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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: 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.