This morning I got a copyright claim for a video I published in 2015 which had a brief bit of background music, using a royalty-free song I got as a perk for being an iTools user from FreePlay in _2003_.

I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims.

To me that's $1/year lost revenue (no big deal, right?) but that company now gets the revenue from this video—and millions of other videos... so they're making mint and gambling that most users won't even try to appeal.

> I can choose to combat the copyright claim (and during this process you check a box that says "you agree that you could have your account deleted if you don't win this claim" (something like that)), or I can give the $1/year revenue I got from that video to the scummy company that files these claims.

Obviously the problem is that it's completely unbalanced. Do people making copyright claims have the same threat? "By disputing this counter-claim, you agree that you could have your right to file any copyright claims revoked."

If not, then yeah, it's absolutely unfair.

But filing claim is protected by law, you ability to have content on YouTube is not. There is a fundamental asymmetry.

Filing claims by suing is protected by law; filing claims on YouTube is not.

These are not DMCA claims.

It would be entirely reasonable for Youtube to block them from submitting the current style of claims and require them to submit actual, proper DMCA claims which open the claimant to all kinds of counterclaims, require the claimant to assert under the penalty of perjury that they own that content, etc.

That's an idea for sure. I should have clarified my point that while these aren't DMCA claims, YouTube is required to handle DMCA claims, and their current process essentially preempts them. So that's how they're choosing to effectively 'handle' what would otherwise presumably be large numbers of DMCA claims.

But yeah, maybe requiring claimants to actually go through the official process would be better (albeit more work for YouTube).

Youtube has it's own system that is not actually DMCA, so they don't need to get pesky lawyers involved.

These aren't being properly submitted under DMCA, Youtube is proactively matching audio to submitted samples.

> But filing claim is protected by law, you ability to have content on YouTube is not. There is a fundamental asymmetry.

Filing a claim automatically and conveniently is not protected by law. They could just as well say, "We have an automated system with a convenient interface for good-faith actors. If you show yourself to be acting in bad faith, you can exercise your legal claim in writing by sending it to this address: X. The postal system to that office is pretty bad, loses stuff all the time, so you'd better send it FedEx."

I am sick of this and thinking about canceling youtube premium...

To be honest this doesn't seem that hard. write an application that crawls youtube videos in some order, grab the audio and stream it to something like echonest, then strike if it hits on anything?

They upload the sound clips, YouTube finds the matching videos and sends them a list, then a human reviews the list(haha just kidding) and activates the revenue stealing. I'm sure some of those videos are earning a lot more than $1/year.

A machine (script) can send out a lot more than a hundred/hr.

Remember, they don't have to be true.

The person clicking the button just needs to think it's true.

And somehow the user is the one that might get banned in this scenario?

It's fully automated.

Games should address this, eg. Fortnite has a toggle for "licensed music" so that they won't get claimed if someone does an emote near them.

Fallout 76 patched in a setting to turn off music worldwide. Before that, if you turned off the radio, the in-world radios would still play. You would see YouTubers rushing to the in-world radios to turn them off, or cutting sections of the video so they didn't get claimed. It's absurd.

Or adapt the law that this farce isn't necessary in the first place. Because it is certainly broken.

edit: And as others have mentioned in their stories, people might get angry if you destroy their radios to evade a frivolous claim.

This farce isn't necessary according to the law, fair use is a thing. The law doesn't need any adaptations - the YouTube policies do.

Fair point. Although companies tend to go out of their way to mitigage possible litigation.

Conceptually, I agree. But at youtube scale, I suspect they aren't comparing a corpus of "asserted copyrights" versus "all videos". It's a corpus of "all videos" (straight up) with some preference for asserted copyrights.

I expect that even toggling off Fortnite's "licensed music" setting can still run into audio copyright claims against other Fortnite videos which have the same audio.

Yeah, it's common for Influencers with a big subscriber base to shove all their videos into Content ID, so other smaller channels get their videos claimed because they happened to play the same video game (and the audio matched as a result).

AFAIK in that case it's at least not malicious, it's just the content ID system completely failing to handle this category of content, where a big chunk of the visuals and/or audio are guaranteed to match with other videos because it's a recording of interactive media.