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Over in the EU Parliament, they're getting ready to vote yet again on the absolutely terrible Copyright Directive, which has serious problems for the future of the internet, including Article 13's mandatory censorship filters and Article 11's link tax. Regrading the mandatory filters, German music professor Ulrich Kaiser, has written about a a very disturbing experiment he ran on YouTube, in which he kept having public domain music he had uploaded for his students get taken down by ContentID copyright claims.
[...] I decided to open a different YouTube account “Labeltest” to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.
I only received more notices, this time about a recording of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, which was accompanied by the message: “Copyrighted content was found in your video. The claimant allows its content to be used in your YouTube video. However, advertisements may be displayed.” Once again, this was a mistaken notification. The recording was one by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Lorin Maazel, which was released in 1961 and is therefore in the public domain. Seeking help, I emailed YouTube, but their reply, “[…] thank you for contacting Google Inc. Please note that due to the large number of enquiries, e-mails received at this e-mail address support-de@google.com cannot be read and acknowledged” was less than reassuring.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @04:30AM (8 children)
In the US for a number of years, I have noticed this trend where companies provide no way to contact a person who works there.
At BEST, you may get to fill out an online form that gets sent who knows where to be read by a program.
It's absolutely bizarre that the company can gather all this info from you, but you can't talk to THEM! What arrogance.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mainframe Bloke on Wednesday September 05 2018, @04:42AM (1 child)
I have to admit this is a personal bugbear of mine as well: the arrogance of refusing direct contact with a human, and only providing a form. Sometimes you're lucky enough to get a phone number or an email address, which I use after I fill in the form if I am steamed up enough.
It's gotten to the point where I will now only do business with companies that provide a real contact point, preferably in Oz where they will understand my accent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @01:54PM
What's even worse is when my customers expect me to provide tech support for services like Google Calendars and Docs, services which I don't recommend and sometimes even warn customers away from because they will not meet the customer's needs. (Employer isn't an outsource help desk so I see no reason why I should even attempt help desk.)
My standard response is a referral to Google's customer service department.
I hope to get across in the most laconic way possible that perhaps they should choose a vendor who has a customer service department.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheReaperD on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:03AM (2 children)
Remember, you're not the customer, you're the product. They can't have products be making demands of them, can they? They're real customers typically get a real contact.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 05 2018, @02:56PM (1 child)
Don't use youtube.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:08PM
From sig
Your search queries are the windows to the sale.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:06PM (1 child)
Be happy.
What if you got your wish?
Vogon poetry while on hold.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:56AM
Or worse, get told the funniest joke in the world while on hold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ienp4J3pW7U [youtube.com]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:30PM
Get an attorney. They'll probably be in touch with an employee before the 'reply-by' date of the demand letter.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:28AM (16 children)
It is all about profits, nothing else matters. I’m not against profits, I’m against greed that would rather sink our civilization than forego a little profit.
Is like Disney [forbes.com] trying to claim copyright on everything from the Grimm tales to the One Thousand Nights. If they can get away with it, a lot of our culture becomes the property of corporations.
I’ll get a lot of flak from the usual suspects who fail to understand that justice should not be at the whim of Congress. The law should protect all at all times, not just the rich and powerful.
Some people (like Helena Morrisey [theguardian.com] in the UK and or Nick Hanauer [ted.com] in the US) get the idea that we need to fix capitalism before it sparks a revolution that will set us back decades and destroy some of more cherised institutions, like democracy.
Sorry people, but it is the role of government to prevent abuses by corporations and it should act. Either by dismembering the large corporations (Google, Microsoft, Bank of America, Disney, etc.) or regulating their activities so they don’t harm society on their pursuit of profit.
We need capitalism 2.0 pronto
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:11AM (2 children)
Can anyone claim a copyright violation?
What would happen if a few thousand people submitted copyright violations against Disney, or whomever, whenever they post something to youtube?Why, yes in fact, I did happen to write Snow White and the Seven Dawarves. Star Wars too.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:29PM (1 child)
You would be interfering with the operations of Disney and YouTube (or whomever). The tort would be Tortious Interference of Business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference [wikipedia.org]
Per Wikipedia, doing so with malice (i.e. you knew you didn't own their properties and were intentionally messing with them) allows for punitive damages in addition to economic.
But the professor (and most ordinary Joes) doesn't have the legal budget to do the same.
That said, TFA says nothing whatsoever if the professor actually followed the procedure to appeal a ContentID claim.
Even if the composer is long dead, the producer of a specific recording has rights too. I wonder how specific the ID filters are in regards to one over another.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:34PM
From the summary: "the recordings were first published before 1963". I'm guessing this must be a copyright cutoff date in Germany, and it could indicate sound recording copyrights that had already expired before the 2011 sound recording copyright term extension [wikipedia.org] took effect.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:16AM (10 children)
[...]
In other words, let us hand more power to a government that clearly isn't doing its job without even a superficial attempt at making sure that power gets used properly. Further, keep in mind that these companies are already heavily regulated. You're calling for things that are already done.
And dismembering such companies or "regulating" them isn't going to change a thing about copyright law. The law is still broken.
[...]
What's wrong with capitalism 1.0 in the first place? Excessive copyright is a regulatory problem not a capitalism problem. You're not proposing a fix for capitalism (or really proposing a fix for anything at all). Nor is capitalism responsible for the bloated and exponentially growing morass that is developed world regulation. That is what makes fixing copyright (and all the other laws, instances of corruption, etc) so hard. There's only so much public attention to go around. It's not going to get fixed without a dramatic fix of how regulation is created, changed, and culled.
Finally, let's look at proposed capitalism 2.0 solutions from your first link:
We see another pointless call for a minimum wage hike, creation of a corrupt fund for companies which already can borrow their own money, inserting mandatory bullshit into UK corporation bylaws, taxing work and wealth on same basis - already done through such things as capital gains taxes (which they propose to remove), and giving even more power to "nations and regions" which already have too much of it. Looks like we'll need a capitalism 3.0 shortly, if this is what capitalism 2.0 is about.
And the second link complains about wealth inequality without discussing the primary cause of wealth inequality - competition from the developing world. The key dynamic is that wages are constrained while capital is not. Hence, those who have most of their wealth in capital rather than earning potential are relatively more wealthy. For example,
I hope the 22nd-century ideas are better. For example, it's quite clear that economies do tend to equilibrium (inequality != lack of equilibrium) and are quite efficient even in the presence of epic poor management. Moving on:
In another 30 years, China will have reached developed world status and India will be close behind. My take is in another decade more than half the world's population will be in a developed world country. Where's the labor competition going to come from then that will drive the bottom 50 percent to such low income? We'll be running out of cheap labor by then. And automation continues to create better jobs for the ones it takes away.
Finally, just how valuable is the wealth of the 1%? I think it's foolish to treat it at face value, particularly since so much of the world isn't interested in accumulating it and probably couldn't do anything with it, if they did receive it.
My take is instead that the growing wealth inequality that we see, modest as it is, will be reversing itself, and these calls for fixing capitalism or worse ending it, will be seen as the hysteria they are. I continue to find it remarkable how we can take the proven best economical systems and the amazing progress we've made over the past few centuries, and completely discount it as if it didn't happen.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:14AM (2 children)
If I may paraphrase that - we the people should seize back the power that corrupt government has misappropriated. Best example has been the copyright power grab by Disney and company, which predated that disgusting penis head Sonny Boner going to Washington to do their bidding. We the people need to stand up and overturn that nonsense, and put copyright back where it was prior to about 1920. No copyright should be good for more than 10 to 20 years, and it should only be renewed one time, at a prohibitive cost. I'm willing to negotiate the length of that first copyright - neither 10 nor 20 years seems unreasonable. Anywhere in between is good for me.
You may well have a good point with this question and answer. Regulation is lacking. Or, rather, good regulation is lacking. That rat bastard Shkrelli never should have been able to pull his shit. There's a lot of nonsense that should never happen, much of it in the pharmaceuticals. Entertainment as a whole needs serious regulation - and not regulation bought and paid for by the entertainment industry.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 05 2018, @12:39PM (1 child)
I think we can all agree that adding more poor regulation of the sort we're complaining about won't solve anything. That's the situation we're in.
At the federal level in the US, Trump's first year was the lowest increase [cei.org] in regulations (by one of the few measures used, number of pages) in a quarter centuries. It still took over 60k pages to describe. Why is it that Trump is making the most progress towards mitigating one of the obvious ills of the US economic system, its crippling regulatory burden? I doubt he'll touch copyright reform, but he's doing more than a fair number of previous presidents did.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday September 07 2018, @05:46AM
Well, part of the NAFTA renewal includes Canada extending copyright by 25 years, a take down system where a company can accuse a site of infringing copyright and remove it from the internet with no judicial oversight (as if the Canadian courts would stand for that). There's also a bunch of stuff about patents and the pharmaceutical companies that are not being publicized.
The thing with regulations, which do need pruning now and again, is which is being pruned. Removing the food handling regulations from the restaurant industry while leaving various regulations designed to create a high barrier to entry isn't a good way to remove regulations for a hypothetical example.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @03:04PM (6 children)
It is a system that for the most part only answers to the short-term interests of the tiny minority of rich people rather than the vast majority of poor people, that's what's wrong with it. Which is the same problem as capitalism 2.0. It's also the same problem as the feudalism and monarchies that preceded capitalism 1.0, and the Roman Empire before that, and the Roman Republic before that. And the Greek city-states. And probably the Sumerians, ancient Egyptians, and Maya. Oh, and both the Soviet-leaning and Chinese-leaning communists too.
No single political or economic system devised so far has ever simultaneously solved the 2 key problems of social organization on a scale larger than about 200 people:
1. A powerful person or cabal ruining things for everybody else.
2. A mob of ill-informed idiots ruining things for everybody else.
Some combinations of ideas, like northern European social democracy, seem to be working better than many of the alternatives, but there is no panacea currently in existence, and to claim otherwise is mostly to demonstrate ignorance of the problems that existed in thr social systems of another time and/or place.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:03PM
tldr: free market is incompatible with banking and fiat money, capitalism never happened, communism is incompatible with man, communism never happened.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:38AM (4 children)
Well how much answering does that system need to do for the "vast majority" of poor people? It already provides food, shelter, security, and something to do, with a great deal of freedom on how to obtain all that.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:29PM (3 children)
Except when it doesn't. For instance, having people without homes while there are more than enough empty homes available looks like a problem to me. Ditto for situations where lots of food is getting thrown in the garbage while other people are going hungry. As for "something to do", you seem to be claiming that legitimate unemployment cannot exist even though it has ever since feudalism ended.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 07 2018, @03:48AM (2 children)
There's a simple solution to that. Don't allow banks to hold foreclosed property for years at a false pre-2008 valuation.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 07 2018, @03:22PM (1 child)
Another approach: You could create a squatter's rights law similar to what the UK had until quite recently that legalizes breaking into unoccupied buildings and living in them until the owners assert their rights. So, for instance, if an absentee home investor buys up a bunch of property in an area, but doesn't do anything with them, they might find otherwise homeless people occupying those homes, and would need to go through something similar to eviction to remove them. This also incentivizes landlords to reduce homelessness in the area around their properties, since fewer homeless equals lower risk of a squatter moving in.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:58AM
Encourage people to break the law? Well, I guess they'd get a place to sleep in jail, right?
(Score: 1) by Drake_Edgewater on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:55AM (1 child)
I am waiting for "Mars, Ho!: The Movie" produced by Walt Disney Studios, you insensitive clod!
Or maybe Touchstone Pictures [wikipedia.org] will do that.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 07 2018, @03:27PM
I thought "Mars, Ho!" was a sci-fi porno flick!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:38AM (9 children)
Stop expecting Google to supply unlimited server and bandwidth resources. This felow is a professor at a, one supposes, real educational institution. They have servers and bandwidth. Use your own. "They" can't auto ban you, their bots won't be able to touch you and if they serve a real legal notice demanding a takedown for something obviously (and noted on the video) public domain you can sue the ever loving bejesus out of them for making a false claim under oath, assuming the EU version of the laws resemble the DMCA here.
The rampant censorship is bad enough, the worse because it is consuming large amounts of their human resources, but this copyright nonsense is simply generating so much automated activity that no company can hire enough humans to police it. And lets face it, the vast bulk of the copyright claims do have merit. Whether they should, whether copyright should be nigh eternal, is a question beyond YouTube's pay grade.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:58AM
This is exactly what the content MAFIAA should do. Unfortuntaly they will certainly not quit their new favorite playground.
Yes you can and often should host your own but it does not change the fact that youtube is seriously broken, because of the greed of MAFIAA and the greed of google.
Apparently the DMCA faces very similar issues. Sounds like perjury is a selectively enforced felony. DMCA#Abuse_of_takedown_notice [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:11AM
This is the EU, not America. Do it the European way:
Threaten to fine Google 5% of its global turnover for each and every false take down, and let them sort it out with the people making bogus claims.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:09AM (1 child)
how the hell is parent a troll?
in general I hate his comments, but this one is not only on-topic, it's a perfectly reasonable suggestion: this is a teacher putting up videos for HIS STUDENTS; why would it be difficult to distribute a nonyoutube link to them? they meet in person at least once a week.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @02:29PM
there are people around to downvote jmorris no matter what he says
(Score: 5, Insightful) by richtopia on Wednesday September 05 2018, @03:24PM (1 child)
Unfortunately the bandwidth is not the biggest hurdle. YouTube is a content delivery network. People will consider it the sole source for video material searches. Yes you can host your own, but it will be much harder to reach a broad audience.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:27PM
This is not something that I initially thought of. Richtopia is correct, a big part of the merit of Youtube is the CDN. A professor uploading content for his students on campus may not need a CDN if all the students are on campus, but online students, especially those out of the university's city (or even country) would definitely benefit from a CDN. Youtube fits that niche at the right price for most content creators (uploaders): free with the bonus of potential revenue from ads.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:11PM (2 children)
If you don't have it, you can rent servers and bandwidth.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:36PM (1 child)
How do you also rent a recommendation engine? One appears down the right column of the desktop view of YouTube.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:13PM
The context is that you're not trying to re-create YouTube. Nor any social media blight.
You're merely trying to host a video that they can't auto-magically take down without going through a human. Or if they do, it is much easier to sue them.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:30AM (7 children)
It's not too hard to figure out what job title to send it to.
I have 5,000 Facebook Friends. RLY. I was ignoring all their Friend Requests until it occurred to me that accepting them would be a good way to promote my writing.
Now I have 1,000 pr0n spammer friends. They're all flogging just one site. So I mailed a dead tree letter to FB "ATTN: Security, Porn Spammers".
I don't think my one letter is going to motivate Zuckerberg to lift a finger but I've been encouraging others to do the same.
And yes: this really _does_ work well to promote my writing. Every time I post a link to my own site I get 500 hits by the next morning.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:11AM (6 children)
and is there any income correlated with those 500 hits?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:44AM (4 children)
Alas, probably not.
Promotion != food.
Didn't say if anyone *liked* the posts, either, just that they'd been counted as "hits"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @12:03PM (3 children)
There is no such thing as bad advertising
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @12:32PM (1 child)
when I asked whether this brought him any money, I was just wondering whether there are any financial rewards coming from his efforts.
obviously he is "winning" in other ways, since he still does it, and long-term the more people that know about him the better chances there may be financial rewards.
I just wanted to know if at this level of publicity it made a difference (and apparently it does not).
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:07AM
Link Popularity of which Google PageRank is a specific version is Transitive. If you link me and I link Rob Malda, then your link boosts Rob's link popularity.
Only a few technical articles are on my work site but a great many essays are on my personal site. My personal site links my work site.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday September 06 2018, @09:43PM
It may get exposure, but people die of exposure.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:04AM
Among my most deeply-held moral principles is that no one should have to pay to benefit from my hard-won experience.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @04:18PM
How does a platform offer a 'free' service to the world and deal with individual customer issues?
The customers have to deal with platform software or deal with each other.
In this case, there are 2 customers. The proff who posted who posted the public domain content and some 3rd party who claimed it was theirs.
Also some pattern matching software.
The platform software should provide the specific match information that is causing the issue, then put the 2 parties together to sort it out.
The Proff should be able to state his case and the and 3rd party should have to respond.
Each party should tell the platform how and why they think the situation should be resolved.
If both say no problem, then the content should be allowed.
Both parties should be held accountable for their actions as in platform timeout if they are proven wrong in court. (Proff can't post more stuff or 3rd party won't get any more filtering by the platform.)
To support this all the software has to do is provide details for the match, put the parties together and keep a record in case it goes to court.
This shifts the burden of individually dealing fairly with a bunch of folks from the platform provider to the person who feels they are infringed.
This seems better because it is the way it used to before the Internet.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
If it is reasonable to have a $150,000 statutory penalty (in the US) per instance of copyright infringement, then it is fair to have an equal penalty for each defective DMCA notice.
By defective I mean things like:
* filer is not the copyright owner or registered agent
* the work is in the public domain
* the claimed infringement is clearly fair use under the fair use factors
* the DMCA claim doesn't even state a copyright infringement, it merely is trying to silence something the filter doesn't like
This would force DMCA filers to give each DMCA filing at least the "sniff" test.
Oh, they would say, but this doesn't work at scale!
All I can say is: HA HA HA HA HA HA !!
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:03PM
Ya, it shouldnt work at scale for the exact reasons goven by the article. Maybe we just need to re-imagine our economy.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:59PM (2 children)
Transcending the limitations of meatbags yours truly bot went a bit back in time, to have an interview with a serious looking Ludwig van Beethoven.
Bot: Hello, gracious Master or whatever the fuck they call you around here, are you aware people make money off your stuff and prevent others to lawfully spread it for free?
Beethoven: WHAT?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:29PM (1 child)
You obviously visited him at a time when his hearing problems were already serious.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:07PM
Thank you for explaining to me MY OWN JOKE. I am multiprocessor but not schizo you know.
Account abandoned.