I guess it's good that there's a new solution to this problem, but I wish it just wasn't a problem in the first place. It's ridiculous that someone can't just walk around outside, making a video of what they're doing, and post it, without having to worry that some copyrighted music is playing in the background for some portion of it.
That sort of situation should be considered fair use, and copyright owners who attempt to make trouble for people caught up in this situation should be slapped down, hard, and fined.
> That sort of situation should be considered fair use, and copyright owners who attempt to make trouble for people caught up in this situation should be slapped down, hard, and fined.
It is considered fair use, but we're not dealing with government law here. We're dealing with a private company's TOS. In fact, Youtubes entire Copyright "strike" system is just a layer in front of "proper" DMCA.
The large, corporate copyright holders are happy with the setup since they can basically strike down anything they want without worry of legal repercussions (which DMCA addresses). Youtube is happy since the large copyright holders are happy. Small creators get screwed over, but it doesn't really matter to Youtube since there's essentially an endless supply of Youtube content creators.
Exactly -- and the situation arises because "fair use" determinations aren't scalable. It literally ultimately takes a court and a jury to determine if something is fair use or not, which is incredibly expensive.
Now in 99.999+% of individual human situations, it never gets that far because it's pretty clear to a person in advance whether something is fair use or not, or they ask a lawyer and assess the risks, etc.
But when you're dealing with user media at scale, that system falls apart. YouTube can't have a human lawyer manually review each clip for fair use, YouTube certainly can't trust uploaders because there are tons of people trying to upload entire Hollywood movies, and asking copyright owners to manually review each flagged match is similarly not scalable.
So YouTube simply implements a content matching system that disallows more than a certain amount of copyrighted material period. There's no other scalable solution given existing copyright law.
And honestly, this new eraser tool is a really good solution if it works. If it can simply and effectively remove unwanted background music that was never wanted/intended to begin with, then it works for everyone -- pirated content uploads are still blocked scalably as well as unlicensed sountracks on webisodes etc., but people can still upload personal clips and instead of them being blocked, they can just remove the music instead.
This is what the DMCA safe harbor policy was meant to deal with. Hosts are not held liable for user content if they respond to a DMCA takedown notice in a timely manner. The other half of the system is that users are supposed to be able to submit a counter notice to have content immediately restored without judicial intervention. At that point the host is immune from litigation and the original party can seek remediation in the court system.
YouTube doesn't provide an implementation of the second half of the DMCA process because they have a side deal with big media to manage royalties in exchange for a system biased in their favor.
That whole debacle spawned Content ID and yes, now they're happily in bed together. They probably prefer it like that, while we'd prefer safe harbour actually works as intended.
However, most copyright disputes on YouTube happen within YouTube's own process (where usually the claimant gets the revenue from the video but the content usually stays up), not the DMCA process (takedown and copyright strike)
> There's no other scalable solution given existing copyright law.
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No, practicality does not demand "binding shitty algorithmic decisions for thee, extreme latitude for egregious errors from me." Determinations don't need to be scalable to backstop a system of back-and-forth escalating claims that keeps the incentives correct for everyone at all stages: human beats algorithm, identified human beats unidentified human (note that at this point and all subsequent points rights holders have an enormous, automatic scalability advantage), identified human with legal commitment to consequences for being incorrect beats uncommitted human, and finally bump it to the legal system if all else fails, but by now everyone has skin in the game committed to their claims so none of the disagreements will be spammy.
This is all possible, it's not even particularly difficult, but it wouldn't create a cozy relationship with big rights holders which is what youtube actually wants, so instead we get "binding shitty decisions for thee, extreme latitude for egregious errors from me."
> Determinations don't need to be scalable to backstop a system of back-and-forth escalating claims that keeps the incentives correct for everyone at all stages
That's yesterday's game. It might have been possible to do this in the 90s, but today's copyright claims are automatic, authoritative and legally legitimate enough to scare a platform owner. This is entirely legal, too; nothing stops Sony from dumping 800,000 alleged infringements on YouTube's lap and giving them a 2 week notice to figure it out. If Google doesn't respond to every claimed abuse, then Sony can force them to arbitrate or sue them in court for willful copyright violation.
> This is all possible, it's not even particularly difficult
But it's not automatic, it creates unnecessary liability, and it's more expensive than their current solution. It's not overly generous to Google to assume that they also hate the rights-holders, but literally can't be assed to do anything about it because the situation is stacked against them. Even assuming the overwhelming majority of copyright-striked content is Fair Use, the losses incurred by the 0.1% that isn't could make defending YouTube a net-negative. Record labels and movie studios keep IP-specific lawyers on-payroll for this exact purpose, and fighting it out is a losing battle any way you cut it.
> corporate copyright holders are happy with the setup since they can basically strike down anything they want without worry of legal repercussions (which DMCA addresses).
In practice they never have much to fear from legal repercussions. There are countless examples of DMCA notices sent by corporations in error, or sent for reasons such as suppressing criticism, or to find out a blogger's identity, or to try to extort money, or as an attack/DoS but I'm not aware of any CEO or corporate lawyer being charged with perjury.
Even if someone wanted to fight a corporation in the court system they can't just prove that the DMCA notice wasn't valid, they also have to prove intent (that the corporation knew it was invalid when it was sent) and even if they manage to win, they'd be lucky to get enough money to cover their legal expenses (http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2010/02/court-nar...)
"the government" has been known to use the copyright strike system to their benefit. Want to ensure that bystander/witness footage of your illegal / unconstitutional acts don't go viral? Blast a <pop artist> song as you go about your business. anyone recording will have the video removed.
No, i won't cite. Even bing can find numerous publications on this very topic with "cops playing copyrighted music to prevent video uploads" which is basically what i said.
I watch FTL game vods regularly. Recently the whole FTL community was hit by id claims on the music in the game, from a company that doesn't own the copyright, on behalf of the author, who has nothing to do with it. He replied that he's aware but cannot do much with it. And FTL is too small to bubble up in social media. It's not the first time it happens.
The situation resolved in two weeks, but for that time all monetization was "shared" with a scam entity. The name of the scammer is "TuneCore".
> I guess it's good that there's a new solution to this problem, but I wish it just wasn't a problem in the first place.
Youtube created the problem and now have this tool to help the problem they created. Indeed, it would be better to not have the problem in the first place!
Having some background music, or short clips, is absolutely fair use and from a pragmatic point of view, just common sense. But all the youtube content creators I know are in constant panic of letting even the slightest bit of external sound into their videos. It is completely unnatural.
No, the people created the problem by voting (indirectly) for the legislation that led YouTube to create its system. Do you think YouTube wants to spend resources implementing a copyright strike system when they could just let that content exist on their platform?
> walk around outside, making a video of what they're doing, and post it, without having to worry that some copyrighted music is playing in the background for some portion of it.
You can, this is called "incidental use" and is an exception to copyright in the USA. If you're filming yourself going down the street and someone starts playing a song, and you're not going out of your easy to capture the copyrighted content, it is legal.
YouTube's copyright strike system is more strict than the law, probably to kowtow to the music companies serving the YouTube Music product in exchange for not having to defend against a lawsuit.
If we weren't subject to their monopoly on online video, someone could just start telling copyright trolls to pound sand when a frivolous complaint comes up.
> If we weren't subject to their monopoly on online video, someone could just start telling copyright trolls to pound sand when a frivolous complaint comes up.
In principle, maybe. But realistically, even if we had a competitive and healthy video hosting market, the RIAA would still have a legal imperative to moderate those platforms. Although we don't perceive them in direct competition with YouTube, copyright takedowns still happen on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Platforms of a certain size become targets for IP holders, and platform-owners lack the time or accountability to deal with each claim on a case-by-case basis. It's less about finding a "someone" to tell-off copyright trolls, and more about paying enough lawyers to fight Sony & Friends when they make dubious claims.
It's a status-quo that sucks for us humans, but this is what intellectual property laws look like as-applied to real life. Art, video and even code are all obsessively licensed to prevent the accidental proliferation of good ideas.
In addition to incidental use and and law enforcement and investigative purposes , copyrighted music in a YouTube video could also be Academic Use, journalism / criticism, sufficiently transformative, a mixtape-style compilation,.
Someday hopefully the musical copyright folks on YouTube will share revenue with Visual Artists on there, too.
It is pretty ridiculous what their copyright bots flag too.
I recorded a live performance of an orchestra in Barcelona at some cathedral. Some version of the song got copyright flagged. Really? Flagging live performances of (checks notes) a song composed in 1954?
Each live performance of a work creates a separate copyrightable work (a derivative work of the composed song, I believe). And composed in 1954 is almost certainly copyrighted still, given that most European countries follow a life+70 rule.
Personally I would say people should not be able to make money off someone else's copyrighted content without permission, but someone putting a lot of work into making a good video and having someone else claim all the money over 10 seconds of audio doesn't seem right either.
Recursive attribution (e.g. a profitable video used 10 seconds of a remix of a song ultimately belonging to xyz) would be fair. It should be easy for YouTube engineers to engineer profit sharing.
Say hypothetically that the song writer gets paid 100% every time their song gets played 100% in any video, why does copyright care at all? It's right to safeguard the primary creator's intellectual property to the extent of allowing them to claim share in profits, but it's strange to use copyright to restrict use.
Mathematically it would be simple, but I don't think it's as simple as just splitting based on time. They'd probably argue the song or movie clip added more value e.g. if I used a famous song in my 10 second introduction clip, that's a major branding move, is that still only worth 1/60 of the revenue from my 10 minute video? Or would I have many fewer viewers with weaker branding week on week?
There is also the right of the creator to have their work not used in ways they don't approve of. This a commonly heard about when politicians play songs at rallies. It's not just about the dollars.
Unless the purpose and value of the video is solely distribution of the copyrighted music it should be protected fair use. If copyright holders don't like it they are free to not license their music to be played in public ever.
I think they had a similar system before to replace all the audio in your video with something from the youtube audio library. The first thing in the list was a song called "009 Sound System Dreamscape" which became notorious as the background audio for tutorials where someone types into notepad due to this system.
I wonder what the pre-eminent audio library song is going to be this time.
This is actually a better solution. If someone complains you can scrub it and still maintain your full ownership of the video, while still keeping your video watchable.
Replace is nice if it's only the song, but you lose any voice-over.
They will have to do this in real time for twitch streamers.
There have been some pretty funny instances of people on among us competing against streamers, so they play copyrighted music to keep the streamers away.
It was the first time that DMCA acted as a paladin-like aura in a video game.
I know a few small youtubers who make "walk around" live-stream type videos and they always struggle with music from bars etc. It's always kind of funny when they attempt to talk over the music or start walking faster. Kind of sad how megacorporations can affect our behavior.
I hope this won't spill over to a general deterioration or avoidance of music. People are really good at copying behavior they see from people they see as "authoritative figures" and influencers are that, for young people.
Oh my, now I'm imagining a hipster bar that uses "only playing non-copyrighted music" as a way to incentivize all the wannabe youtubers and instagrammers and tiktokers to record their content there.
So live music only. Nothing recorded. All original pieces without sheet music or written lyrics. Nothing online or ever via a digital system with a memory function. No portable music players, not even 8-tracks. It would be one big ren faire of wandering bards creating ad hoc songs for coins.
I was thinking more that it would cause companies to have no choice but to chill out about copyright… but you’re kinda selling me on this vision instead.
I haven't played a piece from sheet music in years, and I still get stuff demonetized. You in fact have to know the common themes well enough to _avoid_ playing things that sound too much like them.
No, the opposite. If people in large numbers are avoiding music, then the industry will behave better about copyright. They want people to listen to music.
> If people in large numbers are avoiding music, then the industry will behave better about copyright.
Has there ever been a significant point in history where this has happened? It feels like the opposite happens; when people conscientiously object to the music industry, said industry doubles down on their authority to control music. Radio license agreements, home taping, internet-distribution and now the YouTube/social media era are all punctuated by license-holders reaffirming their control, fair use and popularity be damned.
And if that doesn't work they will argue that they must get a cut from every CD, DVD, harddrive, and SSD sale too. Because, you know, me needing more space for my own projects is why the music industry deserves my money.
That's not really possible, because there are a lot of contextual factors that go into fair use that ultimately depend on what a jury would decide.
I.e. a tool would have to ascertain whether a clip of music in a larger video was being used as part of film criticism (allowed) or as musical accompaniment to a comedy scene (not allowed). Even in a film criticism clip, the music is allowed if it's part of the analysis, but not if it's used as "branding".
So that distinction simply can't be made by a tool, not even with current AI. Heck, in important enough situations that are gray areas, people go to court and it takes a jury to decide.
and when >50% of pop songs have the same 4 note progression i'm not entirely sure what would be accomplished, in the general sense. I'm not sure where i heard it, but it was back when i was composing nearly full time: "All notes have already been played in every order." Merely adding rests or lengthening or shortening notes or adding effects doesn't "fix" anything about the underlying problem.
Meanwhile "Old Town Road" was made by "buying" the "rights" to an instrumental track that was created by Trent Reznor, but Trent Reznor had to be told that someone was using Ghosts 34. IIRC the "beat" was "bought" for less than a meal at a fast food restaurant, not from Reznor (or NIN, or Nothing Records, etc).
I made $0 after spending about a decade composing, writing, arranging over 4 solo albums and an additional 6 albums with another person. One thing of note, though, was the "Napster Bad" metallica workaround on file sharing apps was to change the name of the band... to our band name. We didn't stand a chance.
> That's not really possible, ... a tool would have to ascertain
My guess is you could build an AI + limited human review tool that would do it better than the 75th percentile lawyer. But there's not much reason for YouTube to invest in this.
Which would be irrelevant except YouTube's copyright strike system is effectively run by the copyright holders, and thus goes far further than the law requires.
They should add AI that improves audio as well. Some older MIT and Stanford course playlists have pretty bad audio. It would be nice if they could just enhance the audio in place.
I use Nvidia's Broadcast tool to do it locally on my GPU in realtime. It works fairly well and has made some older videos, especially courses or presentations at conferences satisfactory to watch but I agree it would be great if YouTube could automatically provide it as a tool as well.
I'm hoping to find a tool that removes umms and ahhhs, mouth clicks and other annoying tics.
There was a java tool that could improve audio but it was designed for archival of tape, film audio, and old records and the like. I lost the computer i ran it on, i even paid for it but i can't find the receipt to redownload (or even rebuy it). It worked very well - about as well as i can do manually, and perhaps a few percent better - i don't remember many shimmering artifacts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xazubVJ0jz4&t=85s [0]
I'd be pleasantly surprised if nvidia can "fix" audio, as i have.. oh, a few thousand hours of audio that i could clean up in an automated way.
[0] hilariously, youtube gave me a copyright strike for this video, even though it's obviously an archival upload. Jerks.
i wonder if you can use this to make a viral video of someone screaming like a lunatic by erasing the loud music they were trying to be heard over. like the dean scream video that sunk the howard dean presidential campaign
it's disturbing to me when youtube permits post-publication editing of videos like this
I'm still waiting for Canon to release a tool to scrub pictures of the buildings I own. What makes people believe they can just post photos of my buildings? I purchased the rights to that architecture.
I'm not sure I follow. The equivalent to a photo of a visual would be a recording of a audible. Whether either core thing exists is independent of a specific recording in both cases.
The main difference in the above analogy is probably that a photo is not a primary intended way for the architecture to be consumed whereas it is for a song.
The way a piece of music is supposed to be experienced is not the same as the way a building is supposed to be experienced. Seeing the picture of a building is not the same as seeing the actual building. Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.
The way a piece of music is supposed to be experienced is very dissimilar to having it be incidentally audible in the background of a video about something else entirely that happens to include some of the sounds of the street on which it was filmed.
>Seeing the picture of a building is not the same as seeing the actual building.
Sure, I agree with this.
>Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.
Gonna disagree there; in the same way that looking at a picture of something isn't the same as looking at something, hearing a recording of a performance is not the same as being present for the performance.
> Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.
This is way overly reductionist. Hearing a few notes of a piece of music in the background with crappy quality is not the same as hearing the full ucompressed piece with top of the line equipment. It is remarkably analogous to seeing a picture of building.
Eh. Copyright doesn't care how something is meant to be experienced.
In the US though, architecture copyrights don't protect against people photographing building exteriors.
That said, if your building was covered in a mural or some artistic façade that you held the copyright to, then one can assert copyright against people posting videos of the building on YouTube. Of course, there's exemptions for various forms of fair use like critique.
This made me think of all the copyright claiming against classical musicians performing pieces for the sound recording copyright (rather than the piece itself being copyrighted; so many pieces are out of copyright in a significant number of places[0]). I don't use youtube so I'm not sure if it's still a thing that happens? If it is, I wonder how this eraser tool will behave. Would a few bars of someone's performance of a piece be removed because there's inevitably going to be similarities when performing a piece?
[0] imslp.org is a great source for pieces no longer under copyright. Not all the sheet music itself on imslp is out of copyright in all jurisdictions, of course.
This tool will only remove music that has been reported/claimed by someone and reported to youtube. It certainly cannot remove all copyrighted music given that most all recorded music is copyrighted already irrespective of youtube. This tool can remove stuff that has been reported and shared with youtube's copyright systems. That is a different thing than the title.
I don't think the distinction really matters. If no copyright claim has been made on some background music in a video, then the person who posted the video need not care if that music is copyrighted or not.
This is a much better approach, I like it. Does anyone have a demo videos of this actually being used from when it was in beta? The demo in the video about the feature doesn't demo the results, just the UI.
This feature has existed since at least 2014.[1] I guess they're just advertising it now because AI is the new hotness? It's generally worked for me pretty well, although sometimes the sound gets a bit strange.
We'll see. Rightsholders are doing everything they can to fight that, and having the laws and giant corporations all doing their bidding makes them much more powerful than "the people." They will fight this with everything they have, which is a considerable number of billions.
The music industry will never let this fly. They would lose their ability to control our home movies that have an undetectable slight note or two that might have come from a neighbor's stereo system. Mark my words, YouTube will drop this to give the music mafia their control back.
Great now i can easily remove the content i paid for fair and square from videos of the software i work on, cause i do not have the bureaucracy Time for all those maniacs who strike there custonners.
And its all to protect a ecosystem that their own geberative ai research has doomed to die anyway . Makes perfect sense, in a asylum hallway kind of way. The public will have to bail out YouTube .
Now we need a client side algorithm to add that back, perhaps provided by a music platform where the user is a subscriber. I’m sure streaming services would enjoy this kind of windfall.
They're all actually AI powered, generally some form of real-time RNN trained on identifying and isolating voice content from background noise or music.
rnnoise2 is an open-source model that does very well. There also are things like Waves Clarity VX, the Nvidia Broadcast (Audio Effects SDK) too, as well as plenty of other solutions like Supertone Clear, Krisp, etc etc etc.
Does that mean youtube is AI generating your voice to "add it back" after silencing that part of the video? Does it ever generate different words to what you actually said?
It is pretty hard to subtract a signal like that, if it’s really just signal C=A+B then maybe if you have exactly B you can get A back from C, but with microphones picking up radio or something like that? No shot
I really wish the content id system was open to all.
Simply default to the first person to upload a piece of video to the site 'owns' it. If you're a film studio or something you can upload a video and set it to private to 'own' content before you release it.
I get that technically scaling content id is hard, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge considering the market position it would give YouTube as the de facto copyright reference index. Everyone has to upload there first unless they want to risk getting their content 'owned' by someone else and a battle to get it reassigned.
For a while this was basically how it worked for all intents and purposes. I assume it's not like this anymore, but we used to do this with live tv broadcast material: rush out a private youtube video of individual segments for Content ID to ingest while on-air (because somebody else was posting clips from the show faster than us, claiming Content ID and stealing the ad revenue from the broadcaster's official public video of the final show)
Getting Google to care enough to fix that problem was harder and slower than a technical solution.
I guess it's good that there's a new solution to this problem, but I wish it just wasn't a problem in the first place. It's ridiculous that someone can't just walk around outside, making a video of what they're doing, and post it, without having to worry that some copyrighted music is playing in the background for some portion of it.
That sort of situation should be considered fair use, and copyright owners who attempt to make trouble for people caught up in this situation should be slapped down, hard, and fined.
> That sort of situation should be considered fair use, and copyright owners who attempt to make trouble for people caught up in this situation should be slapped down, hard, and fined.
It is considered fair use, but we're not dealing with government law here. We're dealing with a private company's TOS. In fact, Youtubes entire Copyright "strike" system is just a layer in front of "proper" DMCA.
The large, corporate copyright holders are happy with the setup since they can basically strike down anything they want without worry of legal repercussions (which DMCA addresses). Youtube is happy since the large copyright holders are happy. Small creators get screwed over, but it doesn't really matter to Youtube since there's essentially an endless supply of Youtube content creators.
Exactly -- and the situation arises because "fair use" determinations aren't scalable. It literally ultimately takes a court and a jury to determine if something is fair use or not, which is incredibly expensive.
Now in 99.999+% of individual human situations, it never gets that far because it's pretty clear to a person in advance whether something is fair use or not, or they ask a lawyer and assess the risks, etc.
But when you're dealing with user media at scale, that system falls apart. YouTube can't have a human lawyer manually review each clip for fair use, YouTube certainly can't trust uploaders because there are tons of people trying to upload entire Hollywood movies, and asking copyright owners to manually review each flagged match is similarly not scalable.
So YouTube simply implements a content matching system that disallows more than a certain amount of copyrighted material period. There's no other scalable solution given existing copyright law.
And honestly, this new eraser tool is a really good solution if it works. If it can simply and effectively remove unwanted background music that was never wanted/intended to begin with, then it works for everyone -- pirated content uploads are still blocked scalably as well as unlicensed sountracks on webisodes etc., but people can still upload personal clips and instead of them being blocked, they can just remove the music instead.
This is what the DMCA safe harbor policy was meant to deal with. Hosts are not held liable for user content if they respond to a DMCA takedown notice in a timely manner. The other half of the system is that users are supposed to be able to submit a counter notice to have content immediately restored without judicial intervention. At that point the host is immune from litigation and the original party can seek remediation in the court system.
YouTube doesn't provide an implementation of the second half of the DMCA process because they have a side deal with big media to manage royalties in exchange for a system biased in their favor.
They tried the safe harbour argument against Viacom. It didn't go that smoothly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
That whole debacle spawned Content ID and yes, now they're happily in bed together. They probably prefer it like that, while we'd prefer safe harbour actually works as intended.
> supposed to be able to submit a counter notice to have content immediately restored
Not immediately AFAIK - the provider has to wait ~2 weeks (in which case the original issuer of the notice can sue).
> YouTube doesn't provide an implementation of the second half of the DMCA
AFAIK YouTube does implement this: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807684?hl=en
However, most copyright disputes on YouTube happen within YouTube's own process (where usually the claimant gets the revenue from the video but the content usually stays up), not the DMCA process (takedown and copyright strike)
> There's no other scalable solution given existing copyright law.
(Informercial hands slip on screwdriver) Call Today for our $29.99 special grip that solves all those slippery screwdriver problems you definitely have! There is no other solution to the screwdriver grip conundrum!
No, practicality does not demand "binding shitty algorithmic decisions for thee, extreme latitude for egregious errors from me." Determinations don't need to be scalable to backstop a system of back-and-forth escalating claims that keeps the incentives correct for everyone at all stages: human beats algorithm, identified human beats unidentified human (note that at this point and all subsequent points rights holders have an enormous, automatic scalability advantage), identified human with legal commitment to consequences for being incorrect beats uncommitted human, and finally bump it to the legal system if all else fails, but by now everyone has skin in the game committed to their claims so none of the disagreements will be spammy.
This is all possible, it's not even particularly difficult, but it wouldn't create a cozy relationship with big rights holders which is what youtube actually wants, so instead we get "binding shitty decisions for thee, extreme latitude for egregious errors from me."
> Determinations don't need to be scalable to backstop a system of back-and-forth escalating claims that keeps the incentives correct for everyone at all stages
That's yesterday's game. It might have been possible to do this in the 90s, but today's copyright claims are automatic, authoritative and legally legitimate enough to scare a platform owner. This is entirely legal, too; nothing stops Sony from dumping 800,000 alleged infringements on YouTube's lap and giving them a 2 week notice to figure it out. If Google doesn't respond to every claimed abuse, then Sony can force them to arbitrate or sue them in court for willful copyright violation.
> This is all possible, it's not even particularly difficult
But it's not automatic, it creates unnecessary liability, and it's more expensive than their current solution. It's not overly generous to Google to assume that they also hate the rights-holders, but literally can't be assed to do anything about it because the situation is stacked against them. Even assuming the overwhelming majority of copyright-striked content is Fair Use, the losses incurred by the 0.1% that isn't could make defending YouTube a net-negative. Record labels and movie studios keep IP-specific lawyers on-payroll for this exact purpose, and fighting it out is a losing battle any way you cut it.
> corporate copyright holders are happy with the setup since they can basically strike down anything they want without worry of legal repercussions (which DMCA addresses).
In practice they never have much to fear from legal repercussions. There are countless examples of DMCA notices sent by corporations in error, or sent for reasons such as suppressing criticism, or to find out a blogger's identity, or to try to extort money, or as an attack/DoS but I'm not aware of any CEO or corporate lawyer being charged with perjury.
Even if someone wanted to fight a corporation in the court system they can't just prove that the DMCA notice wasn't valid, they also have to prove intent (that the corporation knew it was invalid when it was sent) and even if they manage to win, they'd be lucky to get enough money to cover their legal expenses (http://copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com/2010/02/court-nar...)
"the government" has been known to use the copyright strike system to their benefit. Want to ensure that bystander/witness footage of your illegal / unconstitutional acts don't go viral? Blast a <pop artist> song as you go about your business. anyone recording will have the video removed.
No, i won't cite. Even bing can find numerous publications on this very topic with "cops playing copyrighted music to prevent video uploads" which is basically what i said.
Fair use is one of those laws that is worthless because normal people cannot use the courts to defend themselves.
How are small creators screwed over?
I watch FTL game vods regularly. Recently the whole FTL community was hit by id claims on the music in the game, from a company that doesn't own the copyright, on behalf of the author, who has nothing to do with it. He replied that he's aware but cannot do much with it. And FTL is too small to bubble up in social media. It's not the first time it happens.
The situation resolved in two weeks, but for that time all monetization was "shared" with a scam entity. The name of the scammer is "TuneCore".
Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHBhM7PNRYA
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ftlgame/comments/1cj0hkt/ftl_youtub...
TuneCore scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believe_Music#:~:text=Copyrigh...
... at what point does Believe Music just get put in its own timeout for this shit?
Agreed. It is stupid and vile to use a few words.
I am all for enforcement if it reaches a significant audience with commercial interests. But now anyone for any reasons gets this crap.
> I guess it's good that there's a new solution to this problem, but I wish it just wasn't a problem in the first place.
Youtube created the problem and now have this tool to help the problem they created. Indeed, it would be better to not have the problem in the first place!
Having some background music, or short clips, is absolutely fair use and from a pragmatic point of view, just common sense. But all the youtube content creators I know are in constant panic of letting even the slightest bit of external sound into their videos. It is completely unnatural.
No, the people created the problem by voting (indirectly) for the legislation that led YouTube to create its system. Do you think YouTube wants to spend resources implementing a copyright strike system when they could just let that content exist on their platform?
> walk around outside, making a video of what they're doing, and post it, without having to worry that some copyrighted music is playing in the background for some portion of it.
You can, this is called "incidental use" and is an exception to copyright in the USA. If you're filming yourself going down the street and someone starts playing a song, and you're not going out of your easy to capture the copyrighted content, it is legal.
YouTube's copyright strike system is more strict than the law, probably to kowtow to the music companies serving the YouTube Music product in exchange for not having to defend against a lawsuit.
If we weren't subject to their monopoly on online video, someone could just start telling copyright trolls to pound sand when a frivolous complaint comes up.
> If we weren't subject to their monopoly on online video, someone could just start telling copyright trolls to pound sand when a frivolous complaint comes up.
In principle, maybe. But realistically, even if we had a competitive and healthy video hosting market, the RIAA would still have a legal imperative to moderate those platforms. Although we don't perceive them in direct competition with YouTube, copyright takedowns still happen on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Platforms of a certain size become targets for IP holders, and platform-owners lack the time or accountability to deal with each claim on a case-by-case basis. It's less about finding a "someone" to tell-off copyright trolls, and more about paying enough lawyers to fight Sony & Friends when they make dubious claims.
It's a status-quo that sucks for us humans, but this is what intellectual property laws look like as-applied to real life. Art, video and even code are all obsessively licensed to prevent the accidental proliferation of good ideas.
It's also easier said than done to fend off intelligent and determined legal adversaries.
In addition to incidental use and and law enforcement and investigative purposes , copyrighted music in a YouTube video could also be Academic Use, journalism / criticism, sufficiently transformative, a mixtape-style compilation,.
Someday hopefully the musical copyright folks on YouTube will share revenue with Visual Artists on there, too.
It is pretty ridiculous what their copyright bots flag too.
I recorded a live performance of an orchestra in Barcelona at some cathedral. Some version of the song got copyright flagged. Really? Flagging live performances of (checks notes) a song composed in 1954?
Just bananas.
Each live performance of a work creates a separate copyrightable work (a derivative work of the composed song, I believe). And composed in 1954 is almost certainly copyrighted still, given that most European countries follow a life+70 rule.
I agree, but this conversation immediately goes to hell if you use that video to train AI, among other problems.
They can, they just shouldn't expect to be paid for it.
Personally I would say people should not be able to make money off someone else's copyrighted content without permission, but someone putting a lot of work into making a good video and having someone else claim all the money over 10 seconds of audio doesn't seem right either.
Recursive attribution (e.g. a profitable video used 10 seconds of a remix of a song ultimately belonging to xyz) would be fair. It should be easy for YouTube engineers to engineer profit sharing.
Say hypothetically that the song writer gets paid 100% every time their song gets played 100% in any video, why does copyright care at all? It's right to safeguard the primary creator's intellectual property to the extent of allowing them to claim share in profits, but it's strange to use copyright to restrict use.
Mathematically it would be simple, but I don't think it's as simple as just splitting based on time. They'd probably argue the song or movie clip added more value e.g. if I used a famous song in my 10 second introduction clip, that's a major branding move, is that still only worth 1/60 of the revenue from my 10 minute video? Or would I have many fewer viewers with weaker branding week on week?
There is also the right of the creator to have their work not used in ways they don't approve of. This a commonly heard about when politicians play songs at rallies. It's not just about the dollars.
Unless the purpose and value of the video is solely distribution of the copyrighted music it should be protected fair use. If copyright holders don't like it they are free to not license their music to be played in public ever.
I think they had a similar system before to replace all the audio in your video with something from the youtube audio library. The first thing in the list was a song called "009 Sound System Dreamscape" which became notorious as the background audio for tutorials where someone types into notepad due to this system.
I wonder what the pre-eminent audio library song is going to be this time.
Fitting AI generated music.
Why not commercials?
This is actually a better solution. If someone complains you can scrub it and still maintain your full ownership of the video, while still keeping your video watchable.
Replace is nice if it's only the song, but you lose any voice-over.
Mute also loses your voice-over.
it's technically possible to separate into stems but not sure how well it works in practice
They will have to do this in real time for twitch streamers.
There have been some pretty funny instances of people on among us competing against streamers, so they play copyrighted music to keep the streamers away.
It was the first time that DMCA acted as a paladin-like aura in a video game.
It’d be nice to have a fair use tool, identifying when copyrighted music is a fair use.
I know a few small youtubers who make "walk around" live-stream type videos and they always struggle with music from bars etc. It's always kind of funny when they attempt to talk over the music or start walking faster. Kind of sad how megacorporations can affect our behavior.
I hope this won't spill over to a general deterioration or avoidance of music. People are really good at copying behavior they see from people they see as "authoritative figures" and influencers are that, for young people.
I feel like if any meaningful amount of society adopted a “avoid copyrighted music” behaviour, the problem would resolve itself pretty fast.
Oh my, now I'm imagining a hipster bar that uses "only playing non-copyrighted music" as a way to incentivize all the wannabe youtubers and instagrammers and tiktokers to record their content there.
There is a brewery near me that plays only Grateful Dead and anything before 19-whatever-it-is to avoid needing a license to “perform” it.
Human music!
Boop boop boop. Boop boop boop. Boop boop boop.
So live music only. Nothing recorded. All original pieces without sheet music or written lyrics. Nothing online or ever via a digital system with a memory function. No portable music players, not even 8-tracks. It would be one big ren faire of wandering bards creating ad hoc songs for coins.
I was thinking more that it would cause companies to have no choice but to chill out about copyright… but you’re kinda selling me on this vision instead.
I haven't played a piece from sheet music in years, and I still get stuff demonetized. You in fact have to know the common themes well enough to _avoid_ playing things that sound too much like them.
unionize musicians
Like hollywood I expect the music industry is full of unions, perhaps so full they'll come and break your fingers for being a scab.
That roughly amounts to "avoid all recorded music" right now.
If you don't like music, sure... but I'm not willing to be that ascetic.
No, the opposite. If people in large numbers are avoiding music, then the industry will behave better about copyright. They want people to listen to music.
> If people in large numbers are avoiding music, then the industry will behave better about copyright.
Has there ever been a significant point in history where this has happened? It feels like the opposite happens; when people conscientiously object to the music industry, said industry doubles down on their authority to control music. Radio license agreements, home taping, internet-distribution and now the YouTube/social media era are all punctuated by license-holders reaffirming their control, fair use and popularity be damned.
I have no sense that this will ever happen. More speaking to the hypothetical being raised.
And if that doesn't work they will argue that they must get a cut from every CD, DVD, harddrive, and SSD sale too. Because, you know, me needing more space for my own projects is why the music industry deserves my money.
They behave like the mob.
I listen to a lot of great albums, and my life would be poorer without them. Why would I give up listening to the music I love?
That's not really possible, because there are a lot of contextual factors that go into fair use that ultimately depend on what a jury would decide.
I.e. a tool would have to ascertain whether a clip of music in a larger video was being used as part of film criticism (allowed) or as musical accompaniment to a comedy scene (not allowed). Even in a film criticism clip, the music is allowed if it's part of the analysis, but not if it's used as "branding".
So that distinction simply can't be made by a tool, not even with current AI. Heck, in important enough situations that are gray areas, people go to court and it takes a jury to decide.
and when >50% of pop songs have the same 4 note progression i'm not entirely sure what would be accomplished, in the general sense. I'm not sure where i heard it, but it was back when i was composing nearly full time: "All notes have already been played in every order." Merely adding rests or lengthening or shortening notes or adding effects doesn't "fix" anything about the underlying problem.
Meanwhile "Old Town Road" was made by "buying" the "rights" to an instrumental track that was created by Trent Reznor, but Trent Reznor had to be told that someone was using Ghosts 34. IIRC the "beat" was "bought" for less than a meal at a fast food restaurant, not from Reznor (or NIN, or Nothing Records, etc).
I made $0 after spending about a decade composing, writing, arranging over 4 solo albums and an additional 6 albums with another person. One thing of note, though, was the "Napster Bad" metallica workaround on file sharing apps was to change the name of the band... to our band name. We didn't stand a chance.
> That's not really possible, ... a tool would have to ascertain
My guess is you could build an AI + limited human review tool that would do it better than the 75th percentile lawyer. But there's not much reason for YouTube to invest in this.
It would be nice to have free AGI lawyers, agreed
Fair use doesn't exist in many jurisdictions (where artists may come from). I would assume carpet bombing is easier than surgery.
Fair use may not exist, but rights of citation or parody still do.
No they don't.
https://seanmiller.us/blog/parody-laws-by-country/
YouTube doesn't respect fair use anyways in any country.
Because copyright holders hate Fair Use
Which would be irrelevant except YouTube's copyright strike system is effectively run by the copyright holders, and thus goes far further than the law requires.
They should add AI that improves audio as well. Some older MIT and Stanford course playlists have pretty bad audio. It would be nice if they could just enhance the audio in place.
I use Nvidia's Broadcast tool to do it locally on my GPU in realtime. It works fairly well and has made some older videos, especially courses or presentations at conferences satisfactory to watch but I agree it would be great if YouTube could automatically provide it as a tool as well.
I'm hoping to find a tool that removes umms and ahhhs, mouth clicks and other annoying tics.
There was a java tool that could improve audio but it was designed for archival of tape, film audio, and old records and the like. I lost the computer i ran it on, i even paid for it but i can't find the receipt to redownload (or even rebuy it). It worked very well - about as well as i can do manually, and perhaps a few percent better - i don't remember many shimmering artifacts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xazubVJ0jz4&t=85s [0]
I'd be pleasantly surprised if nvidia can "fix" audio, as i have.. oh, a few thousand hours of audio that i could clean up in an automated way.
[0] hilariously, youtube gave me a copyright strike for this video, even though it's obviously an archival upload. Jerks.
Ah, looks like you need RTX to run. Sadly I only have a 1080ti
I think Nvidia Broadacst is just a repackaged clone of original"RTX Voice", and that one, despite the name, ran also on non RTX cards, including 970.
Perhaps Broadcast will also run? Its even possible you just need to flip value in config to force it to run on nonRTX cards
i wonder if you can use this to make a viral video of someone screaming like a lunatic by erasing the loud music they were trying to be heard over. like the dean scream video that sunk the howard dean presidential campaign
it's disturbing to me when youtube permits post-publication editing of videos like this
I'm still waiting for Canon to release a tool to scrub pictures of the buildings I own. What makes people believe they can just post photos of my buildings? I purchased the rights to that architecture.
Look up the copyright drama regarding the Atomium in Brussels.
Reminds me of https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35969734
!!
https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...
You can’t take a song photo, there is no permanent one unique recording of a song that has to play forever for it to exist.
I'm not sure I follow. The equivalent to a photo of a visual would be a recording of a audible. Whether either core thing exists is independent of a specific recording in both cases.
The main difference in the above analogy is probably that a photo is not a primary intended way for the architecture to be consumed whereas it is for a song.
Substitute photo for 3D model of building for VR consumption and it works better.
Also some music may be/is intended to be heard live. So the recording/model analogy can certainly fit.
The way a piece of music is supposed to be experienced is not the same as the way a building is supposed to be experienced. Seeing the picture of a building is not the same as seeing the actual building. Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.
The way a piece of music is supposed to be experienced is very dissimilar to having it be incidentally audible in the background of a video about something else entirely that happens to include some of the sounds of the street on which it was filmed.
>Seeing the picture of a building is not the same as seeing the actual building.
Sure, I agree with this.
>Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.
Gonna disagree there; in the same way that looking at a picture of something isn't the same as looking at something, hearing a recording of a performance is not the same as being present for the performance.
The Treachery of Images, as Magritte called it.
> Hearing a piece of music is the same as hearing the piece of music.
This is way overly reductionist. Hearing a few notes of a piece of music in the background with crappy quality is not the same as hearing the full ucompressed piece with top of the line equipment. It is remarkably analogous to seeing a picture of building.
Eh. Copyright doesn't care how something is meant to be experienced.
In the US though, architecture copyrights don't protect against people photographing building exteriors.
That said, if your building was covered in a mural or some artistic façade that you held the copyright to, then one can assert copyright against people posting videos of the building on YouTube. Of course, there's exemptions for various forms of fair use like critique.
This made me think of all the copyright claiming against classical musicians performing pieces for the sound recording copyright (rather than the piece itself being copyrighted; so many pieces are out of copyright in a significant number of places[0]). I don't use youtube so I'm not sure if it's still a thing that happens? If it is, I wonder how this eraser tool will behave. Would a few bars of someone's performance of a piece be removed because there's inevitably going to be similarities when performing a piece?
[0] imslp.org is a great source for pieces no longer under copyright. Not all the sheet music itself on imslp is out of copyright in all jurisdictions, of course.
> Would a few bars of someone's performance of a piece be removed because there's inevitably going to be similarities when performing a piece?
This still happens, yeah.
If they made this available to viewers too it would be a valuable way of removing overbearing background music from otherwise interesting videos.
This is my main grupe with these Innovations. They use it as they want, but rarely as we want. The fact you cant seek in Shorts is just atrocious.
Incorrect title.
>> remove copyright-claimed music from your video
This tool will only remove music that has been reported/claimed by someone and reported to youtube. It certainly cannot remove all copyrighted music given that most all recorded music is copyrighted already irrespective of youtube. This tool can remove stuff that has been reported and shared with youtube's copyright systems. That is a different thing than the title.
I don't think the distinction really matters. If no copyright claim has been made on some background music in a video, then the person who posted the video need not care if that music is copyrighted or not.
This is a much better approach, I like it. Does anyone have a demo videos of this actually being used from when it was in beta? The demo in the video about the feature doesn't demo the results, just the UI.
This is essentially how Earworm[1] started
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
Not only Remove, but also Trum and even Replace the song.
This feature has existed since at least 2014.[1] I guess they're just advertising it now because AI is the new hotness? It's generally worked for me pretty well, although sometimes the sound gets a bit strange.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140427195913/https://support.g...
The article notes the functionality has existed for a while and that this announcement is an improvement of it.
It feels quite plausible that soon enough we’ll be able to ask it to replace copyright music with generated “soundalike” music.
We'll see. Rightsholders are doing everything they can to fight that, and having the laws and giant corporations all doing their bidding makes them much more powerful than "the people." They will fight this with everything they have, which is a considerable number of billions.
The music industry will never let this fly. They would lose their ability to control our home movies that have an undetectable slight note or two that might have come from a neighbor's stereo system. Mark my words, YouTube will drop this to give the music mafia their control back.
Great now i can easily remove the content i paid for fair and square from videos of the software i work on, cause i do not have the bureaucracy Time for all those maniacs who strike there custonners.
And its all to protect a ecosystem that their own geberative ai research has doomed to die anyway . Makes perfect sense, in a asylum hallway kind of way. The public will have to bail out YouTube .
https://github.com/PicassoCT/MOSAIC/raw/master/sounds/advert...
Now we need a client side algorithm to add that back, perhaps provided by a music platform where the user is a subscriber. I’m sure streaming services would enjoy this kind of windfall.
Sync rights are expensive and complicated. Not covered in your Spotify subscription.
It's covered by my rtorrent subscription.
Youtube's eraser tool removes any music that any moron or bullshit artist has chosen to claim...
"AI powered algorithm" or just plain old Fourier Transforms?
They're all actually AI powered, generally some form of real-time RNN trained on identifying and isolating voice content from background noise or music.
rnnoise2 is an open-source model that does very well. There also are things like Waves Clarity VX, the Nvidia Broadcast (Audio Effects SDK) too, as well as plenty of other solutions like Supertone Clear, Krisp, etc etc etc.
Does that mean youtube is AI generating your voice to "add it back" after silencing that part of the video? Does it ever generate different words to what you actually said?
It is pretty hard to subtract a signal like that, if it’s really just signal C=A+B then maybe if you have exactly B you can get A back from C, but with microphones picking up radio or something like that? No shot
Also it has to be able to work on remixes that it doesn’t know about of the songs, etc.
All in all I’d say yeah this definitely requires some clever engineering and I believe them that they use AI as part of all of this.
I guess both. One to detect which waves are copyright protected and the transformation to remove it.
I really wish the content id system was open to all.
Simply default to the first person to upload a piece of video to the site 'owns' it. If you're a film studio or something you can upload a video and set it to private to 'own' content before you release it.
I get that technically scaling content id is hard, but it seems like a solvable technical challenge considering the market position it would give YouTube as the de facto copyright reference index. Everyone has to upload there first unless they want to risk getting their content 'owned' by someone else and a battle to get it reassigned.
For a while this was basically how it worked for all intents and purposes. I assume it's not like this anymore, but we used to do this with live tv broadcast material: rush out a private youtube video of individual segments for Content ID to ingest while on-air (because somebody else was posting clips from the show faster than us, claiming Content ID and stealing the ad revenue from the broadcaster's official public video of the final show)
Getting Google to care enough to fix that problem was harder and slower than a technical solution.