Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors’ websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants “created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs,” said Google’s lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Most of the YouTube issues aren’t DMCA claims but their own Content ID horseshit where there’s automated matching, zero policing of catalogs and associated rights, and seemingly zero recourse for misrepresentations.
I’m friends with a YouTuber (with just under 1M subs) who has licensed music for his intro/outro. Other people have taken that music and created remixes, then uploaded those remixes to rights management companies with access to the Content ID system. They then flag the original work automatically, which allows them to divert monetization from the YouTuber. It doesn’t go into escrow pending dispute resolution. The claiming company just gets to steal the money and keep it no matter what the ultimate result is. On top of that the initial appeal/dispute process is decided by the claiming party instead of someone neutral like YouTube themselves. It’s usually a huge hassle to resolve. My friend has lost thousands of dollars through this.
The automatic diverting of money to the copyright troll is the part that gets me. That really ought to open YouTube up for liability just as much if not more so than hosting copyright violating material. Copyright trolls should be facing fraud charges and systems that reward them should be under intense legal scrutiny.
Sadly, that’s not how it works and even if there was enough interest to organize and lobby for a positive change, there’d still be zero chance of congress anything useful in the foreseeable future.
Personally, if we’re talking thousands then I’d be considering lawyering up. I know that’s a dangerous game to play with YouTube, but damn dude, that’s a lot of money.
My friend was actually a lawyer himself previous to going full time on YouTube. He talked about it once, but suing YouTube/Google itself for it is something he wasn’t prepared to do. It’s daunting enough to litigate against someone only moderately bigger than you, suing one of the largest corporations in the world wasn’t something he was eager to do. One of the rights companies maybe, but there have been a couple dozen of those for him alone. It would be like whack-a-mole.
Damn, imagine having a system so fucked up that even a lawyer can’t deal with it.