• 23 minutes

    Something something YouTube’s copyright system is still broken af and easy to exploit. I wonder how much more abuse it takes for YouTube to finally do something

  • Misleading title. This isn’t an “AI Company”. As far as I can tell, it’s some scammer that used AI Tools to create similar music and then copyright strike the original artist to steal their revenue.

    The major issue here is how YouTube handles these claims. From the article:

    YouTube’s dispute process places enormous trust in whoever files the claim, with little built-in protection for independent artists who lack legal resources.

    This isn’t something new and was already being done before AI tools were available.

    • 8 minutes

      I think YouTube has a lot of room for improvement but why are people still so ignorant about the DMCA and the obligations of platforms to maintain safe-harbour status? YouTube must take down content on claim or open itself up to being legally liable for all user generated content. This Tom Scott video is still relevant https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU

    • 4 hours

      The problem is not an “AI company” but Google being evil and AI making scamming so much more efficient. I had the habit of using youtube as music player in the background (with ublock of course). This has become incredibly miserable and I finall freed myself from that and rather pay qobuz a decent amount of money from now one, for much better quality and much more money actually ending up with the artists and no scam BS like the above. Oh and also active removal of AI music slop, in case it even makes it there.

    • 6 hours

      Same scam as before, just made a lot easier by AI bullshit unfortunately.

    • 5 hours

      I remember I like 2007 YouTube removed one of my videos I made of a glitch in runescape because some else also posted a video and they copyright struke my videoto remove it. I made the video, with my character, just showing the same glitch. There were zero resources to fight it.

      • 4 hours

        More importantly, platforms don’t respect it. Any malicious outside actor shouldn’t be allowed to their malice.

    • 5 hours

      Doesn’t even matter. The systems they built for copyright enforcement are absolute shit and easily abused if you have a lot of money, as designed. And with AI added to the mix, it’s all automated so none of it will work as it should and they don’t care to fix it. Disney or whoever can just launch constant copyright claims and cripple small IP owners even when they’re completely in the wrong.

      • If we all know this why hasn’t there been a class action lawsuit, and don’t give me the arbitration keeps people from trying. As we have learned with this American administration, do it fast enough that the courts can’t respond amd maybe you can force it.

        • 2 hours

          Class action lawsuits happen when lawyers are motivated, not when people suffer.

      • 14 minutes

        Well, we’re not buying the product, so maybe they can extort us into paying to solve a problem instead.

      • 39 minutes

        This definitely has been the narrative recently. Not just from Bland Altman but also from other billionaires it seems.

    • 5 hours

      Didn’t Denmark do something along those lines recently?

      • 6 hours

        What does that have to do with anything here?? I don’t know about you, but my likeness is not permanently located in a public space…

        Freedom of panorama (FoP) is a provision in the copyright laws of various jurisdictions that permits taking photographs and video footage and creating other images (such as paintings) of buildings and sometimes sculptures and other art works which are permanently located in a public space, without infringing on any copyright that may otherwise subsist in such works, and the publishing of such images.

        • I’m not sure of the correct term. It should be obvious though that if anyone can copyright claim their own image, it would basically make taking photos in many public places impossible.

          • 4 hours

            It’s not impossible at all. You just have to blur the faces and any identifying marks unless you’ve obtained explicit consent. Kind people already do this regularly.

  • Because YouTube’s copyright claim system operates without individual human review of each dispute

    Bots telling bots that humans aren’t human…

    There’s an easy solution to this:

    Legislation that requires giant trillion dollar companies actually employ living breathing humans who can perform a task rather than automate it despite that not working and then just not caring.

    And people are going to say that’s hard…

    But all we need to do is pass a single law that says if AI fucks up, the CEO of the company is personally and financially liable because he’s the one that ultimately entrusted the task to AI.

    Do that, and suddenly corps wouldn’t hand everything to AI as intentional incompetence.

    If we don’t do it soon, corps will just blame AI for everything and declare no one is ever at fault

    • 8 hours

      An AI can never be held accountable, therefore an AI must never always make a management decision.

    • 7 hours

      I mean, the concept of a corporation was created as a consequence dodge to begin with…

      • Kind of?

        Like a thousand years ago in Italy the concept started.

        A guy with a bunch of money, would give a guy with no money and a boat the funds to buy cargo and ship it.

        If something bad happened the guy with the boat an no money was liable for the loss of cargo, and wouldn’t have the funds to pay, they’d just go bankrupt.

        If nothing bad happened, the guy with no money paid back the investor plus profits.

        Then it evolved into government enforced monopolies like “East India Trading Co”.

        Which are more like modern corps, but less like what you’re talking about but I’m pretty sure that’s what you meant and not the earlier Italian corporations?

        • 5 hours

          I think you are missing hundreds of years of progressive corporate lawyering to entrench their business model(s) into our society.

          Take the US for example. Originally corporations had to be for the public good, were time limited, and the owners were held directly financially accountable for their decisions.

          It took hundreds of years of court cases and lobbying to get to the point where we are now and it is absolutely insane. There is a reason the corporation has become the dominant form of our culture.

    • There’s an easy solution to this:

      Legislation

      Legislation. A famously easy to advance and trivial to enforce solution to any social problem

    • no worries, I didn’t sign any of those contracts and loans. ai did. get AI to pay it back

    • Legislation that requires giant trillion dollar companies actually employ living breathing humans who can perform a task rather than automate it despite that not working and then just not caring.

      They do. If you or I submit a claim it will go through the process. They have an automated process for the “big boys” that is not the legal copyright process, but it is faster and cheaper for both - it looks like the process, but it isn’t.

      • I’d settle for the government prosecuting every false copyright claim as perjury.

        • You say that because you’re not think of all the times corps beat a valid claim…

          Meaning suing a corp now opens you up for criminal charges if you don’t win, and less people challenging thru court.

          You might be better off asking if something would be a good idea, before thinking of something and immediately recommending it despite not thinking about how it would obviously backfire and end up fucking us over more.

          • Not necessarily. The standard of proof is different. Just because you couldn’t prove to the civil standard (on the balance of probabilities) that they infringed your copyright, it doesn’t mean the claim was false to a criminal standard (beyond reasonable doubt).

            • I’d settle for the government prosecuting every false copyright claim as perjury

              First you said every one…

              Now you’re saying just some…

              This isnt going to be productive, best of luck with your future endeavers. But I won’t be available to answer any other questions.

    • Sure, that would work, but what are the odds we can get the government to do that? It is zero.

      We could do it ourselves by leaving these platforms and making our own. Is that not what what we were trying to do on the fediverse here? Why don’t we get off of our asses, myself included, and make something better? Open source.

  • 9 hours

    This feels like the kind of slam dunk legal case some law firm would be happy to take on contingency. People will keep doing this if there are no consequences.

    • Seriously it seems like the real winners with our current landscape are the lawyers.

      • 8 hours

        You can pretty much always assume that’s the case with the US legal system. The lawyers always win, sometimes their clients do as well but that’s a lot rarer.

        • The lawyers always win

          Not always

          Steven Robert Donziger (born September 14, 1961) is an American former attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion ($13 billion in 2024 dollars) in damages, which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Donziger in the US. In 2011, Chevron filed a RICO (anti-corruption) suit against Donziger in New York City. The case was heard by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the US because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. As a result of this case, Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2018.

          Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan’s RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron’s forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as “judicial harassment.” Human rights campaigners called Chevron’s actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger’s case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022

          • The legal system is designed to benefit the rich and big business.

            Same goes for the copyright system.

            Both need to be abolished and replaced with something that serves the people.

          • 5 hours

            Which lawyers? Clearly Chevron’s lawyers were able to absolve all their liability so they definitely won.

            Furthermore, Chevron extracted close to 30 billion dollars of petroleum and left an environmental disaster behind. Chevron even counter sued and was awarded an addition 3 billion in damages that was reduced to 220 million for Ecuador daring to try and hold a US corporation responsible.

            Not only did Chevron prevail they continued the harassment of Steven keeping him under confinement for years and preventing him from practicing law.

          • I was expecting that to end with him killing himself with two bullets to the back of the head

    • On what grounds? Google’s terms of service say they can take down anything they want for any reason. If someone starts a copyright case you can go go court, but all this is carefully/legally designed such that there is no downsides to “mistakes”

      • But Google isn’t taking it down for any reason, they’re giving someone else the revenue for the young woman’s work.

        • There are lots of options - if you have a few million dollars to pay the lawyers. If you win you get that back. Sometimes lawyers will accept cases on pay only if you win - but generally only if they are sure of winning which this doesn’t seem to me. Still check with a lawyer if you want to consider it.

  • Beginning to think copyright has become a tool of the plutocracy to harass and dispossess the working class.

  • 9 hours

    That fabricated music was then distributed across platforms using a company called Vydia.

    Definately not Leather Jacket Man of nVidia…

  • Given the current media, copyright, and business environment, why haven’t we seen this kind of reverse-piracy pursued as a deliberate business model? Buy some IP rights cheap from YouTube “content creators” who have given up, use your AI-powered robot to find vaguely similar stuff from creators who are still working, and copyright-claim it all?

    It’s pretty evident there would be no downside.

    Maybe small YouTubers should get together and create such a business, just to force the system to change. Make copyright claims against Paramount, CBS, etc. Make them barely plausible. Make thousands of them, from behind a rotating cast of shell companies. Make AI-powered, trust-the-claimant style copyright claims unworkable. Hey, it’s just the free market regulating itself.

    • Filing lots of legal cases for harassment is an established tactic (see SLAPP).

      Using copyright claims to fleece people is also an established method, or rather several methods. People make fraudulent claims eg on youtube to get the ad money. Or they go a legal route and put a lot of copyrighted material out there, and sue anyone they can (“copyright trolls”).

      It would rarely work against the likes of Paramount. Such companies have big bureaucracies to clear the rights. And legal departments to fight in court. Usually, this is about fleecing small companies or individuals, for whom it is cheaper to pay you off, than to go to court.

      Anyway, mind that the OP contains legal disinformation. Better get your info from somewhere else.

    • Copyright claims are under penalty of perjury - you can go to prison for making them in bad faith.

      What Patamount/CBS/etc are doing is not a copyright claim, it is a backdoor google has given them - but not you - that lets them bypass the legal process and get things taken down - but if they are wrong there is no legal issue for them. From the outside it looks exactly like a copyright claim, and in spirit it is - by legally it is not a copyright claim in important ways.

        • They are just making it up. It’s just nonsense.

          These copyright claims are governed by the DMCA in the US. Platforms like Youtube that allow User Generated Content have a safe harbor provision. They are usually not liable for content that users post. Without that, the internet as we know it would be hard to imagine. But when someone reports a copyright violation, the platform must take it down, or else becomes liable. Then it could be sued for damages, as if the platform had pirated the content.

          Posters can submit a DMCA counter-notice. At that point, the copyright owner must either sue the poster, or the content goes back up (within 14 days). It is quite suspicious, that there is no mention of that in the OP.

          However, copyright owners have sued Youtube, alleging that they did not do enough to take down pirated content. This did not go so well for Youtube. Eventually they were forced to create “Content ID”. Owners register and upload their content. Youtube continuously scans for that content in videos posted by users. What happens when there is a match depends on the assumed owner. They can choose to have it taken down, or to get the ad money, for example. SNAFUs are pretty common, especially with classical music. It also has no regard for Fair Use, but content owners hate that anyway.

        • I do not know how hard it is to get access to this. That is a good question to ask - but also read the fine print if you get access as it may not be any better than the legal process for you.

    • 8 hours

      It is a business model: patent trolls’.

  • 7 hours

    I’ve seen this before. The great copyright battle continues, companies vs. peoples…

  • 7 hours

    The Nvidia thing was taken down because an Italian TV station aired it and then submitted a DMCA

  • 8 hours

    It’s primitive accumulation and enclosure all over again