YouTube CEO Says EU's Proposed Copyright Regulation Financially Impossible (googleblog.com) 142
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has again hit out at proposed new European Union copyright rules which she claims is impossible for a platform like YouTube to comply with, and if done so, could harm the creative industries. Wojcicki said the European Parliament's vote in favor of an overhaul to copyright law two months ago is "unrealistic" because owners often disagree on who owns the rights to online material. In a blog post, she wrote: Take the global music hit "Despacito." This video contains multiple copyrights, ranging from sound recording to publishing rights. Although YouTube has agreements with multiple entities to license and pay for the video, some of the rights holders remain unknown. That uncertainty means we might have to block videos like this to avoid liability under article 13. Multiply that risk with the scale of YouTube, where more than 400 hours of video are uploaded every minute, and the potential liabilities could be so large that no company could take on such a financial risk.
The consequences of article 13 go beyond financial losses. EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times. Those videos come from around the world, including more than 35m EU channels, and they include language classes and science tutorials as well as music videos. We welcome the chance to work with policymakers and the industry to develop a solution within article 13 that protects rights holders while also allowing the creative economy to thrive. This could include more comprehensive licensing agreements, collaboration with rights holders to identify who owns what, and smart rights management technology, similar to Content ID.
The consequences of article 13 go beyond financial losses. EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times. Those videos come from around the world, including more than 35m EU channels, and they include language classes and science tutorials as well as music videos. We welcome the chance to work with policymakers and the industry to develop a solution within article 13 that protects rights holders while also allowing the creative economy to thrive. This could include more comprehensive licensing agreements, collaboration with rights holders to identify who owns what, and smart rights management technology, similar to Content ID.
That's fine (Score:5, Insightful)
YouTube can just block all of the EU and watch the hilarity.
Re:That's fine (Score:5, Funny)
It's as if millions of cats cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
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One better (Score:4, Funny)
Block Youtube, where instead it takes you to a page where you can write an angry letter to the people responsible for YouTube being blocked.
It would be really interesting to see what effect blocking YouTube had on a modern society. Riots? Mass adoption of VPN? Meh?
Re: One better (Score:3, Funny)
Increased productivity...
Re: One better (Score:5, Funny)
Amazingly enough, China's demands are much more reasonable and straightforward than those of the EU.
Re:That's fine (Score:5, Funny)
YouTube can just block all of the EU and watch the hilarity.
I have a better idea.
Create servers for EU IP ranges.
Fully license and redirect every video link to a certain Rick Astley video with an announcement to contact the EU if they have any problems with copyright protection.
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Then as it gets started it will trip over an IP landmine and die.
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There are many European video platforms. But guess what, they have the same copyright problems YouTube has, maybe even more so because they can't even claim that the video is actually hosted abroad, and hence the stuff they supply is mostly useless.
The only thing that would happen is that people either start using VPN services or switch to browsers with built-in VPN services altogether.
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In all EU languages with text before the video begins.
Place that before all content now allowed to be played in the EU.
With the correct legal framework quoted in full in each EU member nation language.
Let every EU nation enjoy its full online EU legal compliance while the rest of the free world enjoys content.
So EU viewers know the results they have been allowed to s
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It's funny that so many people think YouTube committing suicide is the best solution here.
Back in the real world if they really think it's that bad they will just go to court to argue it like adults, or find some way of passing the cost on.
Or youtube can stop stealing everyone's music (Score:5, Insightful)
Or youtube can stop stealing everyone's music, streaming it for free, and making all of the copyright infringement profit for themselves.
For some reason youtube is the only company that can outright steal everyone's stuff, and sell it all for their own profit.
If I did that at the swap meet with burned CD's I'd go to jail.
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Did you even read the summary? Even for videos licensed from the music publishers themselves YouTube is at risk of copyright suits from unknown rights holders.
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You are aware that YouTube pays enormous royalty payments to the recording industry, right? Enormous to the tune of where YouTube operates at a loss. A constant claim is that their filters are too strict and regularly improperly flag content as infringing even when it isn't, and when something is flagged, the registered owner decides if it should be blocked or not. Almost everything on YouTube is there with the blessing of their owners using the monatization scheme the owners request.
So basically, everyt
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Almost everything on YouTube is there with the blessing of their owners using the monatization scheme the owners request.
Um, not even close. You can find most TV shows as well as most movies. When you start typing a movie name, youtube even helpfully suggests appending the words "full movie" onto the end and in most cases you can easily find the full movie of most movie on youtube.
Youtube is a cesspool. Google is one of the leaders in AI but has made almost no attempt to clean up, categorize, or filter the stuff on Youtube.
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And to the point in the article, Youtube can't reasonably be expected to police everything someone uploads. They
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Or youtube can stop stealing everyone's music
Let's say I write and record a song and use it as background music for a video that I upload. But if my song is too similar to an existing song, then I unwittingly "stole" someone else's music. What steps can a composer take to stop this "theft" from happening before the upload?
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Mostly because nobody involved gives a shit about copyright crap. I want to listen to music, YouTube wants to provide it. How they do it, why the fuck would I care?
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The rights holders are quite happy to have their music on YouTube, as long as they get the ad revenue.
The problem at the moment is that a lot of the music on there was uploaded by other people, and they are raking in the profits. It happens with new music and also new movie trailers a lot. The official channel releases it, others copy and re-post the video and often the top search result or trending vid is the copy.
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I don't know it can is the operative word here.
It's probably more of a must.
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The EU would fold long before YouTube. Imagine the constant stream of hate the politicians would get,
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The EU would fold long before YouTube. Imagine the constant stream of hate the politicians would get,
Not a problem. The EU is working to block that [slashdot.org] too.
Re: That's fine (Score:2)
Wtf is an EU patriot? Someone who believes that all of Europe should be under the iron fist of unelected elites? Do such people still exist? I thought we got rid of them in WW2 ...
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There's been voices from the US that demanded Europe to become more self reliant in terms of military for a long time, Trump among them. And now, if the EU wants to do just that, it's suddenly treasonous behaviour.
Re: That's fine (Score:2)
This is a different breed. These people learned from the US. And they want the EU to be something like the US in terms of economic and military power and independence - the United States of Europe if you will.
Without elected officials and the protection of basic rights? Sounds more like they learned it from Germany or Italy.
There's been voices from the US that demanded Europe to become more self reliant in terms of military for a long time, Trump among them. And now, if the EU wants to do just that, it's suddenly treasonous behaviour.
No clue where you got that idea from. Who the fuck was talking about the military, let alone treason? Can you try to stick to the discussion at hand rather than bringing in random paranoid delusions?
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I assume in your country the civil servants are all elected then.
Re: That's fine (Score:2)
In my country unelected civil servants don't impose laws and regulations on elected officials.
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ORLY? Pray tell me, who exactly elects the supreme court judges?
Re: That's fine (Score:2)
The Governor General appoints them in consultation with the Prime Minister. I don't see the relevance. You seem to be confused about what the supreme court does.
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Really? In every common law country a court imposes their interpretation of the laws and regulations upon everyone (contrast this with a civil law country where previous court cases can, but don't have to be considered) and a supreme court decision is final and binding. Yet the judges are appointed, not elected.
So why exactly do you have a problem with the european commission - the only appointed body of the european union - even though it cannot actually impose any laws? Their job is roughly comparable to
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Shareholders would demand YouTube folds first. And probably fire Wojcicki for such a ridiculous gambit.
She is just trying to scare politicians. I've read the rules, they require less than what YouTube is already doing. YouTube has it's Content ID system that filters uploads based on rightsholder claims.
YouTube just doesn't want a legal mandate to use this filter, it prefers to negotiate from a position of strength with rightsholders over what will be allowed. Wojcicki doesn't want the balance of power shift
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The EU would be VERY dumb to do that. YouTube is basically the Cute Cat [wikipedia.org] of digital activism.
Shut down access to YouTube is the start signal for Europeans to get VPN access to VPN servers outside the EU. And as soon as this happens, the EU can as well stuff any law concerning the internet (along with their precious "anti-hate-speech" bullshit) in their pipe and smoke it, since nobody would even notice that they did.
All that really would accomplish is that any interesting and thus profitable online resources
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YouTube can just block all of the EU and watch the hilarity.
As someone who wants to watch Google fail I say DO IT! Go on, DO IT.
The funny thing about trying to block a good portion of the wealthy west is that shareholders don't think too highly of the move. Even funnier if you're an advertisement company since your actual source of revenue doesn't think highly of it either.
Thats the idea (Score:1)
Anything not approved will be a copyright or content problem.
Welcome to EU censorship.
No freedom of speech. No freedom to publish. No freedom to comment on content.
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Well just because the US and the UK decided to be really stupid, it doesn't mean that the EU is a bastion of all good intentions. The EU for Decades have been making laws that more or less target American Companies.
Tough (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that's the same with abandonware. Or even in hobbyist music I wrote which I can't release for exactly this reason. Same rules for everyone. Either campaign to remove those rules for everyone, or suck it up and comply. One or the other.
Re:Tough (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't sound like they are looking for an exemption.
It's quite clear that YouTube is saying the proposed rules don't make sense, and shouldn't be implemented for anyone.
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Re:Tough (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and Getty also wanted to charge me £500 to use it, after first insisting they would only deal with corporations anyway and not individuals like me. That would be £500 for one set of rights - the BBC. They then told me I would need to individually contact the presenter who read the script, and the scriptwriter. They also couldn't identify the scriptwriter.
Result? Impossible to publish. Financially a non-starter but let's assume for a moment it wasn't, and that I had some sure-fire hit that easily justified paying three sets of people at minimum £500 each after individually tracking down all contact details...still I couldn't publish, because I wouldn't know where the rights for the script were held. I assumed the BBC. Apparently not.
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It's probably fair use regardless, transformative (Score:4, Informative)
> Too long to be fair use, and it's the centre point of the music anyway.
You're thinking of one type fair use. If you're writing a research paper, you can use a short section from another research paper. "A short section" is only ONE of several types of fair use though.
Two other fair use elements are "transformative" and, most importantly, market for the original work. If you made a rave song, using sampled audio from a newscast, that's probably okay because it's completely transformative. You can use the ENTIRE original work and it can still be fair use. See Kelly vs Arriba and other cases.
Another element, probably the most important, is the effect of your use on the market value of the original work. Will people buy your song INSTEAD OF buying the TV show? If not, that has two effects:
It makes it probably fair use.
It means actual damages* would be $0 anyway, so it doesn't *matter* if it's infringing.
If your song parodies or comments on the show, if it says something about contemporary culture as exemplified by the show, that may be fair use.
There are many factors to consider for fair use. If the show was a stand-up comedy skit and you used most of it to make a comedy song, that would probably infringe. I'd bet that you're aong is transformative enough that it doesn't compete with the prior work or damage its market value, though.
* Statutory damages are a thing. I won't go into that here.
Backwards (Score:3)
See for example Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994) regarding transformative fair use. Also many earlier rulings.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/sup... [cornell.edu]
There is a big difference between criticism and parody in fair use law. One can criticize something without copying it. Parody by it's very nature requires the characteristic elements of the work. Therefore, a criticism does not necessarily have a fair reason to copy; a parody does because the parody cannot exist without copying.
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So you’re saying that instead of fixing something that’s broken, the EU is thoughtfully and deliberately enacting laws that are even dumber?
That makes no sense.
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It's already like this for abandonware. The DMCA requires that you own the copyright of something you send a takedown for. So if nobody that owns the copyright for whatever you're sharing cares, nobody will send your ISP a nastygram.
And if someone does care enough to send a letter, then it's not abandoned, is it.
Hohoho MIT never stops making is laugh (Score:1)
I congratulate the MIT for reinventing the bicycle... well, magnetic tunnel junction. Beg for grants and investor money more
Brussels flies up its own colon (Score:4, Interesting)
The EU is in the process of strangling its own economy with rules that the rest of the world would go broke trying to comply with. Enjoy your GMO-free, music-free, Internet-free existence. We will gladly honor your right to be forgotten.
Re:Brussels flies up its own colon (Score:5, Insightful)
We will gladly honor your right to be forgotten.
Yes you will. And you will bend over backwards to keep content coming our way while doing so. Just like companies bend over backwards to appease Chinese censors. Some markets are too big to ignore, and as often is with empty threats, those markets are usually worth far more than the cost of compliance despite the ensuing bitching and moaning.
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The main issue was that the right holders of GMO didn't sit in the EU, but in the US.
Then why do you luddite wackjobs rip up fields of Golden Rice, which is open source and has nothing to do with Monsanto or any other Evil Corporation?
Please, please, be as antivax as you are anti-GMO. Then in the next big epidemic we will all be rid of you.
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Not at all. Instead it's rediscovering the problem that USSR discovered after WW2. If you want to have a union of states that have wildly different cultural norms and standards, you must have a tyrannical universal rule set and complete lock down on information about the system and how it works.
This is a part of the slowly creeping information lock down. Other parts range from hate speech and blasphemy legislation being interpreted increasingly widely to removal of obstacles from consolidation of ownership
Re: Brussels flies up its own colon (Score:1)
What this really means is that Youtube how-to videos will no longer have loud and obnoxious music tracks playing during the video. That's a good thing.
Well no. IP comes mostly from the US or big corp (Score:2)
Lies (Score:3, Insightful)
YouTube (Alphabet/Google, actually; stop kidding yourselves) — and the rest of the Valley monsters — have demonstrated that they are entirely capable of precisely moderating the content they host. They do so every day as their finely honed wrongthink detectors isolate every case of "offensive" content. So the argument that this EU requirement is some insurmountable burden is farcical. Unlike the deplorables they enthusiastically hunt down 24/7 with no complaint whatsoever about the financial feasibility, they are simply uninterested in enforcing EU copyright laws.
Well too fucking bad. You people made yourselves the universal go-to moderators in your crusade to safe space the Internet. Content owners won't let you pretend you're not capable of applying the same facilities in service of protecting their IP.
And this aggressive push for extreme IP polices coming from the EU should be no surprise to anyone. Consolidating power in Brussels could only amplify this rent seeking behavior. People heard the warnings of exactly this and pretended otherwise because damn all knuckle-draggers that don't want a giant all-caring all-providing European super government.
Well, here you go motherfuckers. Enjoy.
So Google's going to make a smaller profit ... (Score:2)
that might be about right for the amount of tax that it pays. Interesting how that might happen!
What about let's plays and say music rights? (Score:2)
The game may have the music rights must people making the let's plays may have to do there own licensing for it.
Just like how licensing for bars works.
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If game developers want their games to be advertised on youtube or streams by other people playing them, they can choose to design their games to be compliant with these laws. Show those record industry copyright Mafiosi the middle finger and don't use their licensed music in your games. A lot of game developers appear to do this already. Use public domain or make your own music
If I choose to make my own music, what can I do to protect myself from accidentally copying someone else's music into my own music?
Financially impossible? Sounds easy! (Score:2)
This video contains multiple copyrights, ranging from sound recording to publishing rights
So all it boils down to is that companies will have to work a bit harder to earn their billions.
The Left eats itself. (Score:2)
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It's not EU leftists who did this; many Greens oppose it, whereas most right-wing parties supported it.
I'm unable to find a complete breakdown of who supported it and who didn't though. Support for this was appallingly broad.
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Only compared to the extreme right that's currently ruling the US. On its own, the EU is moderately right-wing due to its insistence on austerity, and moderately left-wing due to its insistence on human/civil rights. How you see the regulated free market with a very strong focus on competition, could go either way.
Wouldn't it all be so much easier... (Score:4, Interesting)
...if copyrights only lasted a sane amount of time, say, 10 years or so, with a couple of optional 10 year extensions. Then the long tail of potential rights holders in a given work would dramatically reduce, making systems such as this much more feasible to manage.
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I agree for the tradema
Innovative (Score:2)
If there is no match to existing works, the new content becomes part of the copyright database with the uploader as the defacto copyright holder, transferable if needed.
If a copyright owner disputes ownership of content they will need to upload their own content to potentially replace whatever was flagged as the original, which will propagate the change down to all related work,
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Yeah, that's not how copyright works. The copyright exists the moment the work is created, not when it's uploaded to some database. In your example, how would the original owner prove they were the one who created it?
Copyright also covers works that are substantially different from the original. Your database would have a lot of trouble with photos, remixes or other imperfect reproductions of the original work. If someone draws an unauthorized Mickey Mouse comic, how are you going to find a match against th
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It won't work (Score:2)