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This kind of scam is enabled by the way Youtube, Facebook, and others offer no way to contact an actual human for help (or if you find a way, you get a useless canned response.) People who realize something is wrong have no forum to air their concerns.
Is there a word for this new world where we find ourselves without the ability to appeal our problems to human rationality, where instead we are continually subjected to the whims of automated systems that no human fully understands?
It's an automated bureaucracy (bureaucrazy). It's tyrannical, in that it has power over you and it's unjust and cruel in how it disregards you. You can lump those words together however you like. Tyrannical automated bureaucracy, autotyranny, bureautyranny. You could put the word tech or technological somewhere in there, but I don't think there's much technology in this form of oppression. After all, bureaucracy in itself is a technology (a tool).
That's all from the point of view that this tyranny is external. I'd actually prefer to look at it as something we're subjecting ourselves to. We're half-knowingly turning our tools against us; painting ourselves into a corner; becoming increasingly entangled by our conflicting goals. We're not the victim, but the fool.
In - internal issue
Comp - computer/tech
Pet - sub-human, regarded as secondary if at all
Tence - (tense), as in past tense and you will be forgotten
This implies that implementing a fair system is beyond their capabilities. I think profitable convenience is more apt to their design choices.
> It's tyrannical, in that it has power over you and it's unjust and cruel in how it disregards you.
Welcome to new bureaucracy, same as old bureaucracy.
Bureaucomputation. (Byur-ah-computation?)
Bur-auto-cracy?
Kafkaesque.
Maybe cyber-kafkaesque, but that feels redundant, since the only difference is that it is being done by computers, rather than thoughtless people.
computational-Kafkarcy -- the difference is in the scale and efficiency. Millions of people can be abused at once at practically no cost.
Utopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias.
This is one of my major Hacker News pet peeves. People talk about _any_ law whatsoever and people immediately jump to "yeah but what about this crazy edge case" as if the legal system itself doesn't take those into account. They're probably throwing lots of babies away since bathwater won't ever be microbe-free.
People immediately jump to "yeah but what about this crazy edge case" because they know the law will be applied to hundreds of millions of people and that crazy edge case will actually happen many times.
And if you can't say ahead of time what a judge _should_ do with that law against that edge case, you have a legal vulnerability. Something that will cause "hard cases make bad law." Something that will be abused by the rich and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable. You have a bad law.
What you're advocating for is not thinking about the consequences of legislation before passing it.
Where am I advocating for anything? Please don't put words in my mouth. What I am complaining about is people immediately jumping to completely dismiss the discussed laws and even the need for them just because the posters assume they don't cover edge cases. This is done without understanding or even reading the laws themselves, nor the legal process that will be used to enforce them, nor how the individual legal systems of each countries work in regards to those edge cases. The ironic part is that in the last two or three cases where I saw it happen, the laws themselves already had the edge cases covered!
And honestly, uninformed people talking about a law without doing an iota of research won't make a single difference in the world. Hacker News armchair amateur lawyers are not fighting for anyone, not even for themselves.
> What I am complaining about is people immediately jumping to dismiss the discussed laws and even the need for them just because the posters assume they don't cover edge cases. This is done without understanding or even reading the laws themselves, nor the legal process that will be used to enforce them, nor how the legal system works in regards to those edge cases.
This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."
How is that compatible with a democracy? Don't voters have to be able to understand what their legislators are doing on their behalf? Are we all just permanently screwed?
It's not as if these criticisms don't come to fruition. People said DMCA 1201 would be a bad law from the beginning, and it still is. Sex workers objected to SESTA even though they were the ones it was supposed to protect, politicians passed it over their objection, and the bad things predicted to happen then happened. It is the calls to "reform" CDA 230 that seem to lack any understanding of the law, the reasons for it, or even what it does.
The most common flaw in new legislation is the failure to account for unintended consequences from bad edge cases and perverse incentives. It is actually really hard to create a law without these things. The discussion of how to avoid them, or even _if_ they can be avoided sufficiently to cause the proposed law to be a net positive in the world, is really important.
Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/supreme-court-reins-cfaa-van-bur...
This is your system working, right? But the CFAA was passed in _1986_. We lived under that uncertainty, and it caused much turmoil, for thirty five years. That's bad. We should want for that not to happen.
_> This reads like "these dumdums can't possibly understand the law because only lawyers can understand the law and everyone else needs to shut up."_
It's not. It's more "these [otherwise very intelligent people] can't possibly understand the law because they haven't bothered to read it, as they're merely reacting to the description of it by another poster" and just posted their first reaction to it on a HN post. This is visible when the answers to their posts is "yeah... the law covers that".
People publicly criticising laws with informed articles (or even people repeating talking points from those) is very healthy, but VERY different from armchair commenters who use their own ignorance about a law as fodder for criticising it and for advocating for their own position (normally to dismiss the law altogether).
We are clearly talking about two very different things here.
Unlike you're implying, I also don't want to censor anything and I'm not advocating for anything. Discussion is healthy, uninformed discussion backing radical opinions is noise.
_> Here's another example. This year, the Supreme Court did some good in reining in the CFAA:_
I also don't see how this has anything to do with what I'm saying. Maybe I wasn't clear in my first post, but I'm pretty sure I was in my second.
> We are clearly talking about two very different things here.
I don't think you can separate them so easily. People make mistakes. They make assumptions. They lack information. That shouldn't make them ineligible to participate in the debate, because the debate is the process by which those mistakes and assumptions get corrected and people arrive at a consensus. If they just shut up, they'll still be wrong, but then no one will correct them, and no one with the same wrong assumptions will see the correction.
And they're not always wrong.
Once again I ask you: where did I say it makes them ineligible? Why can't I criticise the behaviour?
You're criticizing the wrong thing. Address the specific instance when they get it wrong, not the general idea of being concerned about edge cases, which in many cases actually are highly problematic.
Once again you are putting words into my mouth. I never said that worrying about edge cases is wrong, nor that discussing them was. The sport of claiming that they aren't handled when they actually are, however, is a pet peeve of mine. I hope you see the irony of claiming that someone having a pet peeve is incompatible with democracy.
_[edit: the parent comment was edited so this comment applies to a previous version]_
Constructive feedback: the first sentence isn't necessary. People will only see the anger and not the actual point. The second sentence stands on its own.
You're right. Sorry about that, but it angers me when people put words in my mouth.
>_People immediately jump to "yeah but what about this crazy edge case" because they know the law will be applied to hundreds of millions of people and that crazy edge case will actually happen many times._
And it shouldn't be too surprising that this happens on HN. Programming has taught me to specifically pay attention to edge cases and evaluate how likely they are and what kind of consequences may follow. This same pattern of thinking then gets applied to other things in life. Laws are one of the closest analogues to programming.
Not exactly a new idea.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
T S Eliot, _The Rock_
"Utopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well."
I hate to be pedantic, but your typo fallowed is literally the opposite of your intended followed.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/fallow
adjective Characterized by inactivity.
However, you have got my interest. What is the flaw in the reasoning?
> What is the flaw in the reasoning?
Because the world is a very wide and varied place, with far more range of human situations than a set of rules is able to adequately deal with. Probably ever.
More so, any system of rules that was anywhere near complete enough to deal with every situation ever would be so huge and complex that no human could ever read and understand it all, and even searching it properly would be impossible. Which will certainly lead to parts of the rule system contradicting each other and actual cases following one or the other or something else entirely depending on what the person applying it to the case was able to find.
And if some individual's ability to find things or not decides what happens, then we're right back where we started, at a rather arbitrary system vulnerable to corruption. In which case, why did we even bother making this huge incomprehensible set of rules?
See for example the US Tax Code.
_Utopia of Rules - our culture thinks that if we just had the right set of rules and everyone fallowed them then everything would work well. This is a flawed belief, like other utopias._
I don't see what about ContentID is related to the "Utopia of Rules" issue. ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts. Alongside the inability to effectively reign in corporations who make such decisions.
ContentID is less of a "Utopia of Rules" and more of a "Kingdom of dictates". Google dictates you are subject to ContentID if you want to participate in YouTube. If you don't want to be subject to that, leave the kingdom.
> ContentID seems more like a problem related to issues of capitalism, where a corporation will make decisions to maximum profits at the expense of any human or social impacts.
Capitalism is the thing where there is supposed to be vigorous free market competition and ContentID would have no power. Because even if 70% of the services were getting it wrong, anyone could switch to any of the other 30% with minimal friction, and then the original 70% would fix their shit or lose market share.
Capitalism isn't a synonym for anarchy. It needs, for example, government enforcement of property rights. But it also needs _antitrust_. Constraints on vertical integration.
The lack of effective antitrust enforcement has allowed markets to concentrate. Which removes competitive pressure, which allows incumbents to make rules that benefit them and their business partners at the expense of customers who now have high switching costs. Enabling the "Utopia of Rules."
ContentID wasn't built because Google thought it would be a great service for end users. It was made in response to a lawsuit by, IIRC, Viacom. There's no practical way for a competitor to operate without their own version of ContentID as it is a function of copyright law and not market forces.
Even so, I would bet the vast majority Google's customers that are aware of ContentID like ContentID and want it to spread everywhere, to all companies in all nations. I mean, how likely is it that Ford (a big customer) would move to UpstartVideo.biz because they don't automatically analyze uploaded videos?
> There's no practical way for a competitor to operate without their own version of ContentID as it is a function of copyright law and not market forces.
Which part of copyright law is the ContentID part? It's not in DMCA 512 anywhere I can see.
YouTube in particular had problems because in their early days they were, shall we say, not well-counseled on the copyright front, and were still getting sued over _that_. They were also trying to make nice with Hollywood to try to get them to license premium content.
Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
And the "you're not the customer, you're the product" trope doesn't really apply -- in a competitive market, suppliers have a choice in who to sell through too. And Ford follows the eyeballs.
> Which part of copyright law is the ContentID part? It's not in DMCA 512 anywhere I can see.
It's a measure to avoid legal ramifications under the DMCA and other acts.
> Many competing video services don't have anything like ContentID. But they also don't have priority search results on google.com, so content creators don't want to use them.
It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar. Or they'll restrict and moderate uploads manually which has exactly the same effect, or perhaps even worse (still erring on the side of legal caution).
> It's a measure to avoid legal ramifications under the DMCA and other acts.
Why would there be "legal ramifications" for someone complying with the ordinary DMCA notice and takedown process?
> It's only a matter of time that they'll fold due to lack of interest, fold due to lawsuits, or implement ContentID or similar.
It has been decades. They're still there.
The lack of popularity is for the reason already mentioned. If your YouTube video gets on the first page of Google search results and the exact same video hosted on some other site doesn't, what are content creators going to use?
Its the same when trying to get mortgage when you are not on fixed salary income.
"Computer says no", "But on average over last 5 years I make 5x what you need me to earn", "Sorry, but computer says no"
Oh yah the mortgage thing is hilarious in that you would think banks were smarter than they are (spoiler alert: they arent). Really demoralizing to see how mechanic a bank is, also means that you can understand how risk accrues secretly in a bank due to them being so mechanical.
Kafkaesque?
Its kafkaesque, the established world for inconprehensible and cruel bureaucracy that destroys lives for no reason. The term predates internet.
It’s a strong assumption that humans are more rational than machines. Certainly typical customer service reps get bamboozled frequently, such as with SIM-swap scams. Even supposedly highly rational professionals like judges are often wrong. You might find that overall, human failures are worse than code-as-policy failures.
Machines aren't rational at all. That is, they do not respond to reasons.
Machine behaviour is only ever _caused_ (i.e. syntactic), not reasoned.
When a human follows a rule, for example as part of a bureaucracy, then our behaviour is merely caused. But we can also be given reasons to _not_ follow the given rule.
This is precisely why "I was just following orders" is not a valid defence; even soldiers are expected to use their reasoning to disobey illegal orders.
Well, the amount of damage an incompetent human can deal is much more limited than an incompetent but very efficient machine.
The situation with almost-no-appeal big tech platforms reminds me of an article titled “the human-built world is not build for humans”[0].
Related phenomenons keep coming up (cities for cars, ecosystems of tokens and identities dependent on remembering secret passkeys, and so on). Desires to profit and to not have to trust each other keeps motivating humans’ attempts to devise environments that are hostile to humans themselves.
[0]
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-human-built-w...
How about "autocratic", with an emphasis on "auto"?
Dystopia
DystopAI
I don't think this answers your question, but it was exemplified in the movie "Brazil", iirc.
Criminal [for the parties facilitating it by allowing it], comes to mind as a naming option.
Kafka's processing distopia.
Check out The Trial or The Castle for examples of old world systems that existed outside of the grace of human rationality, indifferent to justice and human suffering alike.
Is this really new?
This is pretty much exactly what Kafka writes.
It’s new in the sense that it suddenly afflicts my family on an almost daily basis.
How about:
"You get what you pay for"
It’s interesting how people expect all sorts of protections for services they pay nothing to.
Get a record label or agent if you want or need “protection”
"Computer says no"
Harlan Ellison described it in _I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_.
That machine is actually sentient thought, and openly hateful.
web3
This is the purpose of a court system.
Broken.
Customer service
"new" haha. Check out the trial by franz kafka
Automatacracy.
> Is there a word for this new world where we find ourselves without the ability to appeal our problems to human rationality
How about a term like "millennial business ethics"?
Seriously.
I know some will take this as an insult. I don't offer it in that way. Hear me out for a minute.
The generation that grew up without the internet was just as sophisticated --if not more in some areas-- than millennials. I have news for you, we were doing pretty amazing things with computers and hardware in the 80's an 90's and very little of it was about tricking people to click on ads. Go back and look at AI books from that era and you will find pretty much everything being done today...we just didn't have the hardware and the speed.
Excuse the digression. Growing up without the internet and with conventional brick-and-mortar, in-person businesses meant that person-to-person relationships were important. Nobody --nobody-- from my generation would seriously consider running a business where you absolutely ghost your customers and users. That's just unthinkable. That is not the way human beings related to each other in any pursuit.
However, for a generation who's reality has been looking at a screen and clicking buttons far more so than engaging with other humans in person, the idea of not bothering with real person-to-person problem solving might just be perfectly logical and sensible. Why bother? You can do everything with buttons on a touchscreen. Except, you can't.
To me this is a cultural problem. I have often imagine that some of the people who built these companies had the social skills and maturity of a brick. I know this isn't entirely accurate. Yet, how else does one explicitly make these choices? I can excuse social ineptitude as a sign of the time. The alternative would be to make such a choice while knowing just how harmful it could be. That is pure evil.
They have built mechanisms where destroying someone's business overnight, with no path to having a proper person-to-person business discussion, is deemed normal and acceptable. Talk to people who's lives were turned upside-down by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google and you'll learn just how horrific this kind of thing can be on the receiving end of the algorithms.
On this planet, today, if these three companies ban your from using their services, you do not exist. Period. Try running a business without using these channels (and their associated properties) for marketing and delivery and see how well you can do.
I am not a big government guy at all, quite to the contrary. However, I have, for some time, felt that this particular issue is one that needs truly intrusive government intervention. Companies of this scale and importance should not be able to kill your business on any given Monday and just ghost you forever. That is just plain wrong. And evil.
If anything I blame it on the previous generation failing to understand anything about this new world. It should really come as no surprise that a Congress with a 60+ average age can't deal with any technology-related problem.
Don't forget that Content ID was created because of legislation, YouTube didn't invent DMCAs.
You are talking about a different problem. Congress did not make these companies adopt zero customer service and ghosting as their preferred method of engaging with users.
I have friends who invested their life savings in starting businesses on Amazon, only to be shut down without warning and losing it all as a result. Another one had their product cloned by Amazon once he achieved success, they shut down his account and absolutely ghosted him. No way to talk to anyone about any of it. He lost his home as a result. I know people who had their Google accounts suspended with no reason given and no way to contact anyone to resolve the matter, some suffering serious business consequences. Similarly with Facebook and FB advertising.
Such decisions are not made by people with the benefit of healthy human engagement in their lives. This behavior is evil, brutally so.
The 21st century.
Capitalism
Unregulated.
Ah yes, the free market system known as copyright.
I don't know how helpful a deliberate misunderstanding of the current economic model is to this conversation.
Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation, it just hasn't happened as politicians don't really understand the space.
China, which runs a completely different economic system has similar issues.
Capitalism means different things to different people and in different contexts.
Separation of ownership from management. Tradeable claims on the firm. Legal personhood of the firm. Private property. Free trade between countries. Market determined prices.
But it’s lazy and wrong to use it as a synonym for greed. Despite Gordon Gecko, greed is not good. Just seeing something we consider bad and saying “Capitalism” is a pose and not an argument.
>Capitalism doesn't forbid sensible regulation
It doesnt forbid but it strongly inhibits. A system under which you are able to acquire vast resources then creates the ability to use those vast resources to sway the political process in your favor.
Even when the regulations exist (e.g. antitrust) regulatory capture will inhibit their enforcement.
It's surprising how many people consider this process to be somehow irrelevant or out of scope when you analyze how capitalism functions. It's a core feature.
Capitalism is anti regulation by nature.
Human nature is anti-regulation by nature.
Communism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
Totalitarianism: There were several regulatory oversight failures in Germany during their stint with Fascism
That's crazy considering how much more regulation humans have had than any other observable creature.
This just isn’t true. Every social species found in the wild relies on brutal social regulating behaviors that maintain social conditions necessary for group survival.
I don't think the URSS had a Customer XP department. Or the government in general for that matter.
Life.
Right?
Is Life a bad word? No. It's a beautiful word. Does it contain the good, the bad and the ugly? Of course.
Is Capitalism a bad word? No. It's a beautiful idea, and it works significantly better than anything else humans have ever been able to think of on a mass-scale. Does it contain the good the bad and the ugly? Sure.
Capitalism definitely has some of the best PR.
Yea, all the other systems.
A capitalist society has told you that capitalism is good and you think you're so smart parroting this opinion around.
It's getting very old.
(With apologies to Churchill)
Many forms of commerce have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that capitalism is the worst form of commerce except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
But honestly, GGP replying with a one word answer "Capitalism" and to paraphrase your reply >"The system has brainwashed you" does no one here any good. Please expound on what system you would like to see implemented and why it would not have this problem. You will probably have to defend your ideas but that is what debate is for.
>But honestly, GGP replying with a one word answer "Capitalism" and to paraphrase your reply >"The system has brainwashed you" does no one here any good. Please expound on what system you would like to see implemented and why it would not have this problem.
Do you not see the double standard in this very post of yours? You're chastising him with 'please recommend what system we _should_ use then' and at the same time claiming the advantage to capitalism is that it's an imperfect system, yet still better then anything else we've come up with.
If you believe human beings have not thought of any better systems or ideas, then why would you ask him to produce one, other then you would just shut it down with that same argument? It just seems intellectually lazy. If you believe this then _no one_ could ever sway you. At that point don't pretend to be interested in hearing alternatives, just say you've made up your mind.
>_Please expound on what system you would like to see implemented and why it would not have this problem._
While I agree simply saying "capitalism" and hand-waving at "brainwashing" are both not great conversation starters, your demands are equally unhelpful, no matter how nicely you phrase it.
One does not require a solution to a problem in order to identify a problem.
Quite the contrary. I have now lived half my life under a communist regime and half under a capitalist one. Let me be abundantly clear: I far prefer the latter. I like where it is, and I like where it's headed. I NEVER want to hear about communism ever again.
Here's the main differences I see:
1. Capitalism is a social construct. It embraces human greed and builds upon it. That's why it works so well.
2. Communism is merely a short-term con scheme (granted, on a rather large scale). It embraces hypocrisy, pretends to shun greed, steals everyone's chips and runs, while making people build some idealistic nice stuff which all collapses to dust and misery the moment the top runs away with the money.
3. There is no 3. People like to wank about with all sorts of flowery ideas about capitalism minus the greed, but that's just communism really.
As far as I can tell, nowhere has actually implemented either full-scale capitalism or full-scale communism in the last human lifetime. At its most extreme, there have been some planned-economy socialist states (selling themselves as a "stepping stone to communism") and some thoroughly regulated, state-subsidized free-market systems.
I suppose there have also been some failed states that devolved power to a variety of local systems; maybe it's some of those that you have lived under?
One of the sensible #3s you might be missing, by the way, could be something along the lines of "free markets with enough regulation to protect the commons and enough social spending to invest in the populace (encouraging future innovation and mobility) and enough of a safety net to limit desperation (to keep the pitchforks out of the ownership class's stomachs)"
1. Communism is a social construct. It embraces human goodness and builds upon it. That's why it is ethical and good.
2. Capitalism is merely a short-term con scheme (granted, on a rather large scale.) It embraces hypocrisy, encourages greed, steals from the poor and gives to the rich, while making people build some idealistic idea of competitive fairness while burning the entire planet to shreds while the top run away with the resources and quality of life.
3. There is no 3. People like to pretend they understand world history and economics with all these false ideas that lack context of how capitalism is better, when it's just propaganda that hides the resources and military strategy that went behind the current layout of the world economy.
Adorable.
You've never actually been on the receiving end of communism, have you? Seems like you just enjoy prescribing it and bashing what actually works (as all communists do).
You stole my words verbatim. As all communists do (steal). Because they are completely devoid of any and all creativity and individuality. It's in the word itself. But hey, if we say that owning stuff is bad, we can get away with stealing as much as we want, right? Genius (not).
Look, you can keep calling the black colour white, but it doesn't make it so.
The only reason anyone can call communism good and continue to justify its horrendous monstrosity DECADES AFTER it flopped and sprayed diarrhoea everywhere, is because of incurable guilt consciousness. Which all communists have, because they know they're worthless.
"Communism is a social construct"... my ass. There's never been anything more anti-social or more vile. Trust me, I am well aware of the other horrors of the 20th century. This one tops them all.
What country do you live in that has a purely capitalist system? I’m curious how that would work out.
Even the USA has a lot of socialist policies that primarily benefit the wealthy(ie. Taxpayer funded mortgage deductions)
I happen to come from that part of the world where something radically different has been tried out, and will also tell you capitalism is good (considering the alternatives).
I don't think capitalism is good, I just think the alternatives are worse.
Is it not a little pessimistic (and not to mention, very convenient for the ruling class) to believe that we've reached the peak process of resource allocation and community building in the western world of 2021? There is no possibility for an alternative to the current system that is slightly more equitable to slightly more people?
I think that's why these statements sound like cheerleading for the status quo.
It's like propaganda (Our most sacred institution) has killed people's imagination and hardened their hearts.
The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building are not propaganda, it happened.
It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!
Yes, yes we were.. and it's the last place we want to find ourselves again.
_propaganda: information, especially [but not exclusively; nuance abounds] of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view._
This reminds me of this article currently on the front page:
https://quillette.com/2021/11/29/the-universal-structure-of-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29408567
People think about and perceive reality in "stories" (processed heuristically), because that is how we communicate about it - in journalism, in conversations, on social media, almost everywhere (there are exceptions: software, hard sciences, etc [1]) - from the day we are born to the day we die. We don't really know any other form in daily practice, so we do not realize it - it is _the fabric of reality_. A (simplistic) alternative would be speaking to each other like ~autistic, emotionless, hyper-pedantic, object-oriented, robotic AI agents...which human beings tend to dislike, _strongly_.
In this example, I've made an allegation (and made reference to _one example of_ a story that (allegedly) involved propaganda):
>> It's like propaganda (Our most sacred institution) has killed people's imagination and hardened their hearts.
Now, I am countered ("debunked" in modern day _increasingly popular_ subjective parlance, as opposed to "disproven" in objective parlance), by a ~story (which based on my experience, would "rank highly" among observers, perhaps due to its consistency with other stories: "records", "fact"-based journalism):
> The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building are not propaganda, it happened.
> It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!
In no way did I objectively/physically assert that the entirety of "The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building" _are propaganda_ or that _they did not happen_.
In no way did I say that "the" (a rather cognitively magical word) events (the specifics of which we do not know (and do not realize we do not know), even completely leaving aside the infinitely complex underlying causality) of January 6 _did not happen_.
However, to various agents/observers within this system that we live, _I did say these things_. It did not actually happen, but due to _the nature of_ reality [2], if they are perceived as happening (which can occur in many ways), _they then become Real (as opposed to True)_, and are then cognitively processed, stored, recovered (on demand), and perceived _as reality itself_. And if many agents agree upon a story, it then becomes "Truth" (and perceived as Truth), and then documented as _Objective History_.
tl;dr: Plato's Allegory of the Cave may have some truth to it.
[1] Interestingly, these domains tend to be _massively_ more accomplished than the rest of reality. Whether the unusual way they deal in perception (_extremely_ simplified: objectively rather than subjectively) has anything to do with that, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
[2] Reality is a very interesting word. In Scientific Materialistic oriented cultures, it is typically perceived (recursively, as "reality") as consisting of physical objects, and events involving physical objects. Reality does indeed consist of these things, but that is but a slice of the entirety of it. However, ideas such this can be easily _debunked_, because they "are" (another cognitively magical word) "woo woo" - and thus the local minima of Maya is maintained indefinitely.
Ironically, this too is a story. Which story is more true, is also left as an exercise to the reader.
Capitalism may be the best _economic_ model. The only alternative is a non-economic model: post-scarcity. A world where there's an abundance of goods and resources would have no need to economize at all.
The internet is an example. Data is abundant and can be copied and distributed infinitely at virtually no cost. People actually have to impose _artificial_ scarcity on data in order to retrofit an economic system into the virtual world.
100% agree. They reap the benefits of the automation efficiency while not paying the costs of it. I think these companies should be considered directly responsible if they don't pay royalties to the rightful owners.
This should include how the royalties are split when multiple properties are connected to the same Ad (ex: one video that contains a song and a commentary). Right now, for their convenience they only pay the stronger party (usually the song rights holder) and ignore the other party. I think they should be legally required to split the revenues fairly.
Is it a hard problem to solve and risk a lawsuit hell? Sure, but they did solve way harder problems when they had the incentive to do so and certainly have the resources to solve this one. It's also rather easy to solve 90% of the problem and not being blatantly unfair, and I think 90% is way better than 0%.
To put this really bluntly, these companies would _prefer_ that kind of system. Right now the problem is that they are held legally liable if they incorrectly reject a copyright complaint (which, by the way, can only be determined to be valid in court) but only run the risk of pissing off users if they accept a fraudulent one.
The problem here is not convenience, it's that copyright was designed for an era when it was kind of hard to copy things. The DMCA was a good shim to make it feasible for Internet companies to even exist, but it's not enough to fix things in a world where literally every single bit of IP can be copied or downloaded in less than a day.
If, for example, Congress required content owners to submit copies of their works to some centralized US copyright database as a condition for being eligible to receive damages from platforms, that would go a long way to fix things on its own. Expanding the explicit set of fair use exemptions and allowing them to matter outside of a court would also be a big help.
Surely there is some case that could be brought against YouTube by an EU citizen or someone else in a country where automated decision making is limited without human review, no?
I don't know what the argument is though. You have agreed to this Content ID system and automatically distributing the ad revenue based on YouTube's discretion when you signed up.
Note that the system also has advantages. As a publisher you are protected from lawsuits most of the time, the worst case outcome is that you don't get revenue from a video or that you get banned from YouTube.
I'm not saying that the tradeoff is optimal for creators but I don't see how what YouTube is doing is illegal. Unless you try to assert that you were forced to accept the ToS because YouTube is effectively a monopoly. But I find that a really hard argument to make.
Contracts are limited in what they can enforce. A lesser known example is if you don’t benefit in any way then you can’t form a contract.
Which for example brings up the obvious approach of to sue YouTube for copyright infringement as they don’t have the rights to display your video if their not paying you. I expect you would lose that argument, but it might not be thrown out of court.
But as I said there is some benefit for those posting to YouTube. So it seems like it could well be an enforceable contract.
That’s one argument, but it’s up to the courts to decide if it’s true.
The courts would point out that you’re free to take the video down at any time.
That's irrelevant. There is a legal standard "Arbitrary and Capricious" , where the party makes a business decision out of spite, for no good reason and with no consideration for interests of others.
Google is respobsible for decisions they make, it's their problem that they use faulty automation.
Except you can’t go back and take them down _before_ Google decides not to pay you.
The argument is that the GDPR requires companies to provide human review.
The GDPR is very poorly enforced and regulators have shown no desire to enforce it. At least in the UK, the process requires you to try and get in touch with the company to resolve it and give them 30 days to reply, providing evidence of your attempts (a bit difficult with online forms as opposed to emails - I guess you have to take screenshots of the contact form before you submit?), and if you still don't get a satisfactory response you can raise a complaint with the regulator where from my experience it just goes to a black hole where you're lucky to get a (useless) response in a few months.
No. It just takes a lot of time to deal with all the transgressions.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
Disagreed. This link often gets posted as a counterpoint but look at the biggest issue with privacy currently: tracking consent forms. The regulation mandates that any non-essential tracking (as in not required to provide functionality or fulfil legal obligations) should be opt-in and it should be as easy to decline as it is to accept (aka you should provide both an accept and a decline button - hiding the decline option or making it difficult doesn't count). The majority of companies out there fail at that requirement, and it's been almost 4 years since the regulation went into effect and nothing has been done even though those cases should be very straightforward as the evidence is right there on their websites.
Schrems' company Noyb is scanning websites and trying to force companies to do something about it (or potentially face the law).
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is...
Exactly
>>Over the years, countless YouTube users have complained that their videos have been claimed and monetized by entities that apparently have no right to do so but, fearful of what a complaint might do to the status of their accounts, many opted to withdraw from battles they feared they might lose.
This fact and the aggressive-anti-support policies should setup Youtube for a class action suit.
Merely to avoid the expense of actually sorting out who is the actual copyright owner, Alphabet (& others) setup a system that systematically enables this type of fraud against artists, and provides no way to resolve it, and so they happily pay millions to fraudsters like these instead of the actual owners.
It'd be nice if the actual artists could get paid and if Google etc. could get the point that some things require actual support. Unlikely, but it'd be nice.
At some point these companies have to be on the wrong side of negligence.
Also, relying on algos to detect spam instead of using humans, means that scammers are able to run their scams much longer.
It's amazing considering they could hire a small army of good employees for ~$500/person in one of the many developing countries.
Don't need an office, don't even need to bother with taxes if they don't want to, just remote hire and work.
I know it's awful and true, BUT, can you blame them?
Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook.
Just a regular ISP in my country of Sweden needs an entire call centre to handle the calls it gets from customers.
Now scale that up to the levels of Google.
I can totally see why they've made the decision to avoid consumer contact. Their consumers are the entire internet.
I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.
I think it only seems like it would be crazy because we've allowed companies to get away with not doing it.
Go back, pre-internet, and Bell Telephone surely had a sophisticated and expensive tech-support, customer-support department. They managed.
I think we've just come to begrudgingly accept that outsourcing, automating everything is okay. It's okay now to let the customer find your support phone number, navigate your phone tree, spend 30 minutes or more in a phone queue for, in the end, no real help.
Doesn't mean we have to excuse it.
> Go back, pre-internet, and Bell Telephone surely had a sophisticated and expensive tech-support, customer-support department. They managed.
Those services were a lot more expensive to their users as well. If everyone paid $xx/mo to YouTube I’m sure the customer support would be a lot better. But then most people wouldn’t be users in the first place.
So, this business does things that take away people's rights, but it is OK because otherwise their cost of business would be too high?
Exactly! Won't someone please think of the helpless capitalist!!
Understanding and respecting that (I made a similar case within the past day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29421420
), there's still the rejoinder:
If you can't provide a service safely, equitably, and predictably at a given scale, maybe the answer is "don't do that".
I'm failing to understand your logic. Google could put a call center in every country to handle local user's requests could'nt they ?
Your ISP can afford to do so...
But yes, as they have a monopoly, they can afford not putting any call center anywhere.
Yep. And it doesn't even have to be a call center, manual verification would be enough.
I pay my ISP a lot more than I pay Google.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean they should get away with not doing it. Google 2020 revenues were 181 Billion, you can build a VERY big call centre with that.
I hope you are being sarcastic. These companies were fortunate to be ahead of the curve in automating content delivery but, despite their best efforts, have failed in automating service delivery. Human connection should be mandatory in running a modern business. If you want to deal with humans, you should be required to reciprocate.
> I know it's awful and true, BUT, can you blame them?
Yes, I can.
Youtube knowingly traffics and sells stolen goods and services. Youtube's officers and directors know it. The key words there is knowingly. Arrest Youtube CEO as a head of a criminal enterprise. Bust her door pre-dawn and drag her out into the slammer. There's zero difference in how we should deal with Incs be that Mafia, Inc. or Youtube, Inc.
The mere prospect of that will quickly solve all the technical problems. It is all about motivation. Youtube's executives currently are not motivated to solve the problem. The government needs to provide the motivation.
If even a regular ISP can afford a call center so can Google with its economies of scale.
The underlying assumption with all these criticisms is that human contact would be better. But is this really true?
Humans can be bribed, manipulated, or lied to. This introduces a whole set of new problems. It just turns "YouTube algo removed my channel because I got report bombed" to "A YouTube employees removed my channel after they were social engineered".
Contact with a knowledgeable human is better than no contact is I think what people are arguing, yes.
It shouldn't be an excuse. The system is not fit for purpose.
Google makes billions of dollars. They can easily afford to hire tens of thousands of call center employees.
They all have the ability to control that funnel though. In this case, they could allow channel owners that have been demonetized to open a ticket. Or allow artist representatives that already have "special" YouTube accounts to complain, etc.
> I know this is controversial but one solution would be to break their monopoly up so that smaller companies could handle consumer contact.
I think I lean in this direction, too. Customer service should go hand-in-hand with having customers in the first place. If you have grown so outrageously large that you have no feasible way to plumbing some of your astronomical profits to servicing those who facilitate your profits, then maybe you have grown too big.
At scale you have more options. You can subcontract out your call center like all the big companies. These companies use these subcontracted callcenters like
. They don't want to spend the money.
"Think about the infrastructure required to allow direct human contact for someone like Google, Youtube or Facebook."
So they have an unfair advantage over competition by avoiding the cost of customer support? Am I meant to feel sorry for them?
They can always contract it out, and in some cases they do. For example Meta has (used to have?) large deals with Accenture to handle a lot of the interaction internationally.
They could absolutely do it and they have more than enough money to do it. They just don't want to because it'd cut into profits.
I think an ISP is a bad example. The relationship between the user (content creators) and Youtube very different than that of a consumer.
Silver Lining in this trend: The beginning of the end of Amazon may be at hand.
The other day, I really really needed to get in touch with a human at Amazon to resolve an issue (Amazon issued me a refund, apparently in error). After an hour of researching how, I gave up.
The last time I needed to get in touch with a human there was 15 years or so ago. I was able to send an email to an actual human there, who responded! And was able to resolve the issue after 3 or 4 emails back and forth.
Now, all you get is a "Chat AI" who can't help you.
It's the beginning of their end folks. And that's a good thing (Martha Stewart voice).
(The other canary in the Amazon coal mine: their search engine results seem manipulated.)
I see this kind of thing happening all the time, facilitated by third parties.
For example, a few months ago I found this funny video of some trombonists playing Bruchner in unusual situations[1] that had been uploaded on 14th September 2015 and noticed it had an obviously-bogus copyright claim for the music ("Song: Calling You (Live), Artist: FUN, Licensed to YouTube by (on behalf of FUN); Songtrust, Sony ATV Publishing, and 2 music rights societies"), with a link to where this bogus "song" had been uploaded[2].
The "song" proved to be a video consisting of the original trombone video's soundtrack played twice, over an unrelated static image, that had been uploaded on 13th May 2021—six years after the video it was ripping off.
There was enough information on the "song" video to find out that it had been supplied to YouTube by a company called TuneCore[3] who according to their website offer to "SELL YOUR MUSIC WORLDWIDE: Get your music on Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, TikTok, Tencent & more".
I contacted TuneCore in July to point out that their service was being abused, but got a semi-automated reply to the effect that unless it was _my_ copyright that was being infringed they weren't interested. I replied, and also responded to their automated did-Jira-help-you-today survey, in both cases pointing out that they were (however inadvertently) involved in fraudulent activity but (unsurprisingly) never heard back.
I see now that the TuneCore 'song' video has been made private, but the original trombone video still carries the false copyright claim.
So frustrating.
[1]
[2]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-577Wp8yBQ
- now private
[3]
TuneCore has really gone to hell after it was sold. I know horror stories from musicians that used them years ago but since had to move away because of technical and support issues.
What are some good alternatives? I've heard bad things about almost every company in this space.
DistroKid is still quite alright, and I don't see signs of them changing.
Maybe worthy of its own post but there's another kind of overt scammer on Youtube. It goes like this:
They find some technically hip, well known content and create a new channel with a very similar name as the originator. Create an exciting full screen ad for a crypto currency faucet scam, with price charts and crawls. "Live" stream the original content inset into the ad.
Here's one example:
https://cryptoplayboys.blogspot.com/2021/11/spacex-scam-live...
Even if you report these things, they don't get removed very quickly. They're getting tons of views so why would YT care? The original content holder would care about being associated with them and should sue for defamation though.
>They find some technically hip, well known content and create a new channel with a very similar name as the originator. Create an exciting full screen ad for a crypto currency faucet scam, with price charts and crawls. "Live" stream the original content inset into the ad.
There's guaranteed to be several running after every Falcon 9/Starship launch, sometimes they'll attract almost as many viewers as the real livestream - very likely to be bots. What's even worse is that YouTube are recommending these, and with the removal of dislike counts it becomes even harder for the layperson to know if what they're watching is legitimate.
With the exception of copyrighted content it seems like YouTube find it acceptable to offer criminals a multiple hour head start on their mods, allowing them to stream any damn thing they like.
Those criminals and their potential victims (plus potential bots) "engage" with the platform. Until Google becomes liable for facilitating those scams, Google loses nothing and actually benefits from those scammers being there as they contribute to various engagement metrics. The same is true for any other engagement-driven company.
I am sure google would remove terrorism or child exploitation videos real fast, because they are compelled by law to do so. scam videos?..not so much.
Publish literally anything textual on the web and a moment later you'll find a dozen websites copying your content, raking in ad money, identity protected by Cloudflare and conveniently ranking high on Google.
Complain and people will all be "Freedom of speech! Go get a court order, it's not Google's or Cloudflare's place to censor content and/or decide what's copyright infrigement.".
Why is the YouTube drama any different from that? Is it because the creators are well known and have a platform and a following they can complain to?
The weird thing is who pays for all these ads and who take compulsive buy decision based on them ?
If we could someone boycott every company we see in these ads maybe they d stop?
I really dont think we should pay royalties in excess of cost of production + margin for future investment, and that copyright is an abuse itself after a few years of existence (hell I dont get paid a share of every revenue my work is contributing to and Im fine, I just create every day and if I dont like it Ill cut hair or clean dishes)
I find it incredible that if I search for [spacex] on YouTube during a launch, the official livestream doesn't appear in the first 20 results. Instead, it's all scams like what you described.
I wonder at what point Google's competence at search dropped to the point that they can't return the channel named "SpaceX" in response to my query.
During the Pixel 6 event last month I searched on YouTube for the live stream that would be starting in a few minutes and clicked the first result. The result had a Pixel 6 thumbnail, the live icon, Google in the channel name, the Google logo as the avatar, and around 30k viewers. I was a bit surprised someone was already talking on the stage and thought I tuned in late.
Well, after watching for 5 or 10 minutes, they kept talking about Pixel 5s, and then I realized it was a fake account streaming the event from the previous year.
I went back to YouTube search and tried a variety of queries for fun, such as "pixel 6 event", "pixel live", "pixel 6 stream", "pixel phone", and they all featured this fake stream as the first result. It continued to grow and was over 50k viewers. Further down the list was another stream with the same thumbnail, same avatar, and a similar channel name, and that happened to be the real one. It had around 120k viewers, so not much better than the fake channel.
After about 30 minutes or half way through the event, the fake stream was finally removed from the results.
I think their competence is fine, and the service works exactly as designed. The main problem is, Google is both publisher, search indexer, and advertisement network. Worse, it’s a near monopoly on all 3 of these markets.
When you search for SpaceX, Google has a choice.
They can optimize for search quality by taking you to their official channel which has no ads. Doing that only causes them expenses. Bandwidth and compute are very cheap at their scale, but not free.
Or they can take you to these heavily monetized third-parties with the same content. Because these copy-cats are monetized through the same google, google is taking a non-trivial cut from every advertisement dollar spent while people watching these videos.
_They're getting tons of views so why would YT care?_
You don't want your brand to be synonymous with scams. When that happens, you won't get any money from views - if people "know" the videos are scams, they won't watch. They'll assume all videos are scams and won't watch any original content. I'm sure the folks at Google can figure out at what point they need to take action. What amount of bad PR, percentage of views on scam content, percentage of content that is just scams, etc.
...Or maybe they aren't taking the long view on this.
That's clever, but won't most of the live stream viewers still be viewing on a legitimate platform? I'm guessing that framed stream doesn't actually have too many viewers.
I think in these cases, this kind of setup can be largely automated since there isn't really any unique/quality content that'd take a person time to create - and getting smaller view counts over many channels perhaps mitigates the risk of having the channel removed
I've seen similar with sport highlights searches, screenshots and automated commentary scraped from a news source. They don't get many views but there's hundreds of them, particularly for sport behind paywalls. No one wants to see them but they turn up in searches at the right time.
Must be demotivating for content creators to be continually dealing with this kind of thing.
these YouTube crypto scammers make so much money. About $30-50 million/month
https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/crypto-giveaway-sc...
to put it another way, that is about 2-3x times the revenue of the $20-million dollar YouTube copyright scam but compressed into just a few weeks to a month instead of 5 years.
I don't understand how so many people are willingly sending bitcoin. I could see a few folks that don't get how scams work. But millions daily?
That could be some "name squatting" / "cyber squatting":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting
Yes, it's a combination of name squatting, defamation, copyright, AND faucet scam. (bingo?)
YT should act on any one of these but they don't.
That line is thin, large studios have been using Content ID on things that are not under their copyright. [1]
[1]
https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-di...
Your linked article is about _fair use_ issues, which I'd argue is a much different problem, and much more of a gray area, than just outright falsely claiming you are the rights holder to stuff you don't own (and not paying out royalties after you collect).
I am happy that this story made it to the main page. I submitted it earlier here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427272
My main concern is when you try to automate all the human intelligence is eliminated and can lead to both identity theft and money based fraud. Then you the innocent have to prove yourself against the fraudsters. Easy when you have a big megaphone on say Twitter but very hard for the individual.
How many times have we seen automated troublesome issues resolved here on HN when someone from the company is luckily reading a post of a victim.
> Then you the innocent have to prove yourself against the fraudsters.
All too often you are referred to the fraudsters to resolve the problem.
Can't we make illegal to not be able to contact human support?
It would put a hard cap on growth as well, not sure if this is horrible. maybe instead of having one giant youtube or facebook we will have thousands, maybe millions, of small ones.
Or is this just the luddite in me talking?
I got my eBay account "permanently suspended" the other day. I was traveling for Thanksgiving and they had a $10 off $10 promo if you login to the app for the first time. I used the app from the Airport wifi to purchase two books for my friend I was visiting. Upon landing, I had received an email about my "permanent suspension" and if I had any questions, to contact eBay support.
I thought, OK, I tripped up their IP security rules. I'll just call them and get it sorted out. Except... you can't call eBay anymore. Their phone lines are a recording that tell you to login first. When I login, all the support options for my now suspended account are missing. There's no messaging, phone, text, chat, or email options provided to me. Only an endless loop of support articles.
Cross-checking this against my friend's account, he has all the options available and I do not. So in essence, they've shut me out from all communication and I can't ever get this account recovered. Many big companies moved to this communication model during covid, and it's extremely disheartening when something goes very wrong like this. If this is the new normal, we need to make it illegal.
Have you considered sending them a pig fetus? Maybe they would respond?
For those who don’t get the joke:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/15/ex-ebay-employees-sent-blood...
I got my EA account permanently suspended. Not just permanently suspended, but 3 times in the same day. Without even having EA's launcher installed. Or having my computer turned on.
Likely someone stole the account, then tried purchasing multiple games with stolen CCs. At least EA support can be contacted without logging in! You may have the ability to get this reversed.
That's an idea but I couldn't find any indication that anyone else logged into it at all. Also it specifically said I banned for playing Apex Legends, which is a free game.
I'm just really impressed they banned the same account 3 times in a day. That implies that I somehow circumvented the ban twice, without even knowing about the first two times.
As a 25 year eBay user it's sad to see how shitty it has become.
In California, if a landlord improperly withholds someone's deposit after moving out, they can be sued for 3x the original amount. Perhaps there should be a time frame that is applied to fixing issues for improperly attributed claims like these in the article and require the company to pay back 3x what was lost due to the improper claim. For example, say you put up an original work, or one you have the rights to, and YouTube takes it down due to a faulty or fraudulent content ID, then they or the claimant (who will be one of the 3rd party entities that attest to having ownership or license to the work) will have to pay that user 3x the revenue lost from the instant the blocking was placed.
I would suggest unenforceable laws are not only ineffective but have a net negative consequence on society.
Maybe this is enforceable, but I'm certainly nowhere near clever enough to imagine how it could be enforced and given the state of things like drug and human trafficking I'm not convinced a politician will be clever enough either.
It's simple if you actually want to do it in good faith and not try to find every possible excuse not to do it: any citizen encountering issue and being unable to reach human support can make a complaint to a government agency who will attempt to reach human support using reasonable means that the citizen would've done (and documenting the process as evidence). If _they_ can't get through it the company is sued for a certain amount of money proportional to its revenue as a deterrent.
Welcome to YT human support, you are #1865272937 in the queue. Please be patient.
Tbf YT has human customer support, and it's very easy and quick to reach them. I've had to do it several times due to issues with my payment for YT Premium, and the experience was pretty good every time. But yeah, I'm also sure they won't help you with anything other than payment problems.
How would you ever discover content worth watching?
Introducing: Hypertext
Joking aside, it's not like automatic content suggestions are perfect, they tend to lock you into whatever you consumed lately, ultimately causing things like Elsagate[0]
For music or films I rarely use recommendations any more and go back to the old school thing of reading reviews from people who know the material and can compare and draw non obvious parallels with other artists and works.
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
How did we ever discover content worth watching?
This article has some more detail on some of the artists and songs they stole royalty from.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/two-charged-with-stealing-...
This lawsuit should also have Youtube as party. They should be massively fined not preventing this kind of scams, although any sane individual can spot this from distance.
Bingo. The chance that NONE of the affected creators tried to appeal this for FOUR YEARS is effectively zero.
YouTube's negligence rises to a new level here. They should be culpable as well.
So how did this pair get away with it for 5 years?
Surely it only takes a single false claim for someone to be able to take it to police as fraud? And it looks like these guys must have claimed hundreds of thousands of videos... And yet _none_ of them found a suitable way to get this addressed for four years?
Seems like a pretty open and shut case too... Lots of paper trail...
That's what you get when entities get so big and powerful we users don't have a single recourse against them. The ContentID system being a fraud has been well-known in librist circles since whenever it was launched.
It's a bit similar to how higher-ups in the police and secret services have run massive drug imports in France/USA for decades and everybody knew about it but it took many years for the competent authorities to react. When your entire society is based on obedience to a higher authority, we all become come to depend on the goodwill (or lack thereof) of that entity.
Google is not exactly reputable when it comes to dealing with user complaints, and they have exactly 0 financial incentive to fix this huge problem.
We need private rights of action against companies that don’t reasonably investigate claims of fraud a la FCRA. These private rights of action should have minimum statutory damages so individuals can find contingent counsel.
The police basically don't investigate difficult cases or "commercial disputes". You'd have to take Google to court, and who's going to run that risk?
Even trying to report identity theft to the police is a massive pain. They’ll try to pawn it off on the police department where the fraudulent transaction occurred and that PD will tell you they don’t have jurisdiction and it’s really the PD where the victim is located who should investigate. Most police departments just don’t have the technical knowledge to look into these things. They send you around in circles, and maybe to an FBI form that goes nowhere, and wait for you to give up.
#BitcoinFixesThis
will the owners of the videos get any compensation back from the prosection or google?
I doubt it
Bet the artists still end up with fuck all.
Hopefully there is some recourse to the actual copyright owners owed the lost 20 million directly from A.R. or YouTube.
There's a strong case to be made that YT:
- Failed due diligence.
- Made infringing performances of the work.
- Misrepresented the authorship and/or ownership (moral rights).
- Are liable for infringement.
- And owe the true copyright owners both the lost revenue and an infringement penalty.
This case could get quite interesting.
Since this is in my opinion YT fault they should pay and then pursue the money from the scammers on their own. Hopefully YT won't wiggle their way out of this.
You know they will.
I deleted 400 videos and closed my YouTube account in October because of this, or similar. These were not easy videos to produce: audio, video, photography, text in multiple languages, etc.
Hundreds of hours went into that channel. It was the only one that had the _complete_ (!) recordings of early 20th century baritone Titta Ruffo, including the unpublished Edison cylinders, and I'd put a ridiculous amount of my free time into it over about a decade.
I may have had 10 down votes on 400 videos.
Except for five or six of of more modern artists (1960s), all 400 were 80, 90, 100+ year old audio recordings. It was an exceptional resource, and included many other artists besides.
I just couldn't stand the scam-legal this-that thrown my way by untold numbers of "legal entities" whose ownership claims I couldn't possibly contest. I gave up, unable to balance, in my mind, outflows to criminals, even if it was just pennies.
Part of me regrets deleting it. It was a one-of-a-kind resource, but the legal blerg was _eine komplette ScheiĂźe_.
YouTube, if you're listening, you're welcome to resurrect all of those videos and take whatever ownership you can muster. I certainly won't try anymore. I won't upload so much as a video of me drinking a cup of coffee because the coffee cup, the coffee in it, and probably the traffic noise playing in the background will be claimed as property of someone else.
Yes, even property that's over a century old and in the public domain.
The channel was registered to tittaruffooffurattit@gmail.com, also deleted. You have my permission to resurrect and take ownership if you can.
I think you should publish your videos on something like LBRY or IPFS (heck, even put it up as a torrent), that's the only way this kind of stuff will be sustainable.
I used to be a creator (YT) in 2011 (channel created in 2011), granted I was young and inexperienced, I used certain copyrighted music / images initially and those particular videos were de-monetized. I feel my account was "flagged" internally for the lack of better word.
But then, I learned of how to give credits and all, but once you are "marked" there's very little chance that you may get monetized (at least used to be that way, haven't checked now). Also, by default, your videos would be marked as "Has copyrighted contents" which might not always be true.
The biggest pain point comes when you have to argue with the system / support. There were 2 videos where I did not use copyrighted material and credited royalty free track as per the requirement but there's no winning over them(even with facts).
For an organization as big as the Big G, this automated system and lack of actual checks until someone with big following tweets at them is sad to see even in 2021.
> how to give credits
Am I misunderstanding you? Just giving credit in no way grants you the right to use the content / monitize the video.
I am sorry by credits I meant attribution. I remember there was a certain channel on youtube which let you use the song provided you shared the source / original song (their yt link to the music)
I'm not a US citizen and not a lawyer either, but shouldn't it be possible (for a US american copyright holder) to sue youtube and/or those that claim the copyright in small claims court? AFAIK you would not need a lawyer and at the same time create a very big hassle for the companies involved.
Benn Jordan (perhaps better know by his musical moniker The Flashbulb) put out a video today[0] about another scam in a somewhat similar vein, but this one perpetrated by a NYTimes reporter and specifically targeting musicians
[0]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA
Another symptom of a monopol.
If peertube or the likes was a full blown alternative, people would just quit youtube over this, putting the squeeze on google to clean up its act.
It’s not that simple: YouTube has a huge natural lock-in because videos use lots of bandwidth and Google’s advertisers are willing to pay for that.
Peer to peer systems struggle to offer a competitive a competitive experience because few people are able/willing to volunteer significant bandwidth or take on the personal liability for serving content which is copyrighted or otherwise illegal. They’ll work okay for a hugely popular video but fall off the cliff for the long-tail of niche interests and there aren’t enough people who care about it enough to make “YouTube but slower and less reliable” work in general.
Yeah. Essentially, YouTube is all but a natural monopoly given today's legal and technical environment. Unfortunately, it doesn't get the oversight that natural monopolies are supposed to have to prevent abuses like these.
That’s my take as well: regulation and liability for errors are the most realistic way to fix this. Even if ISPs were required to offer symmetric bandwidth I don’t see anywhere near enough people even being interested in serving other people’s content to make P2P work, which makes me feel old for remembering how cool the BitTorrent launch seemed before I understood the social aspects of the problem.
tl;dr:
"The pair falsely represented to YouTube and an intermediary company identified only by the initials A.R. that they were the owners of the music and were entitled to collect “royalty payments” from their use on YouTube. In some cases the defendants used forged documents claiming to be from artists declaring that the pair had the rights to monetize their music."
There was a community project like this years ago where they submitted tens of thousands of 10 second clips and random beats they made just to get back at all the record companies claiming they own 10 second sound samples. I guess it's unsurprising the lawsuit goes after the small guys and not the big companies that have been doing it forever.
Since nobody has commented this yet - provably representing content rights is a great application for NFTs
Eh not really. You still need a central authority to determine whether the rights claimed by the NFT are authentic or fraudulent. Might as well have a central database.
Scenario: 2 users present an NFT claiming the rights to a song. Who wins?
Isn't the entire point of an NFT the fact that two users can't simultaneously possess it?
I don't know if NFTs are the ideal approach but that seems like the one critique that doesn't apply.
For the NFT itself? yes. For the thing the NFT claims? no; that is up to some authority to decide whether to honor it.
e.g., 2 users have NFT which claims "I own the Mona Lisa". Who is right?
No it isn’t.