YouTuber Has 150 Anime Reviews And 'Let's Draws' Hit With Copyright Claims All At Once

from the surprise! dept

As has been a hot topic of discussion of late, YouTube has a copyright enforcement problem on its hands. To be fair, this problem has existed for some time, but due to some recent transparency from YouTube itself over how often it receives claims and enforces them, the scale of this problem is becoming more widely known. In YouTube's minor defense: this is difficult challenge to overcome. The platform operates internationally, which means that it often finds itself attempting to navigate the nuances of copyright laws throughout the world. Still, to say it's not a problem would be silly. And, frankly, YouTube's creative community is becoming more and more vocal about it.

Take Mark Fitzpatrick, for instance, the operator of the Totally Not Mark YouTube channel. Fitzpatrick releases a video a week covering mostly anime topics, primarily either reviews of anime shows or episodes, alongside some let's draws for anime images and characters. He has had this channel for several years and has well over half a million subscribers. This is all fairly straightforward fair use stuff. And, yet, Mark was slammed with a series of copyright claims on 150 of his videos over the course of a day or so, resulting in those videos being taken offline.

YouTuber Mark Fitzpatrick of Totally Not Mark has made a name for himself with his manga and anime videos on YouTube. His reviews edit together montages from whatever he’s reviewing or critiquing as he expounds his thoughts in voice over. Mark says his use of copyright material is fair. Toei Animation, it seems, disagrees, and have filed copyright claims on 150 of his videos.

“Over the last twenty-four hours, I’ve sat back in disbelief, shock, and sorrow as my life’s work has been unfairly ripped away from me,” begins Mark in his response video to Toei and YouTube, which, as of writing, has over 400,000 views. “Two nights ago, I received an email notifying me that fifteen of my videos had been copyright claimed and block by Toei Animation,” Mark continues. “One hour later, that number rose to twenty-eight. And when I woke up this morning, it had reached a total of 150 videos that my audience can no longer see and that I can no longer monetize.” All the videos in question were either for Dragon Ball or One Piece, both of which Toei animates. Note that a handful of those videos did not feature any anime clips, but rather, were how-to-draw explainers.

As a result, something like 3 years worth of his work just went poof! Along with a significant chunk of his company's revenue. This despite Fitzpatrick noting that Toei has actually asked him to do some work in promoting its content directly in the past!

Now, you may be asking how this happens when fair use or fair dealing is a thing. After all, Fitzpatrick operates out of Ireland, where fair dealing is part of the law. Except the claims are coming from a company based out of Japan where there is no such provision in the law and, as we've discussed ourselves, copyright law has morphed into an absolute restrictive monster. And Japanese law may be where YouTube's proverbial head is at.

In his response, Mark says that he ensures that he and his employees adhere to policy regarding fair dealing and fair use as outlined by YouTube, his own country, and other countries. This maybe true; however, copyright law in Japan is...different. I’m no lawyer, but as attorney Keiji Sugiyama explained in a presentation at Fordham University, Japanese copyright law does not have a general fair use provision like the United States.

Instead, Japan has moral rights for any type of work. Sugiyama notes that while the Japanese Copyright Law does lack a general fair use provision, there are certain legal cutouts to allow for parody and private use, as well as for reproductions for schools and libraries.

But not commentary or limited use for things like a let's draw, it seems. And there is the problem.

Again, it's not an easy problem to solve, but multi-billion dollar a year companies aren't supposed to only get softballs pitched down the middle of the strike zone. The platform very much needs to figure out how to enforce copyright claims fairly in situations where the uploader is abiding by his or her country's laws, but not by the laws of the country where the content originated. Put another way: were Toei an American or Irish animation company, this would be a simple problem to solve by counterclaiming it under fair use.

But in this case? Well, it seems the end result due to YouTube is that an Irish uploader must abide by Japanese copyright law. And that can't seriously be the world anyone wants.

Filed Under: anime, content id, copyright, dmca, mark fitzpatrick, takedowns

Warner/Chappell Issues Copyright Claim Over YouTube Video Deliberately Containing None Of Its Music

from the phantom-menace dept

Warner/Chappell's DMCA takedown arm is so damn proactive it can kill YouTube videos containing as little as 0% of its IP. A clip of Star Wars posted to YouTube sans overbearing John Williams soundtrack was targeted by Warner/Chappell, the owner of the rights to John Williams' Star Wars compositions.

Here's Jeremy Hsu of Wired with more details.

Fans of the YouTube channel Auralnauts, which posted the doctored Star Wars scene in 2014 as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the emotional power of Williams’ score, loved it for that weirdness. But another set of viewers—those with the rights to the movie’s soundtrack—tuned in to these sounds of silence and heard something else: the ka-ching of a cash register.

That’s what the Auralnauts discovered earlier this summer when they received word that Warner/Chappell—the global music publishing arm of Warner Music Group—had filed a monetization claim on their “Star Wars Minus Williams” video through YouTube's Content ID System. That’s right: The copyright holder was claiming ownership of something that wasn’t there.

There are several theories to what went wrong here, although Warner engaging in kneejerk copyright claims with zero pre-claim vetting doesn't appear to be the frontrunner. First, a clip of music sounding a lot like a John Williams piece opens the video. But the piece is written and composed by Gustav Holt -- and is "copyright-free" according to Wired. The studio behind Star Wars had no objection to the clip, so it's not related to the visual content. That leaves Warner, possibly motivated by a faulty trigger in its Content ID auto-scanning. There's also a four-second loop of Williams' score appended to the end of the video, which may have pulled the Content ID trigger as well. But even if so, there are still problems with Warner and YouTube's Content ID system because the wrong piece of music was named in Warner's copyright claim.

[T]he Warner/Chappell claim incorrectly identified the “Star Wars Main Title” track as being present in the Auralnauts video. The single brief Williams excerpt used by the Auralnauts actually comes from a track titled “The Throne Room and End Title.”

Whatever the case is, the claim was obviously bogus. But it shows how fragile an ecosystem YouTube can be for those using it as a revenue stream. Even when wrong about pretty much everything, Warner was still able to siphon this video's profits from the Auralnauts. The Auralnauts challenged Warner -- which the article points out is something that happens in less than 1% of content claims -- but it didn't matter. In fact, it's unlikely anyone at Warner even bothered to read the challenge before issuing a rejection.

That leaves the Auralnauts in the difficult position of risking their entire channel to continue disputing Warner's obviously erroneous copyright claim.

[I]f a copyright claimant such as Warner/Chappell does not back down from its claim, the video is likely to get taken down from YouTube entirely—and in that event, the Auralnauts would also be penalized by the platform as a copyright scofflaw and barred from some privileges, such as linking to their own store. Three such takedowns and YouTube will delete your channel.

Despite the constant complaints about YouTube being some sort of infringement wonderland, the odds are stacked almost completely in favor of legacy industry copyright holders. Nothing happens to Warner if it continues to file bogus claims. But those targeted by claims are expected to just let the bogus claims happen because challenging claims is a great way to damage your own YouTube account.

Filed Under: audio, auralnauts, content id, copyright, john williams, monetization, star wars, youtube
Companies: warner/chappell, youtube

Facebook Launches Its Own Version Of ContentID, Which Will Soon Be Abused To Take Down Content

from the watch-this-space dept

Last year, after a bunch of YouTube video creators started slamming Facebook for allowing people to re-upload their videos to Facebook (they called it "freebooting"), Facebook insisted that it, too, was building a ContentID-like system to automate the process of taking down videos based on infringement claims. Last fall, the company announced that it would be using the same system basically everyone other than Google uses: Audible Magic as the backend system of that tool. And now Facebook has officially announced its product, called "Rights Manager."

Today we’re announcing the launch of Rights Manager, a set of admin and workflow tools that help publishers and creators manage and protect their video content on Facebook at scale. With Rights Manager, we want to give video publishers the confidence that their content is protected across Facebook, as well as provide them with increased flexibility and greater control over the use of their video.

Of course, these days, thanks to pressure from copyright holders, large platforms all feel compelled to offer something like this, even if it's not legally required. It's amusing that even in an age where the legacy players are demanding a "notice-and-staydown" system for copyright claims, they're still not happy that basically all the large platforms are already creating platforms that do exactly that.

But what's totally missing from the announcement is how Facebook will avoid the kind of abusive takedowns that YouTube's ContentID sees all the time. There's no mention of how it will protect against bogus claims. There's no mention of how it will handle disputes. Facebook just seems to pretend that the system will work perfectly and it won't be abused. There's little basis to think that's true given how widely ContentID is abused on a regular basis. The company also says that it has updated its "repeat infringer" policy, which is the new hotness thanks to some recent lawsuits over what qualifies as a reasonable repeat infringer policy.

Perhaps Facebook's system won't be nearly as abused as ContentID since it doesn't appear to (yet!) include ContentID's "monetize this use" feature -- but it still seems destined for abuse. And that's especially true since the company notes that the new system will be used against live content:

Video publishers and media companies can also provide reference streams of live content so that we can check live video on Facebook against those reference streams in real time.

So I'm sure we'll start seeing examples of livestreams being killed mid-show thanks to a snippet of music playing in the background. Considering that Facebook is betting big on live streaming, a few false flags taking down events that were livestreamed due to incidental copyright-covered content playing in the background may raise questions about how viable a tool this is.

To be clear, this is a difficult position for platforms to be in. They obviously feel strong pressure to take down infringing content, and an automated solution feels like it makes sense. But we've seen how these things are abused, and it's at least a little concerning that Facebook doesn't even seem to acknowledge that possibility in its announcement.

Filed Under: automated systems, content id, copyright, notice and staydown, rights manager, takedowns
Companies: facebook

News Corp. Makes Copyright Claim Over News Corp's Live Video Stream Of The GOP Debate

from the well,-that-makes-sense dept

As you may have heard, there was a Republican Presidential debate last night -- and it was so much fun they actually did two of them. I happen to be in a hotel which had Fox News on the TV (at home I haven't had any TV service for many years), so I was watching some of it, just for the fun of it. A few people also pointed out that you could watch the stream live via Sky News' YouTube livestream. The debate was officially the "Facebook/Fox News" debate, so it seems odd enough that it wasn't streaming anywhere on Facebook, but we'll leave that aside for now. Yet, with about 15 minutes left in the debate, the livestream on YouTube suddenly disappeared and you got this: In short, Fox News issued a copyright takedown to YouTube over Sky News' streaming the debate. While that might sound perfectly reasonable, it seems worth pointing out that both Fox News and Sky News are owned by the same company: News Corp.. Yes, News Corp. effectively DMCA'd itself. Because that's how copyright works.

Filed Under: content id, copyright, live stream, takedown
Companies: fox news, news corp., sky news

Universal Music Takes Down Maroon 5's Own Video With A Copyright Claim

from the nice-work,-geniuses dept

This seems to happen every few months or so, but once again, a record label is causing a big name musical act to have its own video blocked from showing up on YouTube. As you may have heard, Maroon 5 recently released a new single, entitled "This Summer's Gonna Hurt Like A Motherfucker" -- and with it, a video that has been getting lots of attention. So, you might want to go check it out on YouTube, but if you do that right now, you'll be presented with this (ht: @RomanOnARiver): Ooops. Yes, that's Maroon 5's official YouTube channel and the official video for their new single which has been getting lots of press attention and already had nearly 1.5 million views. But now it's getting none, because the band's own label has yanked the video via a copyright claim (most likely via a braindead use of YouTube's Content ID system). The band is signed to Interscope, which is a subsidiary of Universal Music. Gotta wonder how that's working out for them, if their own label is yanking down their own official video just as it's getting lots of attention. Isn't copyright great?

Filed Under: content id, copyright, maroon 5, promotions, takedowns
Companies: interscope, universal music, youtube

YouTube Briefly Shuts Down Blizzard's Own YouTube Channel For Copyright Infringement

from the three-strikes dept

YouTube's ContentID system gets mocked quite frequently for bogus takedowns, which happen with unfortunate frequency. The latest, as pointed out by YouTube star Total Biscuit is that Blizzard's own damn YouTube channel for World Championship Series StarCraft, WCSStarCraft, was down for at least 40 minutes earlier today. If you visited the page during that time, you saw the following: A YouTuber who follows Totalbiscuit, Ryan Wyatt, quickly noted that the company was "working on it", but it still looks bad -- and again raises questions about why YouTube has given in to pressures from copyright holders to do excessive things like shutting down accounts based on accusations and matches, all too often leading to these kinds of results. Yes, the DMCA requires a process for removing accounts of repeat infringers, but that should require them to be actual infringers.

Filed Under: content id, contentid, copyright, dmca, starcraft, takedown, wcs
Companies: blizzard, google, youtube

More On Indie Labels And YouTube: Some Legitimate Concerns, But Still A Lot Of Misplaced Anger

from the monetization-fight dept

Last week, we wrote about how some of the stories making the rounds concerning YouTube "blocking" musicians from using YouTube and taking down videos if they didn't agree to non-negotiable contract terms for YouTube's new music service were... exaggerated. We pretty clearly noted within that post that there could be legitimate arguments about the terms of the contract, but the claims about being "blocked" from YouTube were not really accurate. That story got a bit of attention, as people dug in to try to understand what was going on. Various versions of the contract that YouTube has been offering to indie artists have been floating around and Digital Music News has posted a copy of the whole thing, as it's done in the past with other music services.

I've also heard from a number of folks in the indie music community who have raised some good points about their concerns, going beyond the whole misleading "but they'll block my videos." One of the best summaries of the concerns was actually placed on a comment to our original story, which highlighted a bunch of other points that people were concerned with, some more reasonable than others. Having looked at the contract on DMN and talked this over with some folks, a few things become clear, which we'll discuss with a few screenshots from the copy DMN uploaded (though it's worth reading the whole thing). First, YouTube is in fact raising the rates it pays people: As we noted, there is a little something strange about complaining about YouTube offering all its artists a deal better than the existing deal, and claiming it's somehow unfair. And, perhaps that's why most (between 90 and 95%) artists seem to have agreed to sign up for this deal with no problem.

The second issue is the "major label" issue. That is, it's been reported, but not confirmed, that the major labels got nice advances from YouTube to join this program, and the indies feel that's unfair and that they're being cut out. As some have pointed out, some of this anger is really indies angry at the major labels plus YouTube as opposed to them just being angry at YouTube. But, on that front, it's somewhat difficult to figure out how YouTube can really do anything here. Of course it's going to provide greater guarantees and advances to the major labels, because they can be reasonably sure that those will make economic sense. It's much tougher to do that with a diverse group of independent artists. There is this tidbit in the contract, though, that has raised some eyebrows: There seems to be some fear here that the major labels will cave and agree to lower rates, and thus the indies will be locked into that. Again, this is where the "indies vs. majors" issue really comes into play. Though, again, I'm a bit hard pressed to figure out what else is makes sense for YouTube to do in this situation. The basic point here is that if the overall economics change so much that the majors are willing to accept lower streaming rates, then the indies will likely have to get pulled along as well. I can see why they're uncomfortable with that... but at the same time it also seems like a perfectly reasonable contract term for a variety of reasons. And, at the same time, does anyone really expect that the major labels are going to agree to cut rates? That seems doubtful. They're going to seek to increase them, rather than the other way around.

The final point that has raised some serious concerns is the apparent provision that artists need to hand over their full catalog and that it has to give their works to YouTube at the same time as any other "similarly situated" service. Here's the clause in the contract DMN posted: On this one, I can definitely see both sides of the argument. Some artists are willing to give some music to some services, and other music to other services, as they think will best serve their audience. At the same time, YouTube obviously has its reasons for wanting to make its service as comprehensive as possible. There is what appears to be that vague exception for "limited exclusives" to other sites, but some might not find that to be enough. As for the "entire catalog" issue, it's important to note that the definition of "Provider Sound Recordings" and "Provider Music Videos" seems to only include those given to YouTube, so it's not clear that it really requires artists to hand over every song they've ever created. It's basically just saying that if the artist does post a song to YouTube's monetization system, it has to be included in the program: That said, we've also heard that this covers ContentID. So... an artist that doesn't want to post a video of their own song, but does want to reserve the right to monetize others' use of his or her songs, is put in an uncomfortable position. Because by using ContentID, they've basically agreed to license their music to the program. That's a point that I can see might reasonably make many artists uncomfortable. If I were in YouTube's shoes, I'd think it might be better (at least for public perception) to offer two options here: one that is a direct monetization option, wherein the artists upload their own songs for monetization across the board, and a second one that is solely for monetizing user videos through ContentID, unrelated to the subscription music service.

Still, that's a contractual choice that Google/YouTube is making about how it wants to run its service, and it really doesn't seem that crazy for the company to try to put together a deal that will likely lead to the best overall experience for end users. Separately, as we pointed out last time (and at least one independent artist noted to me via email), it does seem to be looking a gift horse in the mouth a bit to basically argue that they all want to use YouTube's platform for free -- getting all the advantages of hosting, bandwidth, community, streaming software and more -- and then whine about how YouTube looks to make that more sustainable while at the same time providing ways for the artists to make some revenue as well.

So, in the end, there do seem to be some reasonable concerns by artists about the specific terms in the contract -- but that's going to be true in almost any contract negotiation. YouTube's never going to please everyone all the time. I do think YouTube could have done a few things to better anticipate some of these concerns and to provide artists with greater flexibility in some of the decisions they need to make, but looking over the key concerns, you can also make the argument that YouTube is structuring this offering to be better for users -- and doing so in a way that will help artists make money. And thus... the specific complaints do feel a bit more like nitpicking. The concerns about the deals with the majors are... just kind of a fact of life. It's hard to see how YouTube could realistically do much different in that situation. Negotiating individual deals with every single indie provider is a logistical impossibility (and, if anything, would likely require lower royalty rates, as the management of so many different deals would require significant overhead).

Once again, after looking at the details, it does seem like artists have some legitimate complaints, and YouTube could have been more open and transparent about some of the details of all of this. I definitely see the point from my artist friends who don't want to put everything on YouTube. But, having also dealt with music services where it's frustrating to see them missing songs that really ought to be available, you can see why the company is trying to drag some artists into accepting the fact that making more of their work available is probably best overall as well.

Filed Under: content id, contract terms, indie artists, indie labels, music, youtube
Companies: google, youtube

Vimeo Pressured Into Setting Up Its Own Content ID

from the via-audible-magic dept

The legacy copyright industry has been pushing for years to make automatic fingerprinting and blocking a requirement under the law. In fact, many lawsuits from both the record labels and movie studios have argued that automated fingerprinting is already a requirement under the law -- though, those legal arguments have been consistently rejected. For example, in the record labels lawsuit against Vimeo for allowing "lipdub" videos, the labels have been claiming that Vimeo's failure to offer an automated system for filtering out copyright-covered works amounted to "willful blindness." While the court rejected that argument wholeheartedly, noting that the law makes "clear that service providers are under no affirmative duty to seek out infringement," it appears Vimeo has decided to do so anyway.

On Wednesday, Vimeo announced its new Copyright Match tool. Like basically every non-Content ID filter out there, this one relies on technology from Audible Magic, which doesn't necessarily have the best reputation. Vimeo seems to bend over backwards to insist that it will allow fair use... but it appears they're still taking a "takedown first and review later" approach to it. If your work is blocked, you can claim fair use, and then wait for Vimeo to determine if they agree with you or not -- even if the copyright holder never complained about the work.

In other words, it's another step towards permission culture, rather than allowing the sort of permissionless creativity and innovation that is so important today.

Filed Under: content id, contente match, copyright, creativity, fair use, filters, permission
Companies: audible magic, vimeo

Study Shows How Notice-And-Takedown Reduces Transaction Costs In Making Works Legally Available

from the so-of-course-the-entertainment-industry-wants-to-kill-it dept

We've written a few times in the past about research done by Paul Heald on copyright and its impact on the availability of certain content. He's recently published an interesting new study on how the DMCA's notice-and-takedown regime facilitates making content available by decreasing transaction costs among parties. As we've discussed at length, the entertainment industry's main focus in the next round of copyright reform is to wipe out the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA. The legacy recording and movie industries want everyone else to act as copyright cops, and hate the idea that notice-and-takedown puts the initial burden on themselves as copyright holders.

However, Heald's research looks at music on YouTube and concludes that the notice-and-takedown system has actually enabled much greater authorized availability of music, by reducing transaction costs. The idea is pretty straightforward. Without a notice-and-takedown provision, someone who wants to post music to YouTube needs to go out and seek a license. Of course, getting permission from all the various rightsholders is frequently impossible. The transaction costs of getting permission make it such that it's way too high. Yet, with notice-and-takedown, the person can upload the content without permission, and then the copyright holder is given the option of what to do with it. On YouTube, that includes the option of monetizing it, thus "authorizing" the use. That creates a natural experiment for Heald to explore, in which he can see how much content is "authorized" thanks to such a setup. And the result, not surprisingly, is that this system has enabled much greater authorized (and monetized) access to music than an alternative, high transaction cost system, under which uploaders must first seek out permission to upload everything.

In fact, the analysis shows a tremendous number of popular music hits from the US from 1930 to 1960 are available in what's likely an authorized (i.e., monetized) fashion, even thought nearly all of it was almost certainly uploaded by those without permission. Under the system that the RIAA and MPAA would like, this would be next to impossible. Instead, they'd want to negotiate deals first, making it nearly impossible for such works to be available, and meaning that both the availability and monetization of those works wouldn't be happening. As Heald concludes:

Congress should resist calls to dismantle platforms like YouTube which take advantage of current limits on secondary liability to create a marketplace that radically reduces the high cost of negotiating over rights to music and visual content. The access YouTube provides to valuable cultural products is far from perfect, but it provides a partial solution to the problem of disappearing works, at least in the music context. In any event, no new legislative initiative should proceed in the absence of concrete data testing the claim of copyright owners that their proposals make works more, rather than less, available to the public.

Filed Under: content id, copyright, dmca, efficiency, markets, notice and takedown, paul heald, transaction costs

Sony And YouTube Take Down Sintel; Blender's Open Source, Creative Commons, Crowdfunded Masterpiece

from the how-to-mess-up-everything dept

Pretty much everyone has been sending over the bizarre story of YouTube taking down the film Sintel based on a copyright claim from Sony Pictures. While I imagine it will be back up soon (if not already by the time you read this), as I write this the Sintel link shows the following (and between writing this and posting it, the video was put back up, but all weekend it looked like this): If you're unfamiliar with Sintel, we wrote about it back in 2010. It's an amazingly well-done short animated film created via the open source software Blender, in part to promote how amazing Blender's 3D content creation suite is. The video was partly crowdfunded and was released under a wonderfully broad Creative Commons license that even allowed commercial use (it only required attribution). Sony had nothing to do with any of this.

The Slashdot post about this explains what probably happened here. Sony recently added Sintel to its official 4k demo pool to show off its 4k "ultra HD" TVs. Who knows if they worked out a specific licensed to use it, but under the Creative Commons license, the company wouldn't need to, so long as Sony properly attributed the clip. But, the thinking appears to be that once in the demo pool, the film was somehow added to Sony's "contentID" list of works that Sony claims copyright on, leading YouTube's automated system to pull down the original as infringement. As others have pointed out this highlights almost every possible thing that pisses off people about copyright and automated takedown systems like ContentID.

It's a big company -- one who has fought against the idea that "amateurs" could do powerful work -- taking down a work that it has no copyright claim over. And the work it took down is a well-known example of a freely distributable, Creative Commons-licensed work, created via open source software, and partially crowdfunded. It's hard to think of any other takedown situation that would be more ridiculous or better highlight how broken an automated copyright takedown system is.

Over the last few weeks, in various hearings and conferences, the legacy entertainment industry (and its supporting politicians) have made it pretty clear that they're going to push for automated systems like ContentID to be mandatory in the future. The Sintel takedown by Sony should be the perfect case study in why that's a huge problem.

Filed Under: censorship, content id, copyright, creative commons, crowdfunded, open source
Companies: blender, google, sony, youtube