3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error The errant copyright takedown of a popular video explaining Bitcoin, from Grant Sanderson's smash-hit YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown, has been reversed, with human error blamed. The brand protection company responsible for the unwarranted takedown, ChainPatrol.io, also acknowledged that the legal demand was a mistake, and has …
I wish I could find the video, but it goes into depth how you can easily take down legitimate music streams.
In short, you create AI slop music and set it to be monitised. You then can get bots to scan for similar sound pieces, issue an automated strike down. You then get a share of the "infringing" works revenue.
Then there are other YouTubers complaining they are getting takedowns for no real reason except a bot has created a copyright complaint and forced their video offline (even some of the biggest streamers have had this).
Then finally you have the scumbags like Teenage Engineering that issue copyright infringment for criticising their overpriced tat, just because you played a note from one of the instruments (yes read their T&C's, it's really scummy).
Copyright is a joke on YouTube, and they just don't give a shit.
Many ad blockers no longer work with YT after their recent mini-war against adblocking,
Brave however blocks YT ads without fuss and gets updated often to thwart YT if they try to get clever. Works on mobile too.
I bet you use Chrome or Edge as your normal browser. Lolz
Yea Firefox + uBlock Origin still working here, no sign of the supposed ads-or-pay crackdown yet. I can't help thinking they're doing a slow and steady divide-and-conquer strategy though. Push all the holdouts onto this combo and then they'll start glitching Firefox(*) and implementing new uBlock Origin counters every day when there's nowhere else left to turn. That pretty much worked out for Facebook.
(*) Already happening on some other Google sites lately. Plausibly deniable of course.
I just download them, and play them with a decent video player like vlc or mpv instead of the shitty browser player that can't single step frames or reverse, or pause for 20 minutes.
Voila, no ads at all.
Then if I really l like it, I keep it instead of deleting it afterwards.
Honestly I don't understand how ShiteTube can justify "demonetisation" as a response to a complaint.. It's not de-monetisation, it's Monetisation.. for THEM i.e. they still serve ads, but pocket all of the revenue themselves.
Are they trying to say that the only people allowed to profit from and be complicit in all of the shitty things their ShiteTubers are accused of by other ShitSpuds etc. are.. Themselves?
Spend the money to investigate properly (with actual human employees) and DELETE where appropriate. Don't just take accusation as guilt but pocket the proceeds, dodgy or otherwise, for yourselves. Doing so makes you-- I said it already.
Copyright is a joke on YouTube, and they just don't give a shit.
This is because there are legal penalties for YouTube if something is not taken down, but no penalties if they fuck up apart from their reputation (which they don't give a shit about now due to where they are in the enshittification timeline). This won't change until the law is changed.
@Dan 55
Indeed, would be really good if there were (very large!) financial penalties for incorrect / malicious copyright takedown requests, it does often get used as a way to silence people and / or monetize other peoples content (i.e. not a genuine mistake, but malicious use), especially because your average YT user has no way to contact a "real" person at YT and get malicious takedowns removed.
The law needs to change so that a person who maliciously makes a false accusation of an offence will never receive a penalty less severe than a person who had actually committed that offence.
This is actually the law-
https://perkinscoie.com/insights/article/district-court-decision-indicates-liability-erroneous-dmca-takedowns
Failing to make this evaluation—similar to a submitting party's duty to consider fair use prior to takedown[2]—could lead to liability under Section 512(f) of the DMCA for parties who knowingly and materially misrepresent that third-party content is infringing in a takedown request. A knowing representation can be inferred from business practices that constitute "head in the sand" willful blindness—a meaningful risk for companies who handle their DMCA takedowns in-house and without input from legal counsel. Under the wrong circumstances, erroneous DMCA takedowns can lead to liability for tortious interference as well.
Fair use gets complicated, but claiming copyright on works that the claimant doesn't own should be a lot simpler to bring an action under s512(f) of the DMCA against both YT, and the entity that brings the false claim. Problem is litigation is expensive, and AlphaGoo has an army of darkness.. I mean lawyers to defend their actions. So I think it's one of those things where maybe a State DA or government should intervene to hold YT accountable. Obviously that would have to be the US because the DMCA is a US thing, but there are similar obligations under EU, UK and other nations copyright laws.
"Copyright is a joke on YouTube, and they just don't give a shit."
Maybe watch Tom Scott's excellent video discussing the current copyright system, and YouTubes workarounds (mostly through contracts with the major music publishers and other large copyright holders)
The DMCA essentially gives them the option to treat a false strike as perjury. They don't do it.
They should grow some teeth and start biting - submit a false strike and you're not allowed any more for a month. Two is three months. Three is a year. Any further strikes gets you a permanent ban from submitting them. And the bans should be corporate level. That might get corporations paying attention.
submit a false strike and you're not allowed any more for a month.
Processing DMCA takedowns is what shields corporations from being held directly responsible (i.e. sued) for any infringing copyrighted content uploaded by users to their platform. There is no exception allowing them to ignore DMCA takedown requests from bad actors. If Youtube started following your advice, it would be trivially easy for any company to start a multi-billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against them by just filing an incorrect takedown, followed by legitimate ones (that get ignored).
What Youtube could actually do, while staying within the law, is provide free legal resources (well-versed in the DMCA) to their customers, which would quickly review and files counterclaims and file lawsuits for damages (to the customer) against those who filed inaccurate takedowns.
"They should grow some teeth and start biting - submit a false strike and you're not allowed any more for a month."
And the companies would sign that contract because?
Remember YT copyright claims are all effectively settled out of court by contract between YT and the big copyright holders.
You can train an LLM
I thought this post was going in a different direction; you can train an LLM around scraped copyrighted material and build a billion pound business on it, but put up your own content as a small operation and you can still be struck off by the copyright vigilante industry.
Yes. Even those medim sized channels who just are past the line of having a human to take care of them can be demonetised because... yeah, no reasons given.
But you do not even need AI to take down a video. There are companies that claim copyright infringements (falsely!) to take down videos they deem negatively impacting the brand image. Like the company offering a 25000 quid phono preamp taking down a repair video.
Yes. Even those medim sized channels who just are past the line of having a human to take care of them can be demonetised because... yeah, no reasons given.
There should be a reason, but demonetised is something of a misnomer, and maybe will end up being litigated, especially pending the outcome of the Honey case. Honey will probably argue that their T&Cs make theft by conversion OK, but the courts may disagree. YT does pretty much the same thing, ie the content creator may get demonetised, but YT will still show ads and either keep the money from those, or divert ad revenues to the bot farm that spewed out a potentially false claim. Then from the article-
Varabei said people often don't understand that ChainPatrol handles millions of scam sites, fake domains, and fake YouTube videos.
What Varabei doesn't seem to understand is that people don't care. If CP issues a false takedown, it's broken the DMCA and could be subject to litigation and penalties. But that would cost the content creators, and good IPR lawyers aren't cheap.. Especially when the false takedowns are depriving them of revenue, and the risk of running into the 3-strike rule and being banned.
Came to the comments to see if anyone mentioned Mend It Mark's recent run in with bogus copyright claims on YouTube and glad to see I was not disappointed!
For the poster asking above: that saga nicely shows what happens if you're a smaller content creator _without_ contacts in YouTube: nothing, you're screwed. Unless someone with a bigger following steps in to help, as happened in this case. Then it becomes yet another lovely example of the Streisand Effect.
I came here to mention this one, a clear case of a bogus copyright claim just because someone was upset their little audiophool product was exposed as not being worth a 1/100th of its retail price.
Also there was a recent case where the content creator got a strike on his 10s audio intro so got a fully licenced recording to replace it yet still got another strike
And some time ago the BBC went after the excellent FranLab because she posted NASA video which the BBC had used in an old Horizon programme. The issue here being that all NASA video and images are in the Public Domain.
The entire system is broken, which is why many content creators are using alternative platforms (looking at you Big CLive).
YouTube doesn't need erroneous copyright reports to take videos or channels down improperly. The YouTube AI regularly takes down channels that have done nothing wrong. My channel, with 200,000 subscribers, was taken down that way.
My channel with 54 subscribers was taken down because some scumbag issued copyright claims against my videos of my daughter playing 250 year old Bach pieces on her cello, using original over hundred year old sheet music. Like, literally an old hymnal of Bach music, in original 1800s notation. They issued several right in a row against several videos and YT took my entire channel off the air. My wife's aunt was pretty pissed off about it. I appealed and somehow, not sure how, someone in support saw it and realized it was a bullshit claim and reinstated everything. But if they can do that to me, they can do that to everyone. I also run a marching band's channel and all of our music is live performances and pretty old stuff, I'm waiting for someone to make that claim against us.
But seriously, I feel for those who actually generate revenue off their videos, stealing that revenue via copyright strikes early in the video's life cycle is devastating.
Who on Earth ever thought that leaving Autoplay enabled when vetting videos was a good idea?
I'm a bit dubious about that excuse. I rarely use Autoplay, but something decided this video should end up in the user's Autoplay queue, and Autoplay (or YT's recommendations) isn't that that smart.. Usually quite the opposite. I'm wondering if that's something CP's set up so their 'AI' uses YT API functions or something to generate queues for their humans.
I am skeptical that's the real reason why. If you're working for a tech company (OK, an AI startup is still a tech operation) you should have more aptitude in copying and pasting than me, a barely shaven ape who wanders into tech comment sections to learn dumb computer tricks.
Especially if you're drawing pay for it.
C'mon everyone. We know how this works. They claim to have a bunch of fancy AI but it's just a call center with a bunch of underpaid, tier 1 humans on ten year old desktops clicking through playlists and doing copy pasta. Someone didn't bother to disable auto-play on their browser or nudged the button while talking to their friend in the next cubicle. Now the front man is scrambling because the veil has been lifted.
The mechanical Turk is alive and well. You can pay for a lot of months of call center time and a lot of cafeteria chits for the cost of one GPU rig in a Datacenter. Life finds a way.
YT doesn't care. They're just checking a due diligence box on a compliance document.
Legitimate scam? Not a contradiction in terms?
One ought to be licensed to employ a decent lump hammer in dealing with these cretins although I imagined nothing less than a thermal lance could penetrate their skulls.
I was curious about the name 3blue1brown as the dominant brown eye colour will give you 3brown1blue proportions in offspring from heterozygous parents. Warm but a miss. According to the Wiki page the name refers to Sanderson's right eye's sectoral heterochromia.
Surely I can't have been the only person who read the name of this channel and whose first thought was, "Hmmm, is that something like 2 Girls, 1 Cup…?" [1]
Ah, it's something to do with shitcoin bitcoin, so I guess I was maybe in the right area with that analysis after all… [2]
[1] Don't search for this if you haven't already had the misfortune to read of it from somewhere on your travels on the interwebs. Don't say you weren't warned.
[2] Awaits downvotes from bitcoin fanboys…
[Original AC…]
It was meant to be more of a joke than "casting nasty aspersions". I have never heard of this channel/person before - it was genuinely just the first connection that, unfortunately, came to mind, my being someone who has been on the internet too long and has encountered probably rather too many of its less savoury memes. Given that, it does strike me as a bit of an unfortunate choice of name, but maybe they rely on their audience being somewhat less tainted by their life experiences…
How about:
YouTube requires take-down requests to put up money in escrow, enough to cover the costs of fighting a wrongful request and compensate for the consequences
If the request is implemented and then found to be erroneous the payment goes to the victim
Otherwise, after a due period, the requester gets their money back?
If someone makes requests without due care they're essentially gambling on the outcome and as the outcomes are either stake returned or lose then this could get very expensive very quickly if they do it carelessly at scale.
YouTube get to keep the interest on the money in escrow to make it worth their while.
Recently I watched a video by one Freya Holmér titled "Generative AI is a parasitic cancer". She describes her Youtube channel as "I do videos on tech art, math, game dev, and whatever else I want to project to your screens". Holmér has been devastated by that for-profit companies have stolen people's text, and that it is becoming more and more difficult to find--using common search engines--things by actual people and not "AI" slop, for example when searching for information about a file format. In the end, she has resorted to self-delusion that she can ignore current "AI" stuff.
This incident concerning 3Blue1Brown is another sign of this "AI" greed.
Depressing thought: Let alone the difficulties the average channel owner (who isn't "fortunate enough to have a large audience and contacts within YouTube" like Grant Sanderson) would have in getting this reversed, many old videos were made by people no longer around to contest false DMCA strikes at all. Many people uploading now, likewise, won't have account maintenance heirs.
It may take a while, but it seems quite possible to me YouTube will eventually be cleared of much of its early or even current content — anything that isn't managed by a perpetual corporation. Maybe 3blue1brown should do an episode graphing how rapidly that would happen under various parameters.
(I met Grant Sanderson, once, at an in-person presentation he gave. He was pleasant and engaging in person as well.)
> the video just happened to go to like whatever YouTube selects to be the next video
I realize this works just like TV channel 6 in 1966-- one show after another, no real choice.
I'm sad to hear that 59 years of progress has only made it worse. If I don't hop on the PAUSE button fast I will get something stupid, or offensive, and hardly related to what I was watching. The amount of misogyny on Youtube is revolting. But copyright infringement is more important, of course.
Youtube could easily curb the wrongful/overzealous take down notices by indicating that:
1) Access to our API for automated take downs is a privilege.
2) Too keep your privilege in good standing, no more than 3 false positives (reviewed by our human staff) per calendar year.
3) If this limit is exceeded, then API access is revoked and claims are now required by to be submmitted by certified/registered mail, one per envelope (starting at ~US$5.58 per letter).
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