The internet gets dry-docked - US Copyright office proposes to remove or reduce copyright safe harbors from Online Service Providers

[rcmaehl]

Sources:
Gizmodo (Quote Source)

US Copyright Office Report

 

Summary:
The US Copyright office has released a 195 page report recommending stronger enforcement for copyright owners and reducing the power of Online Providers such as Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.

 

Media:

 

Quotes/Excerpts:

Quote

The U.S. Copyright Office has released a long-awaited, 192-page report that could give the music and movie industry an opening to fight for stricter enforcement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The report concludes that...DMCA is largely working, but also found that...safe harbor provision...that protects service providers like YouTube from copyright liability...is currently “askew” and may be in need of tweaks. Open internet advocates....agree that...safe harbor...is foundational to the internet...,but have criticized the DMCA takedown system for encouraging overzealous corporate censorship and destroying rights to fair use of copyrighted material. Web users have also experienced the takedown provisions....as an omnipresent threat that exposes them to things like unfair harassment by platforms’ automated rights enforcement systems and copyright trolls. The Copyright Office report, however, goes the other direction. It identifies the problems as primarily affecting rightsholders, and while it is “not recommending any wholesale changes to section 512,” it recommended adjustments that would make it easier for corporations to issue takedown notices. “While [online service providers], supported in many aspects by user advocacy groups, report satisfaction with the current operation of the safe harbors, that view is not shared by the other intended beneficiaries of the section 512 system, including authors, creators, and rightsholders of all sorts and sizes,” "the scale of online copyright infringement and the lack of effectiveness of section 512 notices to address that situation remain significant problems.” Congress will supposedly update the DMCA this year. DMCA has left too much power in the hands of online service providers like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to determine who qualifies as a “repeat infringer” whose account must be terminated under the law. Finally, the report also said Congress should also consider tweaking parts of the law that allow rightsholders to subpoena online service providers to identify copyright infringers, suggesting that clarifying whether it applies to internet service providers may help corporations go after peer-to-peer pirates. Changes to the DMCA could have a massive and unforeseeable impact. When the law was drafted in 1998, major web platforms like Facebook and YouTube were years away from launching and may never have at all were it not for the Section 512 provisions.

 

My Thoughts:

Needless to say any such a reform to DMCA is gonna cause all sorts of waves, issues, and over-reactions to prevent legal liability. With the potential loss or major modification of Safe Harbor provisions is going to cause all sorts of hassle for any websites that host user created content. Everything from Forums, Video Services, and even news outlets are going to have to take a while to ensure they don't get put out of business by accidentally violating the new DMCA. If these are implemented it's definitely going to be a bumpy ride similar to Articles 13 and 17.

Edited May 23, 2020 by rcmaehl
Minor formatting change

[Techstorm970]

All I hear here is the government saying that the staff at Vevo, YouTube, Google, etc. can go suck a fat knob.

 

I like that!

[Dravinian]

10 minutes ago, Techstorm970 said:

All I hear here is the government saying that the staff at Vevo, YouTube, Google, etc. can go suck a fat knob.

 

I like that!

Except, they won't, they will just clamp down on any content that contains any material that might belong to someone else.

 

Whether it is fair use or not, they won't care.  So bye to any content criticising music, movies, tv shows.  Good bye to any content teaching you how to do anything that already exists, want to play a peice of music...youtube won't be the place, want to write something, a fiction perhaps? Well there won't be any tutorials on youtube referring to any giants of the field that help you understand what works and what doesn't.

 

These things always have unforeseen consequences, because the people that make these decisions are either 1, so thick it is frightening, or 2, have no idea how technology works....it's a series of tubes...

[ARikozuM]

How about we abolish the protections for copyright and bring back competition? Sounds fair that one shouldn't rest on their laurels once they get large enough. 

[Trik'Stari]

2 hours ago, Techstorm970 said:

All I hear here is the government saying that the staff at Vevo, YouTube, Google, etc. can go suck a fat knob.

 

I like that!

But at the same time I hear the government sucking the knob of the likes of the RIAA, and honestly fuck them.

 

All I see is: "We're going to go harder after piracy.", and that bothers me.

[billcxsby]

5 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

But at the same time I hear the government sucking the knob of the likes of the RIAA, and honestly fuck them.

 

All I see is: "We're going to go harder after piracy.", and that bothers me.

as long as 123movies and those free cartoon sites don't get taken down i don't care.

[Trik'Stari]

Just now, billcxsby said:

as long as 123movies and those free cartoon sites don't get taken down i don't care.

I would think that they would be prime targets.

 

I wouldn't mind so much if content was reasonably priced, didn't have geo-locking, and most streaming sites that I've tried, have had horrible infrastructure.

 

For example, Funimation. I have gigabit internet and it still takes a solid 20 seconds to start playing an episode, from the time I click play. I'm not going to pay for that, if that's the kind of "infrastructure" you're going to provide.

I assume funimation did like a lot of companies seems to these days, and spent more of their budget on marketing than actually spending money on being able to provide the service they're selling in the first place.

[billcxsby]

1 minute ago, Trik'Stari said:

I would think that they would be prime targets.

 

I wouldn't mind so much if content was reasonably priced, didn't have geo-locking, and most streaming sites that I've tried, have had horrible infrastructure.

 

For example, Funimation. I have gigabit internet and it still takes a solid 20 seconds to start playing an episode, from the time I click play. I'm not going to pay for that, if that's the kind of "infrastructure" you're going to provide.

I assume funimation did like a lot of companies seems to these days, and spent more of their budget on marketing than actually spending money on being able to provide the service they're selling in the first place.

Seriously? 20 seconds, with gigabit? I have 75 mbps wifi, and on one of the kimcartoon sites, the night an episode of rick and morty aired I watched it on that site (there would be heavy traffic on it), and on their site which isn't a giant corporation with servers and shit. When I clicked on it about 3/6 of the different servers would load instantly @ 1080p. that's honestly sad

[Trik'Stari]

4 minutes ago, billcxsby said:

Seriously? 20 seconds, with gigabit? I have 75 mbps wifi, and on one of the kimcartoon sites, the night an episode of rick and morty aired I watched it on that site (there would be heavy traffic on it), and on their site which isn't a giant corporation with servers and shit. When I clicked on it about 3/6 of the different servers would load instantly @ 1080p. that's honestly sad

It was atrocious, the last time I used it. Which was probably more than a year ago now.

 

It was bad enough for me to cancel the subscription before my free trial ended.

[ARikozuM]

13 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

I would think that they would be prime targets.

 

I wouldn't mind so much if content was reasonably priced, didn't have geo-locking, and most streaming sites that I've tried, have had horrible infrastructure.

 

For example, Funimation. I have gigabit internet and it still takes a solid 20 seconds to start playing an episode, from the time I click play. I'm not going to pay for that, if that's the kind of "infrastructure" you're going to provide.

I assume funimation did like a lot of companies seems to these days, and spent more of their budget on marketing than actually spending money on being able to provide the service they're selling in the first place.

Funimation has to be THE WORST place for anime. It's like they give you the entire 4K episode and have your own PC downscale it. 

[Aimi]

7 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Funimation has to be THE WORST place for anime. It's like they give you the entire 4K episode and have your own PC downscale it. 

Even without terrible loading time, anything Funimation handles subs/dubs for ends up bad.

[Bombastinator]

I’ve been rewatching bleach on Netflix lately dubbed.  The script is probably awful but it’s a good way to soap your brains out.  Anyone who hasn’t watched Bleach btw it’s one of the best serialized anime ever made.  Goes on forever too.  Hundreds of episodes.

[justpoet]

15 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I’ve been rewatching bleach on Netflix lately dubbed.  The script is probably awful but it’s a good way to soap your brains out.  Anyone who hasn’t watched Bleach btw it’s one of the best serialized anime ever made.  Goes on forever too.  Hundreds of episodes.

Nowhere near as long, but I really liked Trigun.

 

19 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Summary:

Needless to say any such a reform to DMCA is gonna cause all sorts of waves, issues, and over-reactions to prevent legal liability. With the potential loss or major modification of Safe Harbor provisions is going to cause all sorts of hassle for any websites that host user created content. Everything from Forums, Video Services, and even news outlets are going to have to take a while to ensure they don't get put out of business by accidentally violating the new DMCA. If these are implemented it's definitely going to be a bumpy ride similar to Articles 13 and 17.

Back to the topic at hand though.  DMCA is a pretty horrible implementation to start with.  There's so much wrong with it that if people in charge had a clue, this would actually provide the right time to revisit and rebuild it.  Unfortunately, they'd likely just find a way to mess it up even worse.  That being said, it is definitely fair to say that many content distribution platforms get significant revenue from non-licensed work.  It is not an unfair comment to say they shouldn't, and the laws should apply to them when they're selling the goods (Ads and user data) reliant on the published material.  If anything, this will help push decentralization of content again, so everybody isn't constantly at the whim of Youtube/Google and FaceBook  and their ridiculous policies of censorship for whatever random reason they feel like at the moment.  If this means companies like FloatPlane and other direct distribution get more prevalent as options, even if there is pain along the way, then bring it on.

Edited May 23, 2020 by Glenwing
Off-topic political discussion removed

[Bombastinator]

The troop movements thing I know is wrong.  Open skies came out of the Cuban missile crisis.  And the U2 and balckbird programs.   It was about detecting nuclear missile installations.  The specifics are in the wording of the agreement.  Satalites are (were?) covered by open skies.  My memory is there was an alteration made to make some of the later star wars stuff even doable, because some of it was designed to violate the agreement. 

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

 

Summary:

Needless to say any such a reform to DMCA is gonna cause all sorts of waves, issues, and over-reactions to prevent legal liability. With the potential loss or major modification of Safe Harbor provisions is going to cause all sorts of hassle for any websites that host user created content. Everything from Forums, Video Services, and even news outlets are going to have to take a while to ensure they don't get put out of business by accidentally violating the new DMCA. If these are implemented it's definitely going to be a bumpy ride similar to Articles 13 and 17.

If you actually read it ( https://www.copyright.gov/policy/section512/section-512-full-report.pdf ), you'll find that a lot of the issues are issues that have been brought up before:

 

- Cloudflare and other caching/proxy/vpn services acting in bad faith (page 34, page 92)

- Youtube and other content hosting systems acting in bad faith (119 references)

- Copyright holders acting in bad faith

- Delays not long enough/too long to actually address underlying issues

- automation stall tactics, no ownership of issues (page 32)

 

For example, the DMCA process for google/youtube, twitter, tumblr, imgur, and cloudflare are effectively useless, as they are forms that require input that puts the entire onus on the copyright holder, so the hoster can claim no knowledge of the infringing material, when onus should be on the host once notified to have the "one who uploaded" the content to block the content,  produce the license and send it to the copyright holder within 24 hours. Or you know, actually upload the license to the website so it could be sent automatically upon a DMCA. The counter-notice situation is basically a "then sue me" notification, but when sites only let you cross-check 1-10 items at a time, and don't allow you to send them the 100,000 stolen items, it is a stall tactic designed to frustrate the copyright owner. 

 

To "remove" things from google, it can easily two two days of copying each link, one by one, from google search. Instead of oh "this narrow query should only return this site, as no other site has been licensed to host it" 

 

Cloudflare is incredibly bad for this, and since they are acting as an intermediary for the content, they should also do so for all communications between the copyright holder and the claimed infringement. If I have 100,000 items stolen by one site, then I want to see what bullshit license the pirate site claims to have, otherwise I want cloudflare to drop them as a client. It's not like I don't know which subscribers are violating the terms of service, but sending them an invoice for a few million dollars isn't going produce anything. eg if you hide the identity of your subscriber, then you are taking 100% responsibility for any claims made against them.

 

Then there are VPN's which have largely been established to engage in piracy under the claim of "privacy protection" and to evade geoblocking. Geoblocking is also a BS maneuver, but privacy protection is also a flat out lie in most cases since the VPN's usually operate from a country with none (eg China.)

 

Copyright holders acting in bad faith also need to be addressed, as fair use arguments are ignored completely, and the DMCA was only designed for taking down pirated, unlicensed, material not in public domain. It was not intended and should never be used as retaliation, censorship, pilfering the public domain

(see https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/copyright-bots-and-classical-musicians-are-fighting-online-the-bots-are-winning/2020/05/20/a11e349c-98ae-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html )

 

Where the happy medium could exist is that each piece of content that is uploaded to a site like youtube, or some image hosting site like imgur, needs to post the actual license under which the uploader has uploaded the content, and then any claim made against the content has to be accepted (eg this is actually in the content, fair use claim), rejected (eg this is not the claimed content at all), negotiate (the claimed copyright holder will be asked if they will license this content under something broader other than fair use, and if not the content is cut (for video) or muted (for music) from the uploader's upload), everything licensed will then appear under a "licensed media" tab. This would also make the process more transparent for people who want to use that content, and the copyright holder can not blanket refuse a license for anything reasonable.  eg if someone makes an AMV or a mashup, that uses the video of one rights holder but the audio of another, will have two links appear at the beginning of the video, one to purchase the music, and one to purchase the video from youtube, before the video plays in place of the typical 5 second ad. Thus any AMV thus promotes the source material, regardless of contextual use. If there are multiple rights owners, only the original rights owner gets to claim it (eg Nintendo can make a claim for Super Mario music, not Sony (who is the one actually making the claims.)

 

As for dealing with content strikes, these should be eliminated for all but flagrant disregard of copyright (eg uploading entire movies, video game footage, comic book images, reaction videos, and such) where any transformative effort was primarily to evade copyright controls. Particularly in the case of "fansubs" and "scanlation" efforts. In the case of localization efforts, the original copyright owner should be requested to license the unlicensed content, but lock the distribution to only users browsing in that language and logged into the site so that the unlicensed localized content is not discovered as a way to violate the original or licensed version. This also permits a loophole for content to be legally licensed in markets where the copyright holder has no means of reaching otherwise. Again, however, the site must post the license and link to the copyright holders authorized version.

 

Sites like Pixiv and Nico Nico Douga in Japan have the same problem that Tumblr/Imgur and Youtube have in Western markets. That people will steal something from one site and post it on the other, and the only reason the copyright holder ever hears about it is because the unlicensed version overtakes their own version in their home country. Western artists are particularly aggrieved when their images get posted to facebook/twitter without a link to the source. The siloed content of Facebook is especially terrible because facebook wants to keep all the ad revenue for itself, so even if the copyright owner posts the images to facebook itself, the copyright owner gets nothing for it.

 

Remember the "This is Fine" dog? 

https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/this-is-fine-dog-meme-comic-kc-green-interview.html

 

Meme's are, at their core, copyright infringement, and visits to most meme's on the "know your meme" site usually has broken video after broken video, a consequence of copyright holders not paying attention to what they're taking down, as most meme's fall squarely into a fair use "commentary" aspect.

 

Page 34

Quote

Finally, rightsholders say that other developments that obscure the identity of internet users have further complicated the notice-and-takedown process and, more generally, copyright enforcement online.155 These take two forms. The first is technologies that anonymize user data or mask the location of hosting services. These include reverse proxy services that sit between the internet and the web servers that make up the internet, forwarding requests from internet users to web servers and collecting responses from those web servers so that web servers never communicate directly with internet users.156 The second development comes from new foreign laws that limit how OSPs may use and share user information.157 Though there may be technological reasons for anonymizing data or masking location or important policy considerations that support increasing internet user privacy, these business and policy decisions tip the balance away from copyright owners by making it more difficult for them to identify infringers.158

 

Page 87

Quote

The biggest source of conflict between stakeholders on the scope of the safe harbors is whether courts’ application of the section 512(c) safe harbor for “storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider”457 has swept in services that go beyond serving up content “at the direction of a user.”

 

Courts have held that section 512(c) includes video-hosting sites that make copies of videos in different encoding schemes (transcoding), deliver videos to a user’s browser cache at the user’s request (playback), use algorithms to identify and display related videos, and syndicate content to a third party; 458 online storage lockers that are used to display or disseminate copyright protected content;459 and e-commerce sites that provide a platform for users to market and sell their products.460 Courts have reasoned that these services qualify for the section 512(c) safe harbor because their activities are “related” to the activity of storing user-uploaded content.

Page 92

Quote

iii. Section 512(b) and (d) Safe Harbors The section 512(b) and (d) safe harbors for system caching and linking, respectively, do not appear to raise the same issues as the other two safe harbors. The system caching safe harbor has not received much judicial attention, but in Field v. Google, Inc., the court deemed storage of 14 to 20 days as “temporary,” and thus covered by section 512(b). 488 The court also ruled that a copyright owner directed their content to another person (the search engine) when the copyright owner posted content online without using the robots.txt script, which tells search engines not to crawl the content. 489 In other words, the court said that unless a copyright owner took an action to prevent a search engine from crawling, the copyright owner had consented to caching activities. Section 512(d), for its part, has been interpreted to include traditional web services such as search and linking,490 as well as a social bookmarking service that “enable[d] individuals who have similar tastes to point one another (and actually provide one another access) to online materials that cater to those tastes, by bookmarking materials on the social-bookmarking service’s website.”491 Websites that traffic in providing connections to copyright-protected content, such as torrent websites, also have been found to fit within the threshold requirement for information location tools, but some such OSPs have lost the section 512(d) safe harbor because they violated other criteria, particularly red flag knowledge of infringing activities.492

Page 94

Quote

Notably, stretching section 512(c) to cover any activities remotely related to “storage” of the content, no matter how attenuated, has affected the balance of section 512 against copyright owners in a way that it does not appear Congress intended. The Office believes that even if section 512(c) was meant to include some “related services,” Congress did not intend to include related services that modify the content or that promote consumption of specific content, rather than just increasing access to the content. If Congress determines that this change to the original balance of section 512 is, as a policy matter, undesirable, then Congress may wish to step in with clear statutory language.

 

Page 188

Quote

a) Notice-and-Staydown The proposal that has attracted the most attention both from participants in the Study982 and from outside commentators983 is the adoption of a “staydown” requirement for OSPs.984 One proponent describes such a requirement as follows: Once a webhost is on notice that a work is being infringed, it should not receive continued safe harbor protection unless it takes reasonable measures to remove any copies of the same work reposted by the same user and also takes down all infringing copies of the work that bear the same reasonable indicia provided by the rightsholder.985 Some form of staydown requirement was endorsed by rightsholders both big and small.986 Rightsholders’ primary argument in favor of adopting a staydown requirement is that such an approach is necessary to deal with the whack-a-mole problem: the reappearance on an online service (often in short order) of content that was already the subject of a takedown notice.987 In discussing the whack-a-mole problem, rightsholders sometimes conflate two separate phenomenon: (i) websites designed (in bad faith) with a “technological Pez dispenser” system that creates a list of unique URLs for a given piece of content, “dispensing” the next URL once the previous one has been removed due to a takedown notice;988 and (ii) the repeated upload, often by multiple users, of the same content to a single website both before and after a takedown notice had been sent. 989 The former type of activity is likely to be outside the scope of what Congress originally intended section 512 to govern. Bad-faith OSPs that encourage infringement also tend to be rejected for safe harbor protections by most courts once litigation is brought. 990 Thus, this type of activity likely requires a solution beyond just changing section 512, such as one focused on coordinated enforcement activity. The latter activity is, to some degree, the inevitable result of millions of users uploading hours of content a day in the absence of some form of filtering technology or active monitoring by the OSP.991 Many rightsholders argue that a staydown requirement is particularly necessary to address the burden on small creators of policing infringing content online.992 As one Study commenter notes: While . . . [staydown] would still require rights holders to monitor many different OSP’s and to send complaints to any or all of them whenever infringing material was discovered, this would be a heavy but finite and therefore reasonable burden. By contrast, in today’s world and under current copyright law as practiced, that burden is effectively infinite and therefore not reasonable.993 The assumption of most commentators during the Study was that an OSP could address the second whack-a-mole concern and comply with a staydown requirement through technological means,994 either via a sui generis content filtering system developed by that OSP, such as YouTube’s Content ID system,995 or off-the-shelf filtering technologies, such as that offered by Audible Magic.996

Page 189

 

Quote

Opponents of a staydown system, including OSPs and user advocacy groups, note several concerns with such a system. First among these is concern about the impact such filtering technologies would have on free expression and speech interests.998 Many opponents note that technology cannot determine whether use of rightsholders’ material included in uploaded content is done pursuant to a license or constitutes fair use.999 Even after the potential advent of such technological capabilities, some commenters fear a staydown requirement would turn OSPs into “gatekeepers” of online speech.1000 Some users and online content creators argue that OSPs had already become such gatekeepers as a result of section 512 and DMCA+ systems like Content ID, which they maintain regularly sweeps up content they believe makes fair use of third-party materials along with infringing content, and should be scaled back even from current standards.1001 Additionally, some OSPs voice concern that takedowns resulting from filtering technologies would impact non-profit resources like open source repositories and Wikipedia in a particularly negative way.1002 In response to these concerns, some rightsholders sought to narrow the focus to content that is identical to the noticed content, or to full-length content.1003 OSPs, however, resist the idea that filtering for full-length content is an appropriate application of a staydown requirement, maintaining that rightsholders should continue to address each appearance of the same content on an individual basis.

 

I'm not fixing the formatting, if you want to read it, just go to the page.

[Beskamir]

RIP, guess copyright's just gonna keep getting more broken until we won't even be allowed to talk about copyrighted content in person without having to pay royalties.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Beskamir said:

RIP, guess copyright's just gonna keep getting more broken until we won't even be allowed to talk about copyrighted content in person without having to pay royalties.

That is what the MPAA/RIAA/BSA/ESA would prefer yes.

 

Now this is just more of a canary-in-the-coal-mine thing:

 

• The RIAA, want any use of music in any context to be paid to them. Not the artists.
• The MPLC want any use of film and tv shows, in any context, paid to them.
• The BSA wants you to volunteer any unlicensed software, to them, they operate on behalf of Autodesk, Microsoft, Adobe, etc
• The ESA , seems to have no equivalent to the MPAA/RIAA, however they do certainly operate on behalf of Nintendo

That's is effectively how it's always been. No public performance, no sampling, no news, no satire, no parody, no nothing allowed.

 

It's overreach, and you can actually thank Youtube and some websites like Newgrounds for telling these companies that they need to consider fair use, and will not pull anything for censorship* reasons.

 

However, large companies are more willing to capitulate to a legal threat, as they're seen as big piggybanks to hit for a payout over the individual.

 

I think Leonard French (video on the first page) did make a good suggestion here though. Instead of trying to increase punishment with fines (under the assumption that all infringement is the same), lower it and make it more of a disincentive. eg if someone uploads a full movie that they have no permission to have, just straight up fine the youtube user one time, and pull it. For anything less than straight piracy have the rights owner negotiate a license for that use, and allow the user to withdraw (delete it themselves) if they do not wish to do this, or have youtube automatically cut/mute/replace the claimed parts. 

 

What I'd like to see is when a video has a claim on it, that the claimant be named, so it's transparent who is doing the takedowns.

 

But that's just youtube. There are sites out there that are not even pretending they are piracy sites, hiding behind cloudflare. One change that should happen is that before anonymization is even turned on, CF or whatever else, the site should have a working DMCA link for rights owners to contact directly, and if the site is unwilling to remove the content, CF should drop the customer entirely. I can think of at least a dozen sites that operate in exactly the same manner. All their content is stolen, there's no DMCA link, they use "pez-dispenser" url's for downloading files when they're taken down by their file hosts (who sometimes accept DMCA's) 

 

I've also run into cases where sites that are similar to imgur, where the site looks legit at first, but sending a DMCA to them just doesn't do anything. They ask for more information... that is already in the email.

 

*China appears to be the exception to the rule about censorship.

[Souchira]

Copyright is important but right now there is too little responsibility with the copyright holder to actually prove that they have the rights over a piece of content.

 

Just look at what Sony did and is still doing with their scorched earth tactics when it comes to The Last of Us 2 leaks. Striking actual leaks, fine but many news channels and discussions channels that only discussed the topic got hit to.

 

Or the ridiculous situation with Suzy Lu using the DMCA system to strike down content she didn't agree with claiming she has the copyright on her face (which she doesn't/can't have).

https://youtu.be/YqtNzodB-u4

 

Or the bizarre instance where a tweet from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) talking about abusive DMCA takedown requests was taken down itself.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/15/18311091/piracy-tweet-dmca-takedown-request-starz-eff-american-gods

 

When someone strikes you with a DMCA you are basically guilty until you go to court to prove otherwise. Which is not how this should work.

 

Lowering the bar even further, let alone moving this process outside of federal court will be extremely damaging to pretty much every legitimate content creator. Double so for channels that do news or discussions topics where content of other parties is used in fair use. These, mostly small, businesses don't have the financial or legal power to actually take this to court and the Sony's and Warner Brothers of the world know this, instead there should be more responsibility on those multi billion dollar companies.

 

Some more watching to go with it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1zDCgJzZUy-ULKii2yP9AY-Emo1_G8xN

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

The only safe harbor... is at the bay...

[Bombastinator]

On 5/24/2020 at 3:15 PM, Souchira said:

Copyright is important but right now there is too little responsibility with the copyright holder to actually prove that they have the rights over a piece of content.

 

Just look at what Sony did and is still doing with their scorched earth tactics when it comes to The Last of Us 2 leaks. Striking actual leaks, fine but many news channels and discussions channels that only discussed the topic got hit to.

 

Or the ridiculous situation with Suzy Lu using the DMCA system to strike down content she didn't agree with claiming she has the copyright on her face (which she doesn't/can't have).

https://youtu.be/YqtNzodB-u4

 

Or the bizarre instance where a tweet from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) talking about abusive DMCA takedown requests was taken down itself.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/15/18311091/piracy-tweet-dmca-takedown-request-starz-eff-american-gods

 

When someone strikes you with a DMCA you are basically guilty until you go to court to prove otherwise. Which is not how this should work.

 

Lowering the bar even further, let alone moving this process outside of federal court will be extremely damaging to pretty much every legitimate content creator. Double so for channels that do news or discussions topics where content of other parties is used in fair use. These, mostly small, businesses don't have the financial or legal power to actually take this to court and the Sony's and Warner Brothers of the world know this, instead there should be more responsibility on those multi billion dollar companies.

 

Some more watching to go with it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1zDCgJzZUy-ULKii2yP9AY-Emo1_G8xN

 

Removing that requirement causes other problems that make things even more abusive though.  I’m not saying that isn’t a valid complaint though.  Copywrite appears to be a complex nested and interlocked problem.

[mr moose]

If youtube didn't automatically transfer all ad revenue to the copyright complainant and instead temp blocked the video until the offending content was either reviewed or removed then a lot (if not all) of the nuisance and troll copyright claims would disappear.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

On 5/22/2020 at 7:28 PM, ARikozuM said:

How about we abolish the protections for copyright and bring back competition? Sounds fair that one shouldn't rest on their laurels once they get large enough. 

Copywrite law used to be a lot more strict.  Disney took it out behind the woodshed in the 90’s and did some fairly unspeakable things to it. 

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

If youtube didn't automatically transfer all ad revenue to the copyright complainant and instead temp blocked the video until the offending content was either reviewed or removed then a lot (if not all) of the nuisance and troll copyright claims would disappear.

 

 

You would hope. But some people view Youtube as a dumping ground for any random video they found/stole from another site, or as a way to archive music/videos they themselves personally ripped, but didn't get permission, under the basis of "better to forgive than forget"

 

Under some conditions, yes, I do agree it's better to upload a video you think needs to be shared (particularly if it's news-worthy, or the copyright owner is unclear) and if it gets taken down later, just ask for a license to put it back up. Problem solved for most of the unintentional/uneducated level of copyright infringement, and meme's. If you immediately go after anyone who uploads incidental copyright infringement (which is what a lot of the BS MPAA/RIAA takedowns are in effect) then it does act as a censorship chilling effect, and a fair use claim should be written in stone for these sites.

 

Like this is what I would consider a better compromise for "fair use" (keeping in mind that fair use has nothing set in stone, legally, on purpose.)

 

- In general, using less than 10% of the source material, in published order. (Eg 30 seconds of a 5 minute song, 9 minutes of a 90 minute movie (including credits)) (repeating scenes or audio would not count against this), for entertainment software, this applies against the use of both game assets and scenario (eg recording entire game cutscenes would not be a permitted use, transcoding entire audio tracks would like not be acceptable.)

 

Reviews of film, music and game content typically run into a problem where their content gets flagged simply because the content is present, without a fair use consideration. YT's content ID considers the use of 10 seconds and 10 minutes of the same video the same as having the entire content, and this is just not reasonable. If someone cuts a 90 minute video up into 10x9 minute videos, this would also be seen as infringement since 100% of the uploaded video is from one source video. For the 10% rule to apply, not only must it use no more than 10% of the source material, but also make up no more than 10% of the new piece of content in published order. So you can't simply re-order the scenes of a film and upload it as a "my cut" of a film, nor can you upload the entire film with the visual's backwards, or played chronologically backwards, or played at 2x speed, or any other cut/edit that encompasses more than 10% and still retains the beginning, middle and end of the film.

 

- Exceptions for Localization. Scripts, Lyrics, Subtitles/image overlays, and music sheets (or MIDI's) for the purposes of localizing content will not be considered infringement provided they are not distributed with the content they are for, and the content they are for is easily identified.

 

eg the sheet music to "Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata" is public domain, even if someone else transcribes it or makes a MIDI of it. A recording of said song, or a midi re-creation, would be considered it's own unique copyright, but because anyone can recreate the song, only the original copyright holder may make a claim, and since Beethoven is dead, no claim shall ever be forthcoming. 300 people can make their own recordings of Moonlight Sonata, remix it, change the instruments, add lyrics, but none may claim ownership of it. As long as the instructions to reproduce the source material, are not the source material, it should not be considered infringement. Covers of songs can only be claimed by the original copyright owner. Fansubs and licensed materials can only be claimed by the original copyright owner, as they will be the only ones with the information to know what the license is. Regardless of any license a third party has, if the first party has licensed a third party to operate on their behalf, then the third party must notify the first party of every takedown filed in order for any license misunderstandings to be be expediently resolved.

 

- Content that has a visible watermark (eg a logo at the front of a film or a video game, an URL in an image), shall not have the watermark removed, and any fair use claim with the content must not remove the watermark, or it will automatically be considered an attempt to disguise the origin of copyrighted material and will be treated as willful infringement. Regardless of any amount sampled.

 

- Content with invisible watermarks (eg music id3 tags, image EXIF, and so forth) shall not have this information stripped, which means sites like Twitter, Imgur, facebook, etc, need to stop stripping all meta tags from content that is uploaded and only anonymize geolocation data at the direction of the user (eg 'automatically remove geolocation data from photos taken near (HOME/WORK)') while leaving timestamps, copyright and authorship fields intact.

 

Between the two watermark situations above, it would not be fair use to remove or disguise content that has a watermark, but a third party use of the content can make a fair use claim provided that the watermarks and meta tags are intact for the copyright owner, and automated systems to identify it.

 

What Youtube, and other content providers should permit, is any user to go to the copyright owner's version of a piece of content and upload a localized data fragment (eg subtitles, translated lyrics, game mod localization, etc) and attribute the localization to that user. The content owner would then pay the user if their localized data results in a direct sale (eg a film being purchased and watched with that subtitle data) or if one localization is preferred over their own localization data (such in the case as three different camps of "more literal" and "more adapted", and "dubtitle" versions of english subtitles for foreign content.) The copyright owner can also flag a specific localization as being the preferred version, hiding other versions as "private viewing only". The copyright owner need not pay for any submitted localization if the content is free to view in all regions (whether ad supported or not.) Thus an incentive for keeping content free to view.

 

If the copyright holder wishes to opt out of third party data fragments, they can instead publish a "universal content id serial number" for that item, and thus third party playback software, image viewers, software installers, can consult a database for "additional localization/commentary" and work pretty much how third-party subtitles/rifftrax audio already work, just easier to discover, and less dependent on piracy. You buy the content, the player optionally runs this third-party content/cue-sheet/subtitles against that content. Thus, again, pushing the user to use the official content instead of pirated content found on the internet in order for third party data to work.

 

[jagdtigger]

On 5/23/2020 at 7:20 AM, VegetableStu said:

required viewing:

 

 

I actually subbed to mumbo, i still think it is outrageous what happened to him. Because of one sample that makes literally a few seconds of his videos they took all of his revenue on those videos. Now that is literally theft..... I think it would be a perfect time to cut back on the copyright holders powers to abuse the system as they see fit.

[Kisai]

12 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I actually subbed to mumbo, i still think it is outrageous what happened to him. Because of one sample that makes literally a few seconds of his videos they took all of his revenue on those videos. Now that is literally theft..... I think it would be a perfect time to cut back on the copyright holders powers to abuse the system as they see fit.

Sampling is one of those things where I believe no copyright should be permitted, since samples are part of all digital audio workstation software. Unless you're physically sampling dialog, any musical instrument sample should not be in copyright unless it's taken from a physically unique analog instrument (eg a homemade instrument that you can't physically make with off-the-shelf materials in 10 minutes.) This goes double for "synth"'s, since any synth can produce the same sounds given the same input variables. You can replicate a Moog entirely in software, and moog even sells an app that does that.

 

I'm not sure what the exact sample in dispute was here, but that is one of those cases where "only the original copyright holder can make a claim" would be needed (eg the artist, or the estate of the artist) , the one who licensed the content can't override them. Now if it does happen to be true, that the publisher owns the copyright to the song, and the one Mumbo Jumbo licensed didn't happen to clear it correctly (or at all) , that really should have been a dispute between the two intermediaries, not Mumbo Jumbo and Warner Chapelle. I've actually encountered something like this nearly every time I involved music with Youtube. I always use music that I'm absolutely certain is PD, or copyright-free when not dealing with games, but usually what happens is someone inevitably has a copyright claim on it it because they used it first on youtube.

 

As a really fun example that people should try, just to see it from the creator's point of view. Start a youtube stream on youtube account you don't upload videos to. Then just play your music playlist while doing anything, 30 seconds at a time. Watch how nothing happens until you end the stream. Then suddenly you will get multiple copyright claims, sometimes for the exact same music, easily hitting a dozen claims after maybe 5 or so songs that you only used 5-10% of. It's literately unsafe to have any music, what-so-ever, at any volume, and stream on youtube, twitch, etc. You have to seek out music that is known to be royalty-free, free to use commercially, or write the music yourself using only synthetic instruments (eg chiptunes, synths), or classic analog instruments (guitar, piano, flute, trumpet) that don't sample anything. Or if you just don't care about making money on youtube, let the claims stand and do nothing, hopefully nothing you upload goes viral.