If it were at all common, copyright would cease to
| function. E.g. someone could, in theory, write Romeo and
| Juliet word-for-word from their own imagination and then
| apply for a copyright. How on earth would enforcement
| work? There's no distinction between the copyright-free
| Shakespeare version and the newly copyrighted version, so
| do performers get to choose which version they're acting
| under?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The fact of copyright is different from the _term_ of
| copyright. If we changed the term to 1 year tomorrow,
| there would still be arrangement and transcription
| copyrights. I also dislike the term, but it 's a separate
| discussion.
| mort96 wrote:
| I think it would be reasonable for someone to own future
| performances of a piece based on a transcription they
| made for a year, or a couple of years. I don't think it's
| okay for them to own it until 70 years after their death.
| Given that the term is what it is, it is unreasonable for
| transcriptions to be covered by copyright. The two things
| are inseparable.
| Covzire wrote:
| How can YT possibly arbitrate who transcribed/arranged a
| piece of classical music?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| They don't. ContentID makes the claimant determine if a
| counterclaim is valid or not. YouTube forwards the
| messages, diverts revenue into an escrow bucket for the
| duration, and washes their hands of any decision-making
| in the matter after the automated notice.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The same applies to books - even if you bought a public
| domain book like _Alice in Wonderland_ , you could be sued
| if you make a scan. The typesetting and layout is
| copyrightable.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The piano thing is basically nonsense, but you're in the
| right general area.
|
| The copyright may have elapsed on the original composition,
| but a specific arrangement of a public domain composition may
| be entitled to copyright protection as a derivative work. For
| example, the song "Scarborough Fair" pre-dates the modern
| concept of copyright, but Simon & Garfunkel's performance of
| the song contains novel elements that are subject to
| copyright.
|
| (see article 802.6)
| https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap800/ch800-performing-
| art...
| alright2565 wrote:
| Even if the claimant's sheet music is used, how do they know
| that it is their sheet music specifically, and not someone
| else's transcription of the same music?
|
| They could include "paper towns" in the music, but that's not
| what these automated systems are looking for.
| xmodem wrote:
| > Even though an old work like that is in the public domain,
| if it was played as a recording, whoever owns the rights to
| the recording still has a claim to copyright.
|
| I am aware of that. In this case it was played from sheet
| music by a professional organist.
|
| > The modifications to the sheet music could grant the person
| who sold the book a copyright.
|
| Do you have a citation for this?
| jenadine wrote:
| > it was played from sheet music by a professional
| organist.
|
| I assume the claim didn't come from that organist. But
| would it be an infringement if it was?
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Only if the organist recorded it.
| techjamie wrote:
| https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/when-transcribing-a-
| publi...
|
| Here's some discussion on the matter that indicates that a
| transcription can be, but a lot of what I've seen is much
| like the rest of copyright, and it's a hot mess and very
| specific to what the circumstances are.
|
| The "might have a claim" about that topic in my original
| post is pulling a lot of weight for me.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Since the video was unlisted, it is likely that it was
| something flagged accidentally as opposed to someone actually
| trying to take it down
| immibis wrote:
| No, it's likely that someone is trying to extract maximum
| profit from their IP library.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Offtopic.
|
| Last year I uploaded a recording of the mass for the wedding of
| my sister's sister in law (the husband had terminal cancer) My
| homebrew recording was expected days before the official
| recording.
|
| Youtube decided it was agaisnt community guidelines or
| something. Religion? Music? Child abuse (the ones spreading
| flowers)? Who knows. My appeal was successful like 6 months
| later.
|
| For the time being, upload it to somewhere else than youtube,
| like pcloud, dailymotion, etc. Youtube is the best techwise,
| but the legal situation is not stable. Best left for
| professionals (influencers)
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _But if I don 't contest the claims, how can youtube possibly
| count them as abusive?_
|
| I'm not saying Alphabet/Google/Youtube did this, but they do
| things on a massive scale and they could "look into" a
| reasonable sample of claims all on their own and generate very
| good statistics. (always good to remember, statistical
| significance is independent of population size, only dependent
| on sample size, and rather small samples have a lot of
| significance, see birthday paradox)
| speerer wrote:
| I don't think it's right that statistical significance is
| independent of population. 1 sample out of a population size
| 1 is plainly more significant than 1 in 100.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm not good enough at this to be explaining it, but
| statistical significance is based on probabilities.
|
| if humans have a 10% chance of having cancer at any moment,
| and you have one human on an entire planet, the probability
| for that planet is still 1/10 and not 100% or 0 based on
| whether that person has or does not have cancer, and having
| one sample from that population of 1 does not increase your
| confidence in the answer as to whether his cancer
| represents a cancer cluster.
|
| or something like that. If you need a sample of 30 people
| to achieve a certain degree of confidence, whether that
| sample comes from a population of 30 people or a population
| of 100,000 people, same confidence. We aren't trying to
| establish what percentage of people have cancer at any
| given moment, we are trying to establish whether this
| population matches what we know about the percentage who
| "should" have cancer.
|
| I'm really bad at explaining this.
|
| the more times you flip a coin, the more confidence you'll
| have in understanding the probabilities of that coin. for a
| given confidence level, you don't need to flip that coin
| more by 100x, you already know.
| gritspartan wrote:
| Scale is part of the problem. It actually hurts small
| businesses.
|
| There is a probably on Google Maps where a marketer will
| setup a website, a lot of business listings, and get a Google
| Business Profile for a "local business" which doesn't
| actually exist. This is all setup to attract unsuspecting
| customers to share their information which is then sold to
| local contractors often without informing the customers
| and/or the local contractors.
|
| It's a practice known as lead gen and/or rank-and-rent.
|
| For an example, you can look up a "business" called Seattle
| Grease Trap Services on Google Maps. It's part of a network
| of fake businesses run by marketer in Hawaii. Check the
| profiles of the people who leave reviews to find some of the
| others.
|
| Another example is found by searching for deck builders in
| Chicago. There are several variations of Koval, TOD, CPC, and
| similar companies. This is all operated by a local marketing
| company that I managed to identify in less than an hour.
|
| I report these frauds, nothing happens. I escalate. Nothing
| happens. So I've given up, but I know that these listings
| cost local businesses actually work. And even though they're
| against Google guidelines, nothing happens.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > for hymns written in the 18th century.
|
| YouTube matches a lot of classical music even if it was played
| by a different person. I mean, I uploaded a recording of
| _myself_ playing something and it was flagged. But you can just
| contest it and most of the time it just goes away.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Who is behind the fake takedowns? Other YouTubers?
| daghamm wrote:
| Yes. There is a lot of money in this, and not really any
| regulations.
|
| There are some documented cases where youtubers have been
| caught red handed doing this against competition
| bluGill wrote:
| Unfortunately even though the scam is illegal nobody goes to
| jail for it.
| thecrash wrote:
| Or semi-automated scammers trying to claim the ad revenue from
| videos for themselves.
| tapatio wrote:
| How does that work? Ownership of the YT video is transferred
| to the scammer? Even if just a part of it contains
| "copyright"?
| bluGill wrote:
| Ads are automatically applied to the video and the scammer
| gets the ad money
| jeroenhd wrote:
| When a claim is filed through content-ID, the claiming
| company basically gets two options: disable all ads (taking
| out any revenue for the uploader), or run ads and get paid
| out. They also get to pick how many ads to run, which means
| a three second segment can insert minutes of ads into a
| video. They can also mute audio during infringing sections,
| or block videos in certain countries.
|
| Stephanie Sterling famously came up with a trick to make
| their videos run without ads, even when including fair use
| content: by intentionally including content from multiple
| companies, each with different preferred monetisation
| preferences, introducing a conflict in the Youtube content-
| ID system that didn't get resolved automatically. Their
| videos were intentionally run without ads, being supported
| by Patreon and all, and companies kept claiming sections
| for themselves and inserting ads into videos.
|
| Bizarre that to shield oneself from content ID bullshit
| (like including a three second snippet of a Ninendo trailer
| blocking an entire video), one needs to intentionally
| infringe on more copyright, but that was the Youtube system
| of yesteryear.
|
| I don't know if the system still works like that, but based
| on the seemingly random snippets included in Sterling's
| videos I'm guessing they're still applying this trick.
|
| In theory one could take this further, uploading parts of
| one's own video to content-ID so the system hands over some
| partial control over the content, but I feel like Youtube
| wouldn't take too kindly to that method.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Earlier discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42521873
| kyledrake wrote:
| If a provider does nothing and they're wrong, they become legally
| liable for lawsuits. So they default to accepting the request
| because it is legally safer to do so.
|
| Unfortunately, improving this will probably require changes to
| the DMCA, and given the general state of politics I would
| honestly prefer to let sleeping dogs lie on this one.
| bluGill wrote:
| Dmca is under prejury laws. However content id has no legal
| protection. You can sue google for false accusation if you want
| (good luck winning since their terms of service allow this -
| you would have to also argue the terms of service should not
| apply)
| immibis wrote:
| Or we host everything on onion services.
| benatkin wrote:
| To me it seems he didn't win, he just lived to fight another day.
| Winning would be if YouTube would treat him as if or better than
| if this never happened, or if the guy got in trouble, or if it
| would be harder to do this in the future.
| sneak wrote:
| Censorship platforms are a dead-end for society and the web.
|
| The sooner we can engineer around them, the better off we will
| be.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Some comments are wondering how DCMA claims work and where ads
| revenue go to. So here is the gist.
|
| The current YouTube DCMA system is broken. Here's how it
| (mal)functions:
|
| - Creator uploads video, gets ad revenue.
|
| - First valid claimant gets ad revenue.
|
| - Subsequent claimants are ignored, first claimant keeps all
| revenue.
|
| This leads to a first-come, first-served system where the first
| claimant wins all, regardless of the actual IP ownership.
|
| Would need to implement proportional revenue allocation and a
| more transparent with arbitrage claiming process, e.g moderators
| with subject expertise chiming in.
|
| That's if YouTube wants to fix this. But they are rather worried
| about a/ being accused of copyright infringement for not taking
| "some" action and b/ aggravating their profit making distribution
| agreements with major content owners.
|
| To note there is also an automated id system which applies
| primarily on audio fingerprints, to a degree visual frames as
| well.
|
| - Creator uploads video, id system finds matching fingerprint
| against a large DB of copyrighted content and send ads revenue to
| whoever owns the match.
|
| Also to note, that applies to largely most audio content at this
| point. Not much to big films (studios are still onto trying to
| keep distribution via their own streaming platform, to be
| platform or preferred partner platform).
|
| We are in this mess, not because YouTube is dragging its feet,
| but because the IP laws simply aren't reconcilable with the way
| we create and consume content these days.
|
| A brick needed to build a more fair revenue distribution system
| could be to revise legislations, e.g banning distribution
| exclusivity. That would give incentive for innovation, a startup
| could build an engine that redistribute somewhat fairly.
|
| Ultimately, creators own their arts and can pretty much dictate
| how their works can be used, and call out their licensing fees.
| But when intermediaries step in and figure out exclusivity would
| milk more cash from consumers, it goes all the way to effectively
| lobby for the laws to remain crooked to their advantage.
| noname120 wrote:
| If the first-come first-serve is true, what prevents a creator
| from self DMCA-ing all his videos so as to get all the revenue?
| Possibly by embedding a copyrighted sound that belongs to a
| company they create just for that purpose.
| everforward wrote:
| Perjury charges. They're almost never pursued because of the
| difficulty of proving what someone knew or didn't know, but
| DMCA'ing yourself is perjury per se because you cannot
| infringe your own copyright. The RIAA/MPAA would absolutely
| lobby to make pursuing those perjury charges a priority.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Top comment:
|
| What on earth could be the motivation for this not-lawyer? A
| malicious thrill?
|
| "The goal is to take the monetization of videos. You get enough
| 200k+ videos under your belt for a form letter and bot writing in
| requests. For little work you can get in the 100K per year
| income, providing you don't get shutdown."
|
| Hopefully this type of blatant abuse of the law will motivate
| some changes. If not, expect whole offices to pop up in
| developing countries with fake lawyers pulling off this scam en-
| masse.
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