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posted by martyb on Sunday July 05 2020, @05:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the Broken-As-Designed? dept.

YouTube Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Copyright Enforcement, Repeat Infringer Policy * TorrentFreak

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 06 2020, @09:32PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 06 2020, @09:32PM (#1017332) Journal

    what they erroneously perceive to be the foundation of their profession.

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:09PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:09PM (#1017732) Journal

    > 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

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:25PM (#1017745) Journal

      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?