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For many years, Google-owned YouTube has been wrestling with the vast amounts of copyright-infringing content being uploaded by users to its platform.
The challenge is met by YouTube by taking down content for which copyright holders file a legitimate infringement complaint under the DMCA. It also operates a voluntary system known as Content ID, which allows larger rightsholders to settle disputes by either blocking contentious content automatically at the point of upload or monetizing it to generate revenue.
A class action lawsuit filed Thursday in a California court by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider tears apart YouTube’s efforts. It claims that the video-sharing platform fails on a grand scale to protect “ordinary creators” who are “denied any meaningful opportunity to prevent YouTube’s public display of works that infringe their copyrights — no matter how many times their works have previously been pirated on the platform.”
The 44-page complaint leaves no stone unturned, slamming YouTube as a platform designed from the ground up to draw in users with the lure of a “vast library” of pirated content and incentivizing the posting of even more material. YouTube then reaps the rewards via advertising revenue and exploitation of personal data at the expense of copyright holders who never gave permission for their work to be uploaded.
The lawsuit further criticizes YouTube for not only preventing smaller artists from accessing its Content ID system but denouncing the fingerprinting system itself, describing it as a mechanism used by YouTube to prevent known infringing users from being terminated from the site under the repeat infringer requirements of the DMCA.
The full complaint can be obtained here (pdf)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @05:45PM (35 children)
Fuck 'em. The law is abusive and deserves nothing but contempt.
Maybe, with it's original 17 years duration and compulsory licensing, it might become respectable again, but not until then
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:11PM (21 children)
Where did you get 17 years?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#History [wikipedia.org]
Here is perhaps the first copyright law (UK), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:20PM (12 children)
I don't remember. I must have transposed part of the number from the year of the original statute.
14 is perfectly acceptable. We still need the compulsory licensing though. We can't allow the bureaucrats to lock down ideas and inventions for any time
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:33PM (3 children)
You didn't read it all. The original was 14 + another 14 if the _author_ requests--which any living author would almost certainly take advantage of.
In other words, that early copyright was 28 years, unless the author decided it wasn't worth extending.
[Not sure how it worked with heirs if the author died during the 14 or 28 year term.]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:52PM (2 children)
It was 14 years, with a possible extension of 14 years. Extensions were actually quite rare. Only if the original author was still alive, still in control of the work, and still deriving enough profit from it to justify taking the trouble to apply for an extension would it become a 28 year term. Most published works entered the public domain after 14 years.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:54AM (1 child)
Source?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @09:22PM
Arik was there, man, he don't need no sources.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday July 05 2020, @07:59PM (7 children)
Bureaucrats don't lock down ideas and inventions except at the behest of their corporate masters.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:25PM (1 child)
That's not strictly true, though I'll admit that it's largely true. Bureaucrats are a diffuse power defending the status quo, and generally oppose change of any sort...unless it makes their job easier, or gives them an opportunity to be promoted.
N.B.: This is true of low and mid-level bureaucrats, but not of the top level ones who are often more interested in personal aggrandizement than of anything related to the nominal job.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:14AM
Nope, I have seen plenty of bureaucrats refuse any kind of attempt to make their jobs "easier" because it would change their work process.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday July 06 2020, @04:27AM (4 children)
The petty bureaucrat can bring down giants
Nobody can match their power of obstruction.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 06 2020, @09:10PM (3 children)
Do you have an example?
Maybe "bureaucrat" is just another one of those imaginary enemies you have to be constantly on the lookout for. There seem to be an awful lot of those.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday July 06 2020, @10:04PM (2 children)
Do you have an example?
For expedited service to your request, please fill out form 27B/6 in triplicate. Be sure to sign and date. An appointment will be set up within six to eight weeks after we receive the forms. Filing fees to be negotiated during the interview
Thank you for your compliance
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday July 06 2020, @10:17PM (1 child)
Right. That would be a no then.
You're just repeating the scary things you've heard on the TV.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday July 06 2020, @10:27PM
Yes, you're right, the world is perfect in every way
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:23PM (7 children)
17 years is, of course, the duration of a slightly different form of intellectual property, the patent.
Yeah, the 1710 Statute of Anne is bandied about as if its mere age makes it holy or something. People today have difficulty understanding the ramifications of copying being so easy. Think how much less they understood 3 centuries ago. At that point, the Gutenberg Press was not quite 2 centuries old, and its disruption to established and entrenched ways of life was so profound and huge, it was still rippling across society. The Gutenberg Press made it possible to do mass education, which is one of the things that finished off the Middle Ages. Can't lord it over educated peasants like a noble could lord it over uneducated ones.
Over the past 40 years, we've developed technology that has made copying several orders of magnitude easier than the printing press could. More than ever, copying belongs to the masses. But instead of seeing the wonderful potential in this, too many artists are crying over what they see as their enormous loss, and reacting with these foolish lawsuits and other futile attempts to roll back technological advance.
One of the ways much 20th century SF is becoming dated is that it's shot through everywhere with references to printing, and even copyright. It's sad to see such blatant and naked bias and propagandizing for what they erroneously perceive to be the foundation of their profession. Our SF has fantastical tech such as Faster Than Light communication or even travel, teleportation, weapons so powerful they can blow apart a planet, immortality, instant food, and so on, but somehow for prose there's still nothing better than copyright.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:33PM (3 children)
Each SF work is generally focused on a narrow raft of changes. Most maintain the existing social order without change, but change the technological background. Or adopt a social order out of communal myth, like monarchy (usually in a highly idealized form).
If you want a story that's based around a replacement for copyright, create the story. It needs to address why the replacement was valid, what problems it solves, etc. It also needs one of the classical human background stories. Romance it typical, but not the only one. Seeking for power is another. And occasional success is a quest to achieve justice (which is going to need to define why the desired goal is just). It's quite doable, but you need a justifiable (in the context of the story) replacement, and you need to explain it, why it's worth struggling to achieve, etc. while not losing your audience.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 06 2020, @02:29PM (1 child)
> If you want a story that's based around a replacement for copyright, create the story.
If you believe I can do that, most flattering. If I can, and I do, would you read it?
> It also needs one of the classical human background stories. Romance it typical, but not the only one. Seeking for power is another
Are you a writer? Published? Not that fans can't make perfectly good suggestions and critiques, but as the common wisdom has it, you have to do something to really know what it's like and to appreciate the difficulties. I've written a little fiction, without trying to publish anything. As you might expect, there's all kinds of ways stories can go wrong. If you can make believable and interesting characters, and the same for the setting, and you have a decent plot in mind, you've only just started. Among the wrong turns is the urge to warp the story into spewing bad propaganda (like Ayn Rand's stuff), and I certainly would not want the story to be only a thinly veiled exposition on what I think could replace copyright. Otherwise, might as well just write an essay.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:21AM
I've only written programs. I fall way down on the "human interest story" part of the job. I tried a couple of times, but even I could tell that it was a failure. But I have put a bit of time into figuring out why I like certain stories and not others.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:50PM
And his story still succinctly describes the parable of ever extended copyright law as a formerly American(now Canadian) draft dodger and poorish author, formerly married to a college educated woman who was supposed to go up on the next shuttle after Challenger to perform the first zero-g dance performance, sadly denied after the loss of Challenger and its first civilian passenger and the political damage losing another would do to the space program. Instead she died on Earth of cancer almost 30 years later, dream unrealized, and us sitting around with our collective thumbs up our ass having learned nothing from either her or her husband's dreams of a better and more beautiful tomorrow, rather in fact showing that the less optimistic outlooks are what we have to look forward to.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 06 2020, @09:32PM (2 children)
I need to pick a nit here. In a way, it does seem that copyright law is the foundation of their profession. Storytelling and book writing have a lot in common. But, a storyteller doesn't care about any copyright nonsense. A book writer, however, does need control over his books if he is to remain a paid professional writer.
When Henry Ford and his fellow entrepeneurs were putting their horseless carriages on American roads, they ruined the buggy whip trade. And - how many people care about that? How many professional buggy whip makers were put out of work?
No, I don't think that the writer's perception is in error, on that one point. But, I do think that it is irrelevant that book writer's profession might be threatened. Mankind surived the obselescence of scribes, right? We'll survive the obselescence of book writers.
I may miss some of the best book writers. But I won't miss them as a class. There will still be story tellers, bards, or whatever you may wish to call them. People will still entertain the masses, and the best entertainers will be rewarded for their talent.
Those book writers who are incapable of making the transition were probably stealing other author's ideas, anyway.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:09PM (1 child)
> A book writer, however, does need control over his books if he is to remain a paid professional writer.
Under the current regime, yes. However, copyright is not the only way to foster writing richly enough that good writers can make a career of it. For centuries, various forms of patronage have existed, and worked. Indeed, copyright itself can be seen as just one way to provide patronage. The basic principle of pooling many small contributions is a sound one. Other laudable purposes that copyright is used for is curbing of plagiarism and steering a portion of the profit made off of public usages towards the artists.
Yet these things can all be done, mechanisms and customs set up, without copyright. And I believe they should be so done, because there's a lot of downsides to copyright. It's not just the vicious, terroristic lawsuits against ordinary citizens who did nothing more than run a file sharing program. It's the confusion and conflation, some of it deliberate, with property rights over material things. We as a nation rejected monarchy, and more generally tyranny of any sort. Copyright enables and empowers a tyranny of ownership of knowledge. It promotes and habituates ownership thinking. One of the weirder things you'll find in a lot of fantasy writing is magically enforced property rights in the form of magic items that can't be stolen, because they just can't, it's part of their magic, or if they can be stolen, they somehow know who the rightful owner is and will not work or only partly work for the thief. For instance, the Elder Wand in the Harry Potter series. And copyright is, most ironically, anti-educational. That poisoning of our thinking is more than anything else why copyright ought to go.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:25PM
Patronage is part of the compensation that artists might expect. But, less formally, Joe Blow will toss a dime, or a dollar, or even a ten into a tip can, or hat, or whatever.
It's less common that it probably should be, but I've seen customers at bars give tips to the musicians. Of course, it's a long time since I spent a night at a bar. ;^) More often, a customer will just buy a drink for the players - and that don't put groceries on the table when the gig is over.
Patronage, as I understand it, requires at least a moderately wealthy person who likes your music, your books, or whatever. With today's Patreon and similar, I suppose that wealth level has gone way down - but a person still needs some disposable income to give away. No need to expect meaningful income from the lower echelons of the working class, right?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jbWolf on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:24PM (6 children)
Hey, hey, hey! Don't lump me in with these jerks. We need something, though. I'm for a 10 year thing myself.
Keep in mind that there are many other options besides the "keep what we have" and "zero copyright" options.
www.jb-wolf.com [jb-wolf.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @06:37PM (5 children)
I'd go one step further and say that copyright protections are only available for works that are available for purchase or distribution in a particular region. If you won't voluntarily make your content available legally, it shouldn't be eligible for copyright protection. I'd also criminalize the use of DRM. This has been abused to distribute rootkits and renders content inaccessible when the DRM servers are taken offline. I'd go beyond civil liability for DRM and criminalize its use altogether.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Sunday July 05 2020, @07:22PM (1 child)
Yes, and that availability test should be agressive. The work has to be available in most typical forms and with comparable for similar works prices. Say for books, just an ondemand print for ridiculous money is not enough to satisfy eligibility for copyright. A movie should be available on most platforms. If they are "rare" people should be free to publish and distribute them for free for the sake of human knowledge.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday July 06 2020, @06:32PM
That is the idea behind compulsory licensing, to ensure access. It should be part and parcel to copyrights and patents so they can't be weaponized.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:41PM (2 children)
I don't feel that DRM should be criminal, but it should prevent a work being eligible for copyright UNLESS it was deposited in non-DRM encoded form in various "libraries of deposit". (This is one of the few references I was able to locate quickly https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/our-work/legal-deposit [ox.ac.uk] ) The works would then become publicly copyable when the copyright expired. And there need to be multiple libraries of deposit in different legal jurisdictions. I'd also propose that if one of the libraries were to be destroyed, whether by fire, flood, earthquake, acts of war, or legal or financial means, copies of its works held in other libraries become immediately publicly available.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @06:44AM
Ooopsie, we lost all of that sweet data, sorry for that!
(Score: 1) by wArlOrd on Monday July 06 2020, @11:19PM
Copyright extends enormous potential rewards and power to copyright holders (can anyone say statutory damages).
I think the prospective copyright applicants (yes, let's fix this part of Berne right now) should choose either:
1) Accept copyright and all it promises, or
2) Put your money on Digital Restrictions Management without copyright.
Your choice, but only one, and no backsies!
Then we can work towards restoring a sane length of copyright.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @07:06PM (2 children)
Perhaps Soylentnews, Techdirt, EFF, or Public Knowledge can host a petition to amend copyright law to something more sane and less ones sided.
A: Duration time needs to be shortened.
B: Penalty structure needs to be less one sided. Harsher penalties for false takedowns, infringement penalties should be more reasonable
C: It should be opt in and you must opt in before releasing the content. Perhaps the LOC should store the information so when it does hit the public domain.
BTW, Mozilla has a petition to oppose the Earn it act
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/oppose-earn-it-act/ [mozilla.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @07:13PM (1 child)
(Same poster)
BTW, I don't like the fact that Mozilla doesn't seem to give a count of how many people signed a petition.
Petition transparency is a good thing because establishing the number of people that signed a petition allows us to either discuss how many people signed the petition and, if many people signed it, we can discuss how the government, a government that's supposed to represent the public interest, isn't responding to the will/interests of the people. If not many people signed the petition we can either discuss whether it's because people aren't well informed or because they don't really care. If it's because they aren't well informed we can discuss how to remedy that. If it's because they don't really care then we can't really do much about it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2020, @11:04PM
Mozilla is not interested in change, they're interested in your email address so they can sell it along with the fact that you support child pornographers.
(Score: 1) by Opportunist on Monday July 06 2020, @10:55AM (2 children)
The problem is not the law itself but how it can be abused by large studios and how YouTube implements its execution. The way YouTube set it up it can well happen to you that you create something, some large studio infringes on your copyright and when you try to fight them, they get the right to your content with you having no recourse.
At this point it's pretty much impossible for a small creator to fight any large studios because YouTube simply goes by the logic that it's easier to fight the small creator without legal representation than a large studio that has a whole staff of copyright lawyers with nothing better to do than to tie up YouTube's copyright handling department.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 06 2020, @09:40PM (1 child)
About the time that I was an infant, that statement would have been true.
Walt Disney led the movement to increase copyright periods, about the time I was starting elementary school. Sonny Bono was elected to office, with pretty much the express purpose of introducing yet more extreme copyright law. The laws have only grown worse throughout my lifetime.
Today, the laws are vulgar. Life plus 75 years? How about life plus 1000 years? FFS, civilizations might rise and fall, and some corporate SOB is still squeezing pennies out of some patent, hundreds of years old? I used the word "vulgar". Yes, copyright laws are more vulgar than any pornographic trash you might find on your favorite tube. And, it all started with Walt Disney.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday July 08 2020, @08:22PM
The law itself isn't the problem. That is, that there is a copyright law. It also means that large companies can't simply take what you created and sell it cheaper than you could.
That it lasts essentially eternally is the problem. Lifetime of the artist + 75 years is insane. To put it into perspective, if Ringo and Paul died today, "Love me do", published in 1962 would go into public domain in 2095, 130 years after its creation.