Copyright Isn't Just Confusing, It Can Result in Us Seeing Less Art

[SecondPrize]

It's not that confusing. The main problem people seem to have is that "because I want to" isn't justifiable grounds for using other people's work.

Yet apparently, "because I want to" is enough justification to entirely censor other people's work, if you end up on the right side of copyright law, and you can claim that all their work is really just a form of copying.

This kind of black and white acceptance that everything that a copyright covers is "someone else's work", and every infringement is merely "using it", just covers up the harms of copyright under tautological self-justifications.

This is not about piracy. Even if we can all agree that sticking someone else's book in the photocopier, and selling your own copies, or streaming the film your cellphone camera-recorded of a new movie, shouldn't be allowed, the problem is that copyright also ends up restricting the production of creative content, that's existence might depend on earlier works' "usage" too, yes, but at the same time it's also a valuable work not unlike as the original copyright claimant's, yet the law entirely benefits the former while disenfranchising the latter.

When "You could get in a lot of trouble" for painting new pictures, editing new videos, or writing new stories, thanks to a system that's supposed to incentivize artists, something has gone terribly wrong.

You got it half right, it's "Because I want to and hold the copyright." Yeah, it's not about piracy. It's about the rights people hold to content. Also, who the fuck is going to argue that selling your own copies of a book is okay? If people want to broadcast their audio tracks while playing a game, they should knock themselves out, providing they're not playing copyrighted music, of course. If they want to broadcast the entirety of the output of someone's code, they should ask for permission first.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

The term length extension was stupid, but the real harm of the copyright regime lies in the much more subtle way with which it convinced us that it's subjects are not just specific works, but "characters" and "settings" and "universes". They made the term "IP" synonymous with "fictional concept". They made us take it for granted that there needs to be such a thing as "the Star Wars IP" in the first place, and we need to choose between either deciding how long it should last, or completely deprive people of "their property".

Speaking of 'Star Wars IP', I think its amusing that if Kurosawa had been the kind of IP arsehole Lucas turned into then Star Wars may never have existed.

 

[Mike Fang]

Copyright law has definitely gotten close to, if not all the way, out of hand. In the beginning I'd believed copyright means you can't claim a creative work as your own, i.e. you can't say you made it, thereby you can't market it as your own creation and sell copies of it with your name on it and without the -actual- creator's consent and/or giving them a share of the profits.

However, it seems like these days it not only means you can't claim someone else's work as yours, but you can't display it either, even when giving them credit. Now to be fair, I can see the reasoning; why would you go pay to see a movie if someone's made a video of it that they're letting anyone see online for free? Better quality? It may be better quality, but if that's not a concern for you just wanted to know the plot, that's still something you're not going to pay to see. Besides, it doesn't make sense to say you can record a movie in a theater just so long as it's not a good-looking recording. If they let someone make a shitty-quality recording, they'd have to let someone make a good-quality one too.

But then we get to things like doing a live stream of a movie or a game session. Is that the same thing? Is it alright so long as I don't save a video of it online so people can't see it whenever they want? These people may not own a copy of the game or movie themselves, so isn't that similar to getting it for free? Wouldn't it be like buying a movie and inviting my friends over to watch it with me? Where is the line drawn?

This is what, to me, is the problem with copyright nowadays. It either needs to be clearly defined or, if it already is, have its definition retooled to take into consideration modern technology and practices.

 

[Ark of the Covetor]

It's not that confusing. The main problem people seem to have is that "because I want to" isn't justifiable grounds for using other people's work.

Yet apparently, "because I want to" is enough justification to entirely censor other people's work, if you end up on the right side of copyright law, and you can claim that all their work is really just a form of copying.

This kind of black and white acceptance that everything that a copyright covers is "someone else's work", and every infringement is merely "using it", just covers up the harms of copyright under tautological self-justifications.

This is not about piracy. Even if we can all agree that sticking someone else's book in the photocopier, and selling your own copies, or streaming the film your cellphone camera-recorded of a new movie, shouldn't be allowed, the problem is that copyright also ends up restricting the production of creative content, that's existence might depend on earlier works' "usage" too, yes, but at the same time it's also a valuable work not unlike as the original copyright claimant's, yet the law entirely benefits the former while disenfranchising the latter.

When "You could get in a lot of trouble" for painting new pictures, editing new videos, or writing new stories, thanks to a system that's supposed to incentivize artists, something has gone terribly wrong.

You got it half right, it's "Because I want to and hold the copyright." Yeah, it's not about piracy. It's about the rights people hold to content. Also, who the fuck is going to argue that selling your own copies of a book is okay? If people want to broadcast their audio tracks while playing a game, they should knock themselves out, providing they're not playing copyrighted music, of course. If they want to broadcast the entirety of the output of someone's code, they should ask for permission first.

OK, so what happens when a musician writes a song and, upon hearing it, a second musician decides that the guitar riff is similar to one they wrote and performed twenty years beforehand, then sues the first musician? If we accept the modern definition of "intellectual property" as you would have us do, then it doesn't matter whether the first artist had, for example, heard the second artist's song when they were younger, subsequently completely forgotten it, and it influenced their own work without any conscious effort on their part to "infringe". It doesn't matter if the composer of the newer work came up with a very similar sounding riff totally independently of the "original" artist. Just the fact that the new one is similar enough to the old one is sufficient justification to declare the newer work as having infringed on the older one, meaning the older artist can demand obscene damages as "compensation" for the "harm" done to them(despite never having to actually demonstrate they've been professionally harmed) and now effectively owns the work of the newer artist as well despite having nothing to do with its creation.

That's the ultimate result of copyright as you would have it, and I'm not making a slippery slope argument because we're already at the bottom of the slope. Every time we've made copyright laws more restrictive, we've been arbitrarily deciding that "protecting" one form of creative expression is more important than another form, and it's now gotten so ludicrously convoluted and intrusive that I would technically be infringing someone's copyright if I walked down the street humming a song("public performance" of a copyrighted work), and tens of thousands of people every day are criminals when they sing Happy Birthday at a friend's party. You might think that's perfectly fair, I think it's fucking lunacy.

 

[Entitled]

You got it half right, it's "Because I want to and hold the copyright." Yeah, it's not about piracy. It's about the rights people hold to content.

As far as justifications go, this is just an automatic adherence to whatever the law says. Every censorship system in the history of ever, has been installed beause someone said "I want to, and I have the legal authority to do so". The question is not whether they "hold the rights", of course they do, it says so right there in the currently active law. The question is whether holding such rights as they are written now, is a good thing or a bad thing.

Also, who the fuck is going to argue that selling your own copies of a book is okay? If people want to broadcast their audio tracks while playing a game, they should knock themselves out, providing they're not playing copyrighted music, of course. If they want to broadcast the entirety of the output of someone's code, they should ask for permission first.

I brought up the book example, because you keep bringing up similars where wholesale copying happens with no new merit whatsoever. Someone "playing the music" on a stream, or "broadcast the entirety of someone's code". The problem with copyright laws discussed here, is that they control NOT just wholesale copying, but any usage of someone else's work in a context where it's unlikely to lose him money, but could add to the value of a new work as it's foundation.

If painting a picture, and uploading it on deviantart, can be illegal because someone other than the painter "holds the content", then maybe people SHOULDN'T hold content in that form.

If you make a Star Wars animated parody video, and use some Star Wars tunes through it, how likely is it that Disney will lose any profits at all, because people wanted to buy their soundtrack and instead just opted to downyour video and listen to the BGM? Why is it better let them censor that video, and thus control it's creators' work, than to let everyone own their respective products, even if it's based on a transformation of others'?

 

[alj]

And this is the problem, nobody understands what is allowed nowadays. No not even the people that write the laws.

Things need to be massively simplified, post a whole episode of game of thrones on youtube? Thats a breach of copyright clearly. Posting a critical review of it where you use significant portion of the episode but talk about it is not. Should be the same with games books music whatever.

Content ID needs to be changed as well, it should simple flag a video but do nothing else, then youtube should have someone check it, this will be expensive yes but google can afford it. Content id could be updated to not flag anything that say does not match 50% of the video, this would massively reduce the number of flags to deal with to a reasonable level .

And also music playing in the background ( unless this is all you do ) should also be relaxed. If you play whole albums then i can see why that may be an issue but you cannot even turn on the radio in a video to test it after you have done a repair is just retarded .

 

[Strazdas]

Copyright is broken by design. and sky is blue. who would have though. the whole idea that copyright can be owned by companies and not people and that it can last for more than at maximum 25 years is ludicrous. not to mention the whole fair use issue like Nintendo running a claim campaign that is in fact illegal for them to do but fuck that beucase nintendo can do no wrong.

The problem with that is that it's often huge companies that own tens of thousands of different properties that send out these orders thousands of times a day, and even a tiny fraction of a percent of automated claims made in error would put them over the limit. It would be far easier for them to contract such work out to outside firms which issue a pile of claims, inevitably make a mistake, then fold and re-open under a slightly different name; the megacorp still issues as many claims as they like, just now the people in their "rights protection department" work in a different building.

OT: The plural of anecdote is not evidence. I don't doubt that draconian copyright enforcement and rampant piracy convince some people to not share their work, but there has got to be a better way of gathering stats for that than trawling Youtube comments, counting how many posts hit your keyword filter.

That is NOT a problem. that is only a problem if they are so bold as to make claims and think there is acceptable margin of errors. That is like saying there is acceptable level of government censorship. There should be no tiny fraction. there should be 0, and if your making false claims, no matter how tiny fraction, you should stop doing that untill you find a better method for it.
Your problem can be easily solved by making sure that a claim MUST be made by the company that owns the copyright and it is their job to prove that BEFORE takedown. you know, the whole innocent until proven guilty we have everywhere BUT copyright?


Plural of anecdotes is evidence. we call it statistics.

It's not that confusing.

What is confusing is that you need to ask for permission.

They made us take it for granted that there needs to be such a thing as "the Star Wars IP" in the first place, and we need to choose between either deciding how long it should last, or completely deprive people of "their property".

legally there is no such thing as "IP". its a buzzword. What legal system uses is trademarks copyrights and patents.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

Copyright is broken by design. and sky is blue. who would have though. the whole idea that copyright can be owned by companies and not people and that it can last for more than at maximum 25 years is ludicrous. not to mention the whole fair use issue like Nintendo running a claim campaign that is in fact illegal for them to do but fuck that beucase nintendo can do no wrong.

The problem with that is that it's often huge companies that own tens of thousands of different properties that send out these orders thousands of times a day, and even a tiny fraction of a percent of automated claims made in error would put them over the limit. It would be far easier for them to contract such work out to outside firms which issue a pile of claims, inevitably make a mistake, then fold and re-open under a slightly different name; the megacorp still issues as many claims as they like, just now the people in their "rights protection department" work in a different building.

OT: The plural of anecdote is not evidence. I don't doubt that draconian copyright enforcement and rampant piracy convince some people to not share their work, but there has got to be a better way of gathering stats for that than trawling Youtube comments, counting how many posts hit your keyword filter.

That is NOT a problem. that is only a problem if they are so bold as to make claims and think there is acceptable margin of errors. That is like saying there is acceptable level of government censorship. There should be no tiny fraction. there should be 0, and if your making false claims, no matter how tiny fraction, you should stop doing that untill you find a better method for it.
Your problem can be easily solved by making sure that a claim MUST be made by the company that owns the copyright and it is their job to prove that BEFORE takedown. you know, the whole innocent until proven guilty we have everywhere BUT copyright?


Plural of anecdotes is evidence. we call it statistics.

In reverse order:
"The plural of anecdote is not data" is a common phrase in statistics, because treating them as the same leads to very poor research. Amongst the biggest problems is the reporting bias: by it's nature, anecdotes are willingly surrendered, while data is collected. In this study, they literally looked for people who said in internet comments that copyright law stopped them from producing content, and accepted that as fact. There was no attempt to see whether they actually were making something, whether they said they weren't going to publish it but later did (in the same or different venue), or any other in-depth examination. It's laughably bad data collection.

For your main argument,
Leaving aside the fact that there is blatantly an accepted level of government censorship (most visible in things such as hate speech and verbal assault laws), the law already has "innocent until proven guilty" built into it. A company such as Viacom would need to prove that their intellectual property (absolutely a legal term, btw; here's the office that governs it in Canada) was being misused in a video before they could legally force Youtube to take down a video. However, Youtube has decided that it doesn't want to get into a thousand legal battles with every entertainment company on the planet every day, so it exercises it's rights to not host material of which the legality is in question, although it gives step by step instructions on how a video owner may dispute a claim.

Currently the system is:
A) A specific company, after passing a series of tests, is allowed to provide Youtube with a library of their copyrighted material.
B) Youtube checks these multiple libraries against the millions of videos being uploaded.
C) If it detects a video using copyrighted material (without permission from the CP holder) they send them a message letting both the uploader and the Holder know.
C2) The Holder can then mute the video, monetize it for themselves, block it entirely, or report it as a false positive.
C3) The uploader can argue that they have access to copyrighted materials under fair use laws.
C4) "Content owners who repeatedly make erroneous claims can have their Content ID access disabled and their partnership with YouTube terminated."

What you're calling for is something drastically different. Even if each video was checked by hand (literally impossible, even if you were to hire thousands of people to watch Youtube videos alone), there would still be erroneous claims. As it is, both Youtube and the content owners take a series of steps to provide reasonable grounds to prevent a video from being hosted by a specific site, while allowing people to dispute the legality of their claim. In the eyes of the court, the have proven that they had reasonable grounds to assume that they owned something BEFORE the takedown notice.

You are demanding an impossible level of perfection, unfairly limiting the actions that a company could rightfully take to defend themselves (copyright laws everywhere are enforced by specialist legal firms, so denying a company access to that because "it's on the internet" is asinine), and insisting that Youtube allow blatantly illegal action rather than defending itself from the backlash of having people host illegal content on it.

 

[FalloutJack]

I feel as though these things should be taken on a case-by-case basis by someone who is not an idiot, which immediately excludes making a computer program, because it lacks intelligence and Youtube can't code worth shit anyhow.

 

[Travis Fischer]

Violating copyrights on YouTube is a three strikes and you're out offense. I don't see why making false claims shouldn't be the same. If you have a history of making claims on videos you have no legitimate claim to, then you lose the ability to make claims. Or, at the very least, lose the ability to use the Content ID system and instead have to issue every claim by hand.

The problem with that is that it's often huge companies that own tens of thousands of different properties that send out these orders thousands of times a day, and even a tiny fraction of a percent of automated claims made in error would put them over the limit.

Doesn't sound like a problem to me...

It would be far easier for them to contract such work out to outside firms which issue a pile of claims, inevitably make a mistake, then fold and re-open under a slightly different name; the megacorp still issues as many claims as they like, just now the people in their "rights protection department" work in a different building.

Fair enough, although I can't imagine folding and re-opening a firm every month would be considered worth continuing the practice of issuing thousands of claims a day.

It would at least be some incentive for them to cut back on their "shotgun" approach to copyright claims and take a closer look.

 

[DEAD34345]

Wow, um... I suppose I'll get a warning for low content if my entire post is just "Duh.".

Ok, then. Of course copyright law results in us seeing less art, that's like all it does. It makes some art illegal to make. Supposedly it has secondary effects that make creating art more profitable, but on a basic level it achieves this by just denying the right for some art to exist.

 

[Entitled]

Ok, then. Of course copyright law results in us seeing less art, that's like all it does. It makes some art illegal to make. Supposedly it has secondary effects that make creating art more profitable, but on a basic level it achieves this by just denying the right for some art to exist.

Like I have said earlier, this is kind of wrong. The "basic level" of copyright could be, and historically has been restricted to making profits, the aspect that restricts derivative creations is a relatively modern interpretation that managed to pass itself off in the public eye as an inherent part of the system. It got to the point that people intuitively take it for granted that writing, drawing, singing, or coding the wrong way is immoral, but that's all a recent propaganda of the content industry's lobby.

If anything, with the backing of a sufficiently activist-minded U.S. Supreme Court, even the claim could be made that the current copyright system is outright ILLEGAL, since the Constitution only empowers congress to give copyrights to people for their "respective writings", and with the specific purpose to "promote the progress of science" (that is, culture).

Since censoring other people's work is an example of neither, it could be argued that it's a constitutionally unsupported limitation on "freedom of speech, or of the press".

Of course, the current pack of ringwraiths would reject that argument, being one of the most pro-corporate and anti-civil-rights court ever, but the principle is still there.

 

[Vigormortis]

I've been saying it for years:
U.S. copyright laws are in desperate need of revising. They're a series of rules whose core ideals are stuck in 20th century corporate culture, complete with tacked on, sometimes contradictory or uselessly vague, amendments designed to take advantage of the very worst ideas of 21st century corporate culture.

I'm glad people are finally starting to take notice and speak up. I only wish they'd done so sooner.

 

[DarkBlood626]

As someone who lives in a country outside of the US (or ?the known world? as certain media distributors seem to believe) I say? No **** Sherlock.

 

[Strazdas]

snipped for space

Fair enough, you have a point with anecdotes.

the law already has "innocent until proven guilty" built into it. A company such as Viacom would need to prove that their intellectual property (absolutely a legal term, btw; here's the office that governs it in Canada) was being misused in a video before they could legally force Youtube to take down a video.

Thats the thing though. the Copyright law in US does NOT require Viacom to provide any proof, only the claim, and the content HAS to be taken down and it is the uploader that has to prove it is not copyrighted, basically shifting the burden of proof to the defendant.

Things may be different in Canada, i am not very familiar with its system. Youtube works following US laws as it is registered in US.

although it gives step by step instructions on how a video owner may dispute a claim.

And that instruction is simply as follows:

You get flagged for copyright infringement. you can press a button to claim you are not. that claim goes to the very same person that flagged you in the first place. Obviuosly, if he flagged you, he wont unflag you because you said so. Next step is to sue them in court.

great instructions here.

A) A specific company, after passing a series of tests, is allowed to provide Youtube with a library of their copyrighted material.

For content ID - yes. for regular takedown claims - no. I can create a fuctional company, send a fancy looking email to youtube and they would have to legally take down the video BEFORE going to check whether i even own the copyright.

What you're calling for is something drastically different.

Of course i am. Thats because the current system is extremely broken.

Even if each video was checked by hand (literally impossible, even if you were to hire thousands of people to watch Youtube videos alone), there would still be erroneous claims.

No, i am asking for the claimee to have to provide proof that the video is copyrighter before the checking even begins. and no, saying "i own it" is not proof.

You are demanding an impossible level of perfection, unfairly limiting the actions that a company could rightfully take to defend themselves (copyright laws everywhere are enforced by specialist legal firms, so denying a company access to that because "it's on the internet" is asinine), and insisting that Youtube allow blatantly illegal action rather than defending itself from the backlash of having people host illegal content on it.

Yes, i demand that comapnies would be held responsible for falsely accusing the public of abusing rights they area already unfairly granted to as it is.

While we talk about youtube here i never limited my arguments to "internet". i want a change in copyright, or rather, a comeback of actual meaning of copyright, everywhere, not just internet. its just that internet is challenging it the most currently.

And if the content is so "Blatantly illegal" then its easy to prove it is so, right?