You see the inherent asymmetry of power in these massive platforms now. YouTube hasn't the slightest, tiniest imaginable incentive whatsoever to change their practices in any way here. This creator is just another meaningless bit of chaff in their grist mill of complete dominance over the web. People will get angry, retweet, do whatever, and YouTube will keep humming along. An unassailable behemoth whose total disregard for any form of fairness will never hurt it in any way.
And every second they think that way brings them a step closer to being replaced. Literally the only thing youtube has value-wise is its audience. Nothing they do can't be done with existing cloud networks and off-the-shelf open source software, or a bit of clever coding.
Furthermore by catering to advertisers wholesale, they are alienating their primary users and pissing everyone off. Eventually people will get sick of it and start a subscription-based video service where ads and sponsored content are banned.
But that isn't even necessary -- all it really takes is 3-4 of the major content creators to switch to another platform with a less draconian view on copyright and advertising policies and real change could happen.
Ive always worked at a much higher level than infra, and I used to be similarly dismissive about the difficulty of infrastructure at scale until I had some exposure to it; You'd be surprised at how much talent and effort and money goes into delivering the volume of content that YouTube does at the reliability it does. The fact that I subconsciously always pick YouTube video search results links over the alternatives has a lot to do with the fact that it's apparently difficult enough for every other entity to deliver video content reliably (with far, far lower volume).
Right but all of that auto scaling has been essentially donated to the community in the form of google cloud platform and AWS. Now we have cloud functions / lambdas (that are capable of running ffmpeg), Kubernetes, S3, Docker, and a whole slew of things that make this task fairly trivial compared to how it was in say 2005.
There also isn't any rule saying you have to do your video conversions server side. Imagine the cost efficiency of client-side video conversion. You could probably do it in js these days or very worst case scenario have a cross platform desktop / phone client.
WASM makes this an even easier task -- with some effort you could probably compile ffmpeg to WASM and run it fully client side in the browser with no performance penalty.
If you take video conversion out of the equation, all that's left is file hosting, which is commoditized as possible these days, and the search/suggestions algorithm, which pisses people off with its accuracy anyway.
> Kubernetes, S3, Docker, and a whole slew of things that make this task fairly trivial compared to how it was in say 2005.
Agreed, it's much _easier_ to do these things, but evidently not yet _easy_. Handwaving about who deserves credit is irrelevant compared to an analysis of whether executing on it is easy or not, and my (admittedly low-confidence) model,based on the empirics of the situation, is that its evidently still not that easy to reach the reliability and quality of YouTube as a service.
Could potentially be content creators that pay the subscription only. But yeah, something somewhere has got to give. Eventually people are going to be sick enough of ads that they will pay $5/month to remove them.
Maybe. But the thing is, as we move towards higher-resolution video formats we get into more expensive stuff. A 1080p60 Twitch stream is about 6128 Kbps per second (6Mbps video, 128Kbps audio). YouTube recommends 12Mbps for uploads. 4K is worse. YouTube recommends 35-45Mbps for 24/30fps videos and 68Mbps for 4K60 uploads.
So we're looking at using roughly a gigabyte of transfer for three minutes of 4K30 video at acceptable quality or about nine minutes for 1080p60 (video games, etc.). I dunno about you, but most of the creators whose stuff I follow are between 20 and 45 minutes a video. Call it 30 minutes. So if they put out one video every two weeks and I watch it once, I'm pulling ~4GB for 1080p or ~10GB for 4K30.
At S3 prices, that means that of that $5, Amazon eats $1.20 or so. It's worse if they're more prolific. You can say "raise prices", but Patreons, subscriptions, etc., are brutally inelastic. When Patreon wanted to go to a model where they passed transaction fees onto the funder, a ton of people came out to claim that they couldn't afford to keep all their pledges if they had to eat a ten to thirty percent surcharge. And I believe it.
It sucks. I'm trying to come up with a better option just for my own stuff. My solution, which I can do because I'm a software developer, is probably something like OVH, where they hand you effectively-unlimited transfer. But I also don't then need to pay somebody to manage it for me--and to try to turn it into a going concern, you're going back to the "hey, how much a month is this gonna cost me?" problem.
It's not an unfixable problem. But it is a problem where the winners have economies of scale. That means...well...a YouTube.
> Nothing they do can't be done with existing cloud networks and off-the-shelf open source software
Please, link to this off-the-shelf open source software that can be used to replicate the YouTube experience, both in terms of hosting and playing videos as well as distribution on various platforms. I'll settle for Android and iOS.
ffmpeg, s3 (or google cloud storage or if you want affordable then wasabi), and HTML 5 video tags basically get you there -- search you can just use off-the-shelf elastic search stuff. It's not like it was in 2005 where you had to invent the wheel.
Then you just set your subscription fee to match your average cost per user, add 50% to that, round up to the nearest dollar, and you're good.
So, frankly, you have nothing. Because none of that replicates the YouTube experience for both the producer and viewer. You also ignored delivery. Saying you can replicate YouTube with off-the shelf open source software and then proceed to provide me with common pieces that still need to be pieced together literally just don't know what "off-the-shelf" means.
The real problem with Youtube is that it remains to be the biggest copyright infringer on earth. There is almost no record and song, no matter how obscure, that you cannot find on Youtube, and nothing prevents you from downloading this content. I'm not judging this, just stating the facts, so don't downvote me for it. Who doesn't enjoy direct access to a gigantic music collection without paying? Everybody likes it and uses it.
Somehow Youtube gets away with that, because they are a major US company. If you'd find the same amount of content on a small foreign company's servers, the FBI would crack down on it in no time using all international law available.
The current extreme bias in the complaint system will not change, because it is Youtube's legal insurance. They need to be able to claim they've done everything they can fighting piracy. In reality, piracy is and always has been one of the major uses of Youtube in addition to the privately produced content.
As a result of this, Youtube is double unfair. It enables massive piracy and at the same time severely punishes original content producers in favor of predatory and sometimes plain fraudulent companies filing bogus copyright complaints. It's a systemic problem that IMHO could only be solved by drastic law reforms.
How about this: your copyright claim accuracy becomes a multiplier for monetization payouts. E.g. if 100% of claims are correct, you keep all monetization. If 10% of claims are correct, you only get 10% of monetization.
Also, if Google can show that the copyright claims are incorrect, then they get to keep the difference.
Now copyright holders are incentivized to make accurate claims and Google is incentivized to find inaccurate claims.
That doesn't make sense for the unambiguous cases of copyright violation. The copyright holder never agreed for the content to be monetized by Google and under their terms. Google can't just make up some revenue sharing policy and act like that's the law.
The content owner should be able to negotiate a rate with Google or choose not to, not have to be forcibly entered into it.
The 'content owner' can always choose to opt out and file DMCA requests instead of using ContentID, though. If they don't like Google's system... They don't have to use it.
But of course that just means that things get taken down - and no revenue goes to the claimant. Great for protecting your copyright, good for trolling, really shitty for extracting money from the works of others.
The DMCA may be rough on active content creators, but it is far worse on inactive ones and on the public interest in having that material available. ContentID has the same trouble. Consider:
* creator is in the hospital
* creator is dead, and the heirs know nothing about dealing with copyright claims
* creator is hiking the Appalachian Trail for the next year
* creator is in jail for something unrelated
* creator got deployed on a submarine
* creator now has Alzheimer's disease and can't remember the internet
ContentID becomes a trivial way to steal money, and the DMCA becomes a trivial way to suppress the creator's work.
Or just ban the channels of the networks that abuse the system. Would be hilarious if disney got their channel banned for not understanding fair use laws. Why can't google be more like that :/
How about every time a company files a frivolous claim they lose their ability to claim anything for an ever-increasing amount of time? An hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, etc up to a year.
since the ability to make copyright claims is required by law and there are requirements as to how platforms must respond to claims then any fix to the system that imagines ignoring the law in favor of its fix is bound to fail.
A three (or ten, or even 300) strike plan, where they lose the right to make copyright claims in a "guilty until proven innocent" fashion - the company must provide sufficient evidence to YouTube that the content is infringing.
They would still have the DMCA process, but they lose rights to use the copyright strike process until they prove their competence.
I completely agree with this. There should be enormous consequences for false reports, and there should be an AI that is designed to understand fair use (It's not fucking impossible).
True. If I was google I'd spend millions getting lawyers and lobbyists to try to change how fair use is applied and interpreted in the U.S. so it is as clear cut as "an excerpt of up to this percent size of the total work is fair use regardless of context" combined with "excerpts are not permitted to be pieced or packaged together in such a way that the entire or most of the original work can be consumed". So you wouldn't be allowed to just make a playlist of 30 second clips on youtube that equals the entire movie, but a stupid script could figure out if a clip counts as fair use.
To clarify, this would work the same way classified information works in the DoD -- many small pieces of information can be one classification level (or even unclassified), but if you aggregate them, they can become a higher classification level in aggregate. Similarly, small fair-use clips on an individual level would retain fair-use status, but if you start aggregating them, via a playlist or some other method, the playlist would not be fair use and would count as infringement.
The ballsier move than simply lobbying forever would be for Google to just go ahead and do this -- go ahead and write a script/AI that rejects infringement reports and/or DMCA requests on excerpts that are less than 5% of the total work on the basis that such a small excerpt necessarily must be fair use no matter the context because of the small size of the clip, and then battle each case out in court on behalf of the infringing user. I think they would win every single case, and once they have won a few in a row, precedent would take care of the rest and predatory media companies would stop trying.
This isn't impossible. Google is in a position to clarify / influence how copyright law is applied, and they should do it.
Sure, but YouTube doesn't have that option. Any of the suggestions given here would almost certainly lose YT their safe harbor status.
YouTube's policies are as Draconian as they are because that's literally the only way to comply with the law. I can't for the life of me figure out why YT doesn't have some kind of messaging strategy around that.
The point is though, they aren't fighting it at all. There are all kinds of ways they could penalize copyright claimants that wouldn't affect safe-harbor status, but they aren't doing it. They are in bed with the movie and music studios.
They do have over $100 billion in savings, so maybe that number should actually be $90 billion and that other ~10% dedicated to the boring stuff like supporting their users. It's no accident that Amazon, Comcast, AT&T etc can support 100m+ people by phone... and pure accounting chicanery that Google does not.
Why not say "no" to more people? Allowing the automation of this is really bad and heavily favors people with big bucks- would requiring a different written statement per video make sense at all?
Creators go where the consumers are. You can move to a different platform or start your own but you won’t get any viewers. It’s the equivalent of not liking the taxes in a city retail space, and moving your store out to the desert in protest.
What will end up happening is the major content creators, the ones that have massive followings will treat YouTube as the "advertisement" to the other platform they are on. "Hey guys thanks for checking out my video, here's a small preview. To view the full version, check me out at <some_other_platform>.com!" It's similar to what the big ones did with monetization (turned off all monetization, and now do in-video ads or some donation platform). Once that happens, there will be enough traffic on the new platform for enough medium size players to test the waters, then the whole thing will topple down. The only thing YT will have left is existing content, of which the only task remaining will be a race to archive what is currently on there.
Unlike a real desert, everyone can still reach you in your internet desert, and eventually it can become an internet oasis.
Then again, maybe once that happens YT will actually start to become content-creator friendly again.
If creators were smart they would always publish on two (or more) platforms - Youtube and Vimeo for example. It doesn't cost them much in terms of time and effort, it gives their viewers a choice (given the choice, I would rather watch alternative), and if enough creators do that, it keeps Youtube on their toes. Which means that they might care a bit more about the creators.
On a related note, Google should clean up their customer support. Everywhere.
There is a way to handle this, but you aren't going to like it.
Since there is absolutely no penalty for filing copyright claims, you just get together with other large youtube channels and begin filing claims against Disney, CBS, NBC, Fox, and so forth, all the large media companies that have youtube over a barrel, as well as their advertisers.
You simply decide not to play nice whatsoever. And you keep on doing it, as a growing group, repeatedly, until youtube is forced to take action. You do it to any large corporation that wants to post on youtube. And if they take the wrong action, which they will, you bring out RICO statutes and begin filing so many subpeona's they can't financially afford to work with it. You don't stop at youtube either, you get in groups and sue them for stuff they put on cable TV as well. Find yourself jr lawyers.
If Google wants binding arbitration contracts in place and then wants to sexually harass their staff, the appropriate turn-about play is for the staff to get together and plan on sexually harassing the executive management. And I'm not talking in ways they would like; I'm talking hundreds of people telling the execs and upper managers they want to do scat-play, or buying and mailing them used japanese underwear and mini goats with plushines, and so forth. And they get as viscious as possible about this, up to the point of following them around with handcuffs and leather straps in groups.
Because if we're going to be lawsless, it's time to act like total animals. And realistically, there's only one way to teach that lesson.
I'm down for ddos via lawsuit, but two wrongs don't make a right - sexually harassing people shouldn't be weaponized, as injust the power structures may be.
