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The Ennui of Learned Helplessness: Article 13 and the Five Lies in YouTube’s Content ID
According to Wired (“Don’t believe the hype: Article 13 is great news for YouTube“), YouTube is positioned to be a big winner due to the Article 13 requirement for “upload filters”. If you’re keeping your brackets for “Most Googlely Journalist” in the post-Article 13 March Madness spin, Wired gets the three point play on this post–there are no upload filters in Article 13, so not quite sure what Wired is getting at here. But I digress.
Wired tells us:
[Article 13’s upload filters are] likely to be disruptive, for YouTube as for everyone else. There will be mistakes, disgruntled creators and meme-posters, protests against this or that algorithmic decision. But if anyone is going to eventually benefit from this, in the long run, that is YouTube.
Leaving aside the fact that Alphabet, YouTube’s owner, would probably have enough money to invest in licensing agreements with media companies and music labels – YouTube is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the internet’s sudden need for copyright filters. The platform itself has been using a type of copyright filter, its home-brewed Content ID, for over a decade. The algorithm compares newly uploaded footage against a database of registered videos, and demonetises (or takes down) any post containing matching content [which is also not quite right–it allows the user of Content ID to elect to block or monetize, with heavy pressure to monetize and not block].
While there have been instances of manipulation and egregious mistakes, Alphabet has invested more than $100 million in Content ID’s development, and the technology is already used by more than 9,000 broadcasters, movie studios, and music producers globally. [And there it is–we’ll come back to that] A vast number of other companies – virtually, every single platform and website that does not want to fall foul of Article 13 – could soon swell the ranks of Content ID’s users. Rather than an existential threat, Article 13 could wind up being a fillip to YouTube’s finances.
First, let’s dispense with an implication of that last assertion–that YouTube would profit from ContentID by licensing Content ID to third parties. There is absolutely no evidence that YouTube would do anything remotely like that, and even if they did, Google would likely still control who gets to put their works into ContentID in the first place. Wired doesn’t actually say this, but a reader might get that implication.
What is more clear is that Wired asserts YouTube would have a competitive advantage over other, smaller perhaps, platforms–not like they already do as the result of Google’s illegal favoring of its own products for which it is being fined billions in Europe. This due to the nonexistent “upload filters” that are not in the Copyright Directive (aka Article 13) but that the tech press keeps asserting are really there in one of the great gaslighting exercises of all time.
Remember–ContentID has a lot more to do with preserving YouTube’s US-based DMCA safe harbor and getting licenses for premium content (with higher advertising revenue, i.e., CPMs) than it does with some desire to do the right thing. That sentiment arguably does not exist at Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other Silicon Valley company with the notable exception of Apple.
Wired blows past the two key facts it its own story. First, the number of participants in ContentID: “the technology is already used by more than 9,000 broadcasters, movie studios, and music producers globally”.
This statistic comes from YouTube itself:
But strangely according to a 2016 story in the New York Times:
YouTube says that about 8,000 companies and organizations have access to Content ID and that independents may get access through affiliated companies and industry groups.
That’s right–the number of users of ContentID has increased–worldwide–by 1,000 in four years. Any idea how many new videos were uploaded to YouTube in that time? We may not have that exact number, but we do know this again according to YouTube’s own statistics:
That’s billion with a B. So just rough justice, don’t you think that if there are that many videos being viewed on YouTube there would be more than 9,000 worldwide users of ContentID?
The other relevant fact is that Wired breathlessly repeats that YouTube spent $100,000,000 on developing Content ID. According to Wikipedia (which I tend to believe in this case because it’s their benefactor Google), ContentID cost $60 million to develop by 2016 and as of 2018 Google had spent $100 million on the system.
Allow me to posit that $100 million for a system that can handle the volume on YouTube is chump change. One reason that it cost so little is that it is working for purpose–it is not intended to catch everything, it is only intended to catch works by the people who sign YouTube’s chump deal or people who are “important” (in the best traditions of YouTube’s founders).
Remember this line from the 2016 NYT story? “[I]ndependents may get access [to ContentID] through affiliated companies and industry groups.”
So you mean that some artists are more equal than others?
Exactly.
YouTube’s theory according to the NYT is that independent artists (such as five time Grammy-winner Maria Schneider who graced our pages with her groundbreaking essay on YouTube’s sleaze) are not harmed by YouTube’s “catch me if you can” DMCA shakedown because Content ID is widely available. The implication being if those pesky artists would just use the tools YouTube provides, there would be peace in the valley with sunshine, gum drops and puppy dog tails for everyone with happiness among the subjects of the Unicorn Kings.
The clear implication is that “independents” have nothing to complain about because they can get “access” to ContentID through “affiliated companies and industry groups”. “Affiliated” in this case means affiliated with YouTube (laughably called “partners”), and that means that the “companies and industry groups” have signed a ContentID license agreement which is essentially a nonnegotiable form contract imposed by Google.
Because Google wants to have the rights to use their IP all tied down.
Ahem.
This is another reason why Wired should not write to the Google press release.
So let’s start with what YouTube actually says about who gets ContentID:
And what are the “specific criteria” that copyright owners have to meet for their “substantial body of original material”?
So that quote from YouTube’s website arguably explains why there’s only 9,000 entities that have access to Content ID on a worldwide basis across all copyright categories (assuming that’s even true).
There’s at least five lies underlying Content ID, all of which you’d miss if you didn’t have the inside baseball insight into the unnecessarily complex Content ID system–and as we know, complexity almost always hides fraud.
Lie #1: Show Me Where I Signed Your Social Contract
The first point is why should artists be required to even deal with Content ID or YouTube at all? If an artist never consented to being on the site in the first place, why should Google be able to just exploit their work without consent? Why shouldn’t Google have to have a contract with the artists to exploit their IP? You know, the way you have to be approved and have a license to use Content ID. This is a core property rights concept underlying the new Copyright Directive in Europe–we hope that the US follows suit with DMCA reform.
There is tremendous cost associated with engaging with YouTube at all whether you qualify for Content ID or you don’t. In fact, as the Trichordist’s Streaming Price Bible demonstrates, YouTube’s royalties are so crappy that it’s entirely possible that the total cost of doing business with YouTube exceeds any royalties you could make–because the cost of dealing with YouTube varies directly with the size of your catalog.
So why shouldn’t artists be able to just say no and keep all of their music (or other work product) off of YouTube? Every penny spent trying to block unauthorized videos is a penny spent for YouTube’s benefit. And why is it we have to pay for this?
The truth is that it is not at all apparent that declining the opportunity to license YouTube wouldn’t actually be more profitable than dealing with the incredibly screwed up Content ID and CMS system.
So let’s not assume that Content ID and notice and shakedown are the only possible outcomes here.
Lie #2: Using Content ID Is Not Free
Even though Google doesn’t charge for Content ID, using the system is hardly free, especially for “independents”. In order to get “access” to Content ID, an independent artist needs to contract with a claiming company–and pay that company anywhere from 20% to 50% of their YouTube revenue.
And let’s be clear–claiming companies exist to fix YouTube’s mistakes imposed on the world due to YouTube’s legacy and highly inefficient DMCA notice and shakedown business. Every penny spent by an artist through giving a claiming company a revenue share is a penny spent for YouTube’s benefit by an artist capitulating to the notice and shakedown onslaught.
So saying that “independents” have “access” to Content ID through a claiming company “affiliated” with YouTube is a grotesque oversimplification. There are claiming companies that operate at the more lucrative end of the YouTube doing channel management and MCN or near-MCN business for which they may operate their own in-house advertising sales staff.
The claiming companies in reach of “independents” necessarily have to take a larger share of a smaller revenue stream in order to operate. And here’s what they don’t do:
Block.
Why do they only monetize? Because that’s what a revenue share means–revenue. Using Content ID to just block videos (especially UGC) would only be available for a fee (since there’s no revenue if you block everything). Independent artists can’t afford to pay a fee to block on YouTube so they typically will capitulate and monetize.
And who benefits from that? YouTube.
Why would blocking require a fee for service? If an artist just wants to bail out altogether, then that artist would set the automated controls of CMS to block worldwide. In order to make that blocking meaningful, there would need to be a lot of manual care and feeding to account for UGC leakage through the very porous Content ID.
That would include techniques like pitch bending to use the curious speed controls on the YouTube player which seem to have one purpose–defeating Content ID.
This is what’s called a royal pain in the trade, so anyone doing that work would have to be paid for the hours and hours and hours it would take to accomplish it. Since the artist can’t afford to pay someone else to do that work, the artist would need to do it in all their spare time. Which of course will not be very effective or may not happen at all.
I call this the ennui of learned helplessness.
Lie #3: Artists Cannot Access Content ID
By using the word “access” when it comes to Content ID, YouTube is equivocating yet again. If you are an independent artist and your distributor has a CMS account (and that’s a small group), do you have access to Content ID?
No. At best, you can tell your distributor what you do and do not want monetized. They will only devote so much time to you, however, and they won’t do the manual claiming on UGC, etc., at least not until you get some pretty significant traction on YouTube (meaning over 5,000 views or so on a particular video).
Your distributor will not allow you to get your hands on their CMS or Content ID dashboards. There’s a good reason for this, which is that the way Google licenses Content ID there’s a good chance that the distributor (such as Tunecore or CD Baby) could never get enough seats for its particular CMS license to allow all the distributed artists to have individual access, and there’s no view in Content ID that would show one artist’s tracks without showing that user all the other artist’s tracks handled by that distributor.
Why? Because YouTube doesn’t design the system for “independents”.
Lie #4: Independent Songwriters are SOL
Notice YouTube never talks about independent songwriters having “access” to Content ID. The closest that an independent songwriter comes to getting access to Content ID is if they opted into the HFA YouTube license connected to the out of court settlement of the class action against YouTube that was a companion case to Viacom v. YouTube (and which wasn’t certified as a class, but is often referred to as a class action by people wishing to avoid using the legal term “putative”).
So ask independent songwriters who opted in to the HFA license how that “access” is working out for them.
Lie #5: Content ID Is Another Nondisplay Use of Other People’s Stuff
Google has made a subspecialty of acquiring data for one use and actually using it for other purposes–undisclosed purposes.
Remember “GOOG-411”? This Google product was the “free” Google directory assistance (very similar to Google Voice). Former Googler (and former Yahoo!er) Marissa Meyer told Info World years ago that GOOG-411 was not intended to be what it appeared to be:
You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free 411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.
The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video [such as from YouTube], we can do it with high accuracy.
That’s right–Google told you the product was doing one thing, but in actual fact it was always intended to be something entirely different. The real action was in the background where users couldn’t see it. If Marissa Meyer hadn’t let it slip in an interview, you might never have known.
If you have a Content ID contract, check out this language in paragraph 2:
By providing Reference Files, you grant Google a non-exclusive, royalty-free, limited license to (a) store, copy (including the right to make temporary cache and storage copies), modify or reformat, excerpt, analyze, use to create algorithms and binary representations, create ID Files and otherwise use those Reference Files, the ID Files and the associated metadata in connection with the System…
And there it is: “otherwise use”. Pretty broad grant of rights, eh? You could say that “in connection with the System” is limiting, but how would you ever know what “in connection with” means?
Remember Google Books? Ever heard of “corpus machine translation“? Google uses the scans of the tens of millions of books it stole from authors in the background to improve its translation algorithms. If the authors had brought their case about that, do you think the court would have been so quick to find this obviously massively commercial application a fair use?
Bevo ≠ Unicorn King
Once again, YouTube has scammed their way past artist objections such as those in Maria Schneider’s post and Irving Azoff’s open letter. I think this is partly because the whole Content ID system is such inside baseball–once you accept the idea that requiring artists to use these legacy DMCA tools is even acceptable, which I don’t. Reporters just don’t know what questions to ask.
Now they do.
(Some of this post previously appeared on MTP in other posts.)
Guest Post by @schneidermaria: Content ID is Still Just Piracy in Disguise: An Open Letter to Rightsholders and a Music Industry Ready to Renegotiate with a Monster
Content ID, YouTube’s digital fingerprinting technology, is under fire lately for very good reason. Originally touted by YouTube as an effective method of blocking illegal uploads, Content ID was ostensibly the service’s way to protect copyright holders. But Content ID quickly morphed into a self-serving massive moneymaker. Their pitch goes something like this: “Hey, advertising is good for you. Why not use Content ID to cash in on all the piracy by getting a share of revenue we can generate from ad placement?” Well, they don’t call it piracy – but make no mistake, in the end, their whole scheme still depends on a culture of piracy.
Since the media presents YouTube’s misleading talking points without challenge, it’s up to us to expose what’s really going on. There’s a lot to sift through when one digs deep, so bear with me. In the end, ask yourself if jumping on board, monetizing through YouTube’s Content ID, makes us all complicit in perpetuating the piracy racket that YouTube created to make billions for itself.
1. YouTube’s 3 Billion Figure is all Smoke and Mirrors
YouTube dangles Content ID and monetization in general in front of music creators to lure us to participate. YouTube’s line is that if we jump on the monetization bandwagon, they’ll share ad revenue with us. Sounds like a good deal, but YouTube’s ad revenue has proven paltry when compared to the real cost of producing music. Like an Atlantic City casino, YouTube wants us to believe that we just might hit the jackpot. Stories of viral videos make the news and seem like the new brass ring for rights-holders, but this insightful article explains how rare “viral” is. And of the very, very few who achieve viral, who can sustain it and make a career of it?
The real truth is that most music creators on YouTube are making nothing or next to nothing from the use of their work. YouTube acknowledges that out of all people in the world with videos/music on its service, only 8000 “partners” qualify for Content ID. The rest of us can put ads on the videos we ourselves post, but likely the majority of us are never paid anything, not reaching the $100 threshold YouTube requires of us to receive the first check. And our own uploaded content is competing with pirated uploads of our music that we’re left to police. The mountain of cash from all the music creators who haven’t yet reached $100 must be creating one hell of a “float” for YouTube.
YouTube boasts of $3 billion in total payouts, but dig slightly below that surface, and you see a shameful number. They’ve admitted it’s really less than $1 billion per year. And think about it: YouTube has over a billion users each month, and over 12 billion users a year, so do the math. The measure of fairness is not how much YouTube has paid out in total, but it’s whether those who make the music that fuels YouTube’s fortune are getting paid adequately. Here would be important questions to ask:
1. How many rights-holders are represented on YouTube? (That number must be astronomical, and likely impossible to calculate.)
2. How many rights-holders can actually pay for the budget of a record from revenue they receive from YouTube?
3. How many music creators never reach the $100 threshold?
4. Of all the music-rights-holders represented on YouTube, how many make even minimum wage on an ongoing basis, year after year, for their life’s work that sits, year after year, on YouTube’s massive servers?
Every musician knows that as long as music is available on YouTube for free, it won’t likely sell very well elsewhere, especially with all the available apps that can rip mp3s right from YouTube videos into your personal library. And hey, what happened to the mechanical royalty for all of this, guys? (I’ll be writing about that soon.) So, if YouTube is going to corrupt all other income streams for those who invest their lives and means into the making of music, then YouTube should at very least pay a living wage, right?
We’ve had plenty of time to test the ad model, and one thing is for certain: Ad revenue does not pay for the making of music – not even remotely close. The music industry should quit banging its head into that same wall looking for results. Face the facts folks – ads will never fuel the music economy.
2. YouTube Has Us Haggling Over Popcorn Prices, While They Walk Away With All the “Main Event” Revenue
While we’re haggling over paltry ad revenue, we’re diverted from the far greater value that is being generated from our music. Every month, our music drives billions of users to YouTube’s platform, and the data that Google then gathers from following our fans around the web is where YouTube’s true value lies. Google and Facebook didn’t get their billion dollar valuations from ad revenue. YouTube’s valuation largely comes from the mountains of hoarded data collected on the backs of all musicians and creators. Therefore, part of the value of the YouTube empire should fairly belong to musicians. Not only should musicians and creators share in the value of data gathered, but they should also have access to the data their creations generate. Why in the world is it fair for YouTube to keep all of this data as a “trade secret” when it’s generated from our own fans, often through piracy YouTube expressly facilitates?
3. YouTube’s Dirty Secret about Content ID
Content ID is available only to those whom YouTube chooses – and YouTube runs the place like an exclusive country club. The simple fact is that the vast majority of independent musician-rights-holders are not accepted into Content ID. I’ve received five GRAMMY® Awards, and even testified about the DMCA next to Google’s counsel, Katherine Oyama, listening to her boast at length about the virtues of Content ID and its ability to block uploads. But when I came home from testifying in D.C. and applied for Content ID, I was denied. Content ID is reserved for big record companies with big catalogues, and probably selected independent artists whom YouTube believes will make YouTube a heap of money. And who even knows to what degree artists or companies with YouTube contracts are allowed to “block” uploads, as those contracts are under NDAs. Are we seriously to believe they’d permit independent artists to join, only to block their entire catalogue from being uploaded?
In the press, YouTube has fought back against the recent flood of criticism, saying that all rights-holders can access Content ID – that they can get it through “third-party vendors.” These third party vendors often take between 20% to 50% of the revenue paid by YouTube—after YouTube takes its share. That means the rights-holder is paying two overpaid gatekeepers. So yes, it’s available, but at a completely unreasonable premium. If big record companies are complaining about their bad revenue from YouTube, they should try being an independent musician, paying yet another middleman!
But here’s the most relevant fact that YouTube keeps hiding: BLOCKING UPLOADS THROUGH CONTENT ID IS NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH THIRD PARTIES. The use they bragged about before Congress – that they imply is available to everyone – does not exist. The reason is obvious – without ad revenue, there’s zero incentive for the third-party vendor or YouTube to partake. The third-party vendors would have to charge a fee big enough to pay YouTube and itself to simply block uploads. What a sick game that would be – paying some third-party company and YouTube to block the pirated uploads YouTube promotes.
Why can’t a rights-holder protect his/her work from illegal exposure on YouTube according to his/her Constitutional right, and then go sell it where he/she wants, for the price he/she chooses to set? That’s reasonable, right? Why is that such an unattainable dream for people like me and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of my colleagues?
If an independent rights-holder wants to keep all their work off of YouTube and keep clear of YouTube’s ad-based, piracy-driven, self-serving, dirty, lawless racket, he or she is screwed. Is there a single independent artist that YouTube has allowed access to Content ID for the sole purpose of “blocking” uploads? Katherine Oyama should stop the bragging about Content ID until her company makes it available to “every” rights-holder for blocking. And certainly, misleading Congress with false claims and self-aggrandizement in a Congressional hearing, and similarly misleading the American public through a calculated propaganda campaign, is in my opinion, deeply unethical.
4. Content ID Legitimizes Piracy – We Shouldn’t Be Complicit
Music creators who succumb to the false appeal of “monetizing” on Content ID, or those whose record company has made that deal for them, have been swayed by YouTube’s line of baloney that illegal uploads are good and aren’t really illegal as long as YouTube offers a pittance from the ads they generate. Clearly, the infringement orgy YouTube has sponsored for so many years has brought independent musicians and record companies to their knees, as they accept bad deals to monetize the crumbs that are left on the floor from a devoured industry.
Our music industry’s acceptance of the “monetization” tool from Content ID only serves to “legitimize” the piracy that YouTube systematically breeds. Monetization erases any last vestige of guilty-feeling-illegal-uploaders. Content ID actually makes them feel good about themselves as they upload to their hearts’ content with zero inquiry. “Look! I’m making the artists money AND giving them needed exposure, AND I’m offering the public free music at the same time!”
I’ve heard this logic again and again from young people with bloated YouTube channels. We’ve all fallen into YouTube’s trap: By making a deal with the devil, right-holders are basically condoning the piracy that has destroyed the music marketplace. Content ID monetization is steamrolling our Constitutional right to control our own creative works. We shouldn’t buy into YouTube’s piracy scheme for the few scraps it might offer.
5. Content ID Offers a Pathetic Deal
With a straight face, YouTube tells you and the media that they give 55% of ad revenue to the rights-holder and only keep 45%. But they calculate that percentage split after they first reimburse themselves for their own expenses, which they calculate behind their green curtain. So the 55% figure is not of gross income. An article by East Bay Ray explains that after YouTube pays itself about 37% for its expenses, rights-holders receive only about 35%. That’s not a split, that’s a fleecing.
YouTube’s approach reeks of hypocrisy. Sure, YouTube has expenses. But has anyone discussed our expenses in making the recording? Costs should be figured on both sides. We all agree that when a potter sells a bowl, the price reflects the cost of clay, glaze, the kiln, firing, etc. When a clothing designer sells a pair of pants, the wholesale price covers the cost of fabric, thread, pattern design, etc. But YouTube, or rather, Google, the richest company in the world, wants us to accept a business model where the “price” they pay for our music has no rational relationship to the actual costs of making the music. Who cares about how much they say they pay out. Their site contains almost the entire world’s library of music, and it’s not even coming close to paying the cost of making that music. We invest all we have – time, talent, training, technology, and more. We have the right to expect a reasonable return on that investment. YouTube is an imperialist tycoon that is finger-flicking less than third world pay at musicians and the music industry for a product that YouTube shouldn’t even have access to in the first place.
6. Who is Clearing all the Rights for Music on Content ID Anyway?
The answer is, probably no one. When a record company puts out a record, the record company (assuming the artist hasn’t negotiated for ownership) likely owns the copyright to that recording. And if the record company has struck a Content ID deal with YouTube, chances are they will monetize the record. But what about the other copyright-holders? Likely there are songwriters whose works are represented on the record, too. Often there are several or more collaborators on any given song. So, what about their right to block uploads? Where are their royalties? How are they accounted? Are they accounted? Who asked for permission? Where is the transparency? This is happening to me, and my answers are: none, nowhere, not, no, no one, and none. YouTube is a jumbled, colossal rights violations mess that leaves independent rights-holders with the impossible task of doing DMCA takedowns, where YouTube publicly exposes our identities, leaving us open to repercussions from fans or record companies. The intimidation leads us to do nothing but accept the loss. There must be millions upon millions of such copyright violations on YouTube. Maybe that’s why they don’t allow all of us to have access to the Content ID blocking mechanism, because they fear most records would have some rights-holder that won’t allow it to be monetized. Well, if there was economic incentive, that wouldn’t be the case. Isn’t that how a free market economy works?
7. YouTube’s Use of Content ID is Un-American
Here are the bigger and broader questions for our industry and government. Why aren’t musicians and creators allowed to be a part of the American free market, where we set our prices based on the cost of producing our own product? That’s how manufacturing works in any freedom-loving country. Why can’t a music creator set the valuation of his/her work in the same way one sells visual art? Why are the Department of Justice and government, (all of whom are tarnished by their whirling revolving doors with Google – read it!) who are setting most of our prices for us, doing so based on failed ad revenue models from usurious companies? Why are the DOJ and our government at large intent on propping up a bogus “freemium” model? And why are they blind to the simple fact that big data companies operate freemium ad-based models all to the greater end of gathering invaluable data to become the biggest player in the AI (artificial intelligence) race?
Why is the survival of theft-enabling, ineffective, ad-based internet businesses more valued than the future of music or livelihoods of musicians? Why are we collectively not screaming our bloody heads off? Our songs and music have shaped our culture and the world’s culture for centuries. Music has brought people and cultures together, serving as the worlds’ ambassador without fail: a voice for freedom, for the oppressed, for change, for comfort, for celebration, and for transformation.
Music creators should be treated like the valuable citizens of this country that we are. We should be allowed to set our own price at very least! We aren’t the indentured servants of YouTube, here to make the Google empire rich and powerful. Given a fighting chance, the market would show how much our fans value our work, as it has for nearly a century. Taylor Swift and Adele proved exactly that with their quite recent releases that sold millions of good-old fashioned CDs at regular prices. But when we’re forced to try and create that market in a society with a complicit government that’s allowed copyright theft to run rampant, it’s an almost impossible situation.
When YouTube serves the world mountains of pirated content on a silver platter without having to take a single step to stop the piracy, or Google is allowed to prioritize pirates in their ‘search’ algorithms (even after rights-holders send takedown notices), how could there ever be a true marketplace?
8. Without an Ability to Block Illegal Uploads with Content ID, We’re All Screwed
For the vast majority of us that are unable to protect our music against piracy, we’re stuck playing Whack-A-Mole with an outdated and anemic DMCA takedown process, fighting a tsunami of piracy from a company that does all they can to keep the flood-waters flowing.
So, let us ask ourselves as composers, songwriters, performers, producers, publishers, and record companies: are we willing to be complicit in this whole scheme, cementing piracy as an acceptable norm, all for the measly pocket lint they’re offering us? I’d sooner fight piracy to the bitter end, and lose, than do that deal with the richest and scariest (“don’t be evil”) company on earth.
9. YouTube Should Lose Their “Safe Harbor” for Withholding “Standard Technical Measures”
The DMCA’s safe harbor provision requires that companies like YouTube must ensure that “standard technical measures” “are available to any person on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms” to identify and protect their copyrighted work. (17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(i).) YouTube is not allowed to discriminate as to who gets access to tools that have become “standard” in protecting copyright. If YouTube does discriminate, it is supposed to lose its safe harbor.
It’s right in the DMCA. This is a point no one has yet pressed. Content ID has been around and used billions of times to make billions of dollars for years now. “Audible Magic” is available at a very reasonable price to any company wanting to offer blocking of illegal uploads. And on Audible Magic, content owners can upload their content for free. Apple has now created “iTunes Match,” and Facebook is rolling out its own similar fingerprinting technology, so it’s obvious that fingerprinting technology has become a “standard technical measure.” YouTube can’t deny it’s become the core of their business. And, if they also tout that it’s widely available through third parties, as they have in numerous publications, that suggests “standard,” too. Digital fingerprinting is a standard technology that’s now very accessible, it’s just that YouTube stiff-arms most of us who want to use it to block pirated uploads. And most other sites that allow music uploads from their users, pretend like Audible Magic doesn’t exist, because they don’t want it to exist. And though the DMCA safe harbor provision requires YouTube (and all internet companies that also allow public uploads), to use the available fingerprinting technology, no one is yet enforcing this application of the law. It’s high time.
YouTube reserving its copyright protection feature for hand-picked rights-holders, blocking the masses’ ability to fully protect their Constitutional right, even though the technology is right there in YouTube’s dirty fingers, is like denying a rope to a drowning person. Sounds like clear grounds to take away YouTube’s “safe harbor” protections to me. It actually feels criminal by my own estimation, when you consider that the violated rights are Constitutional rights.
I wish record companies would step away from their Content ID contracts entirely, and fight a noble fight to enforce this statute in the DMCA that would protect all rights-holders equally, rather than being a complicit partner in the pathetic and dirty Content ID piracy racket.
10. Content ID Should Be Made “Open Source” for All Internet Platforms
People are starting to wake up to the dangers of allowing a company to amass such power from data and artificial intelligence (AI). There’s a movement to quickly develop AI technology and algorithms as ‘open source,’ in an effort to keep a few all-powerful hipster tycoons from having AI power over the entire world. It’s called Open AI, and many seriously talented scientists are flocking to it. Thank God there are a few people out there scared stiff by the power of those that are controlling AI.
Since Google’s empire is built on the premise that “open” and “free content” is such a grand idea for us little folk, then it’s high-time it puts its money where its mouth is, and make Content ID fingerprinting technology for blocking illegal uploads available to us little folk as “open source” too. YouTube likes to say how much it has spent developing Content ID, but that’s exactly the point: if you won’t share YOUR works with us for free because you want to recover YOUR investment, why should you expect us to give away our works for free, without having recovered OUR investment?
And YouTube, don’t dictate how we rights-holders can use this now-standard technology. Let rights-holders use it as they wish – to block or to monetize – no NDA’s, backroom deals, or intimidation. Let’s make it all free and open, and see what a real marketplace looks like when we actually take measures to control infringement.
YouTube/Google wants the public to believe that certain “copyright” protection somehow harms the internet. But when their own trillions are made on their own “copyrighted” software, through their own “copyrighted” algorithms and databases, and through their own “trade secret intellectual property,” they suddenly guard it like Fort Knox. Somehow, YouTube’s and Google’s own copyrights are “good,” but musicians’ copyrights are “bad.”
Here’s the simple truth: protecting copyright doesn’t hurt the internet, it only hurts piracy. And in the final analysis, Content ID is really just another sneaky way for YouTube to get rich off of piracy, and to try to appear like they’re throwing us a helping hand. It’s underhanded and deceitful. We as a music industry shouldn’t negotiate away the true value of our work out of desperation, giving way to the powerful grip of a racketeer (in my opinion) that just wants to keep us quiet.
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