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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: 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.