This exact thing has happened to most YT creators at this point. It's just part of doing business on YT. Some small section (<10%?) get three "copyright" strikes (nothing to do with actual copyright, of course, as Google isn't the judge of that), and get taken down, and need to start a new channel from scratch. It's what we all get for using a free video streaming service to distribute our content.
> I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue,
I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale. Currently, about 5000 videos are uploaded to YT every minute. If just 0.1% of them have any potential copyright issues, that's 5 potentially complex cases per minute or 7200 per day.
No amount of human review will be able to decide this in a timely manner. The piano teacher's case is just the simplest of scenarios and you'd have to expect the vast majority being "fair use" cases, which are incredibly hard to decide.
Free an in freedom ultimately results in users being sued directly (see torrent networks) and I'm not at all convinced that that's any better.
If they followed the DMCA instead of their own system it would scale just fine.
It would scale because under the DMCA system the site is not responsible for finding violations. That is up to the copyright owners.
All the site has to do is:
1. Take down alleged infringing content when someone claiming to be the copyright owner files a take-down notice.
2. Put the content back when whoever uploaded it files a counter-notice.
3. Tell the former that if they want the content taken down again, sue the latter. The site is now in the DMCA safe harbor.
All the site has to scale up to handle is dealing with notices and counter-notices. For that, all they need to do is check that all the required fields in the forms are filled out. This does not require anyone with any legal training--it is just checking things like they have identified themselves, described what content they want taken down/put back up, stated a reason for their belief that this action should be taken, and similar things.
You could train in an afternoon anyone who can read at a pre-high school level to handle this. 20 people in a normal shift could handle those 7200 cases per day.
Heck, you could even speed that up if you wanted by doing even less review on the notices. There aren't really any legal consequences to the site if they accept a notice that wasn't quite right. It is only the counter-notice that needs a little scrutiny. You want to make sure everything is correctly filled out in that, because it is the counter-notice that gives you the safe harbor.
Let's say it takes 5 minutes to properly adjudicate a dispute. 5 minutes allows 20 per person-hour. An 8 hour shift could resolve 160 reviews. 7200 / 160 = 45 shifts per day to review all of the hypothetical copyright issues. I don't think that's required, and the number of requested reviews is going to be some fraction of that. Requiring google to spread out under 50 shifts over a 24 period in order to provide a fair review so that they may bring in billions of dollars a year from youtube doesn't seem like a large ask. This is call-center-esque work and even done in the US or Western Europe would be very cheap, particularly as it can avoid otherwise more cumbersome regulatory hurdles.
> Let's say it takes 5 minutes to properly adjudicate a dispute.
That's highly unrealistic, but review alone would take at least twice as long, since the average video length is about 12 minutes.
How would you find out in just 5 minutes whether a monetization claim is justified? Not every case is as clear as the piano teacher's case. Keep in mind that this isn't a DMCA takedown request either - it's about a party that claims the content in order to redirect the revenue.
So you seriously claim that on average you can find out in just 5 minutes whether one of the 6 license types [0] applies and the claimant actually has a case? If it was that easy, I doubt that court cases like [1] would take years. And that's assuming all the information is already at hand so no further communication with either party is required...
> > I think the centralization plus trusting a company is the issue,
> I think that's not the issue at all. The problem is simply scale.
Do you think that the scale of YT is achieved without centralization?
Given the reality that a lack of a centralizing force like YT would just shift copyright adjudication to actual courts and be more expensive and higher stakes for all involved and probably have a similar error rate and bad actors like Prenda, I’d agree that a relatively benignly uncaring Corp without access to police and prisons is better than the court route.
It is because people are routinely violating copyright in much larger amounts, yet nobody is bothering to go after them. Compare with the way the laws about audio and video cassettes ended up.
