False Flags

You’re a musician, and you write your own music. In order to reach a wide audience, you put your songs up on YouTube to reach a wide audience. You get a good number of daily views and are happy to see that people are buying your songs on iTunes, even! Suddenly, you go to your account and find that your videos have been flagged as violating copyright, and you’re no longer receiving the ad revenue. Instead, it’s going to someone you’ve never even heard of. Understandably, you’re confused.

You review games for a living and receive thousands, sometimes millions of views daily for your YouTube videos. Many people enjoy your videos and trust your judgment, sometimes buying a game simply because you played it. You make sure to receive explicit permission from game makers before reviewing. Suddenly, one of these companies has flagged your videos and took down the videos. Understandably, you’re angry.

These are false flags: ContentID incorrectly flagged videos as violating copyright. In the first, it’s because someone claimed ownership of someone else’s content. In the second, it’s because the system doesn’t know when someone other than the copyright holder has been given the right to use the material. How can we fix the system to stop this from happening?

For the first, there’s a preliminary check. You can make sure that the content doesn’t match anything already in the database. If it is in the database, you know one of the two doesn’t own the content. However, if you don’t know who does own the content, you have to make an assumption, and it’s normally first-come, first-served. The more comprehensive but painstaking process is requiring proof of copyright. This should be the way it works, as a DMCA Takedown Notice first requires proof of copyright or authority to file a claim. However, the process of verifying each individual claim is lengthy; there’s a reason an automated process was chosen.

For the second, you can upload proof of right to use the material. However, the verification process can be lengthy. Instead, the content holder can whitelist people: he can list those he gave right of use. However, this requires action on their part; if they do not whitelist, someone who gained the right to use the material will be assumed not to have it. In addition, if there is a large number to whitelist, the process becomes lengthy again.

The best solution against these false flags is to verify each content-holder individually. However, this has to be done manually, since automated systems cannot be presumed perfect. Many would assume this not worth the work, but if it’s done right, it could be very helpful. However, the time taken to confirm a claim is time during which that copyright could be infringed… What do you think? What else could be done? Even if the situation can’t be fixed entirely, can it be improved?

P.S. If you’re interested in looking around, there have been some really hilarious false claims. For instance, someone received a copyright violation flag for a video which only included sounds of nature. Whoops.

Introduction

A first post, to set the scene, I suppose this is. Let’s bring the players in: YouTube and Twitch. The first I assume many are familiar with, the second… not so much. YouTube, for those of you who don’t know, is a very popular and successful video-sharing website which was bought by Google in 2006. Users can upload videos of whatever they want, so others may view it later. Twitch is a live-streaming website, where users may capture video and broadcast it live to anyone watching their channel. In addition, these broadcasts are split into chunks and stored as videos in case anyone wants to watch them later. Together, these sites make up much of the internet’s free video-viewing market. With video comes audio, and with both come copyright.

When people may upload whatever, there’s always a concern that they’re not uploading their own material. Add the anonymity of the internet to that, and these sites are just waiting to be subject to infringement and piracy. Many of you, I assume, have visited YouTube to listen to music. Do you watch official videos? Do you watch unofficial ones? Admittedly, for some songs, there are only unofficial videos. To the copyright holders, these unofficial videos not only result in fewer sales, but these other users are profiting from their music. That’s right. YouTube gives portions of the ad revenue to uploaders, so the more views your video gets, the more you can profit. In fact, some reviewers, gamers, and musicians use this feature to make a living from their videos. It’s a nice system when things go well, but when someone’s video isn’t theirs… something has to change.

Of course, there are billions upon billions of videos on YouTube.  It would be unfeasible to search through them all manually for whatever copyright violations might exist. Thus, the digital age spawned an automatic flagger: YouTube’s Content ID searches through all the videos and matches them to files in its system. It excludes the content holder’s own files, and the user can also whitelist people to whom it has given rights to use material. If there is a match, the video is flagged as potentially violating copyright. Content ID tells the person who put the content in its database that this video on YouTube may be infringing on copyright, and that content holder determines what to do about it. If they think there’s no infringement, they may remove the flag. Otherwise, they can track the video’s statistics, mute or block the video, or reroute funding from that video to themselves. In this way, copyright holders can feel secure that their content is only profiting themselves.

Now, we have a system which finds all potentially copyright-infringing material on YouTube and notifies the content holder.  What do you think about it? Is it perfect? Is it faulty? In what ways? In making a system like this, what concerns are there? For the copyright holders? For gray-area uploaders? I’ll talk more about my own thoughts in upcoming posts, but this is for you. What questions do you have for me? What suggestions? What are your thoughts? I’ve set the scene, and now it’s time for you to figure out just where we’re headed…