We Have Destroyed Copyright Law

good morning John I watched your video on Tuesday which is good because you included a bunch of clips of hockey and soccer and football games that you did not own and one of the companies that owned some of those clips decided to block the video from being viewed on YouTube so it feels like this might be a good time for an educational video on the very weird state of copyright and online media in 2019 19 before the internet piracy was excruciating ly slow we did it of course we recorded mixtapes from the radio and traded fansub DHS's of anime yes that's actually something I did but the internet first through Napster made it very easy to instantly distribute other people's property it was so easy and it didn't feel wrong songs were already free on the radio and everyone I knew was doing it and YouTube in its early days was part of this system it would not be the platform it is today if it weren't for pirated Family Guy and Daily Show clips Viacom sued them about it for years so in order to keep existing YouTube had to create a ludicrously complicated piece of technology that checks every moment of every video uploaded to its platform against a vast library of content that includes like everything that has ever been made but YouTube doesn't actually want to stop copyright violation and neither do the rights holders who own that content here on the vlog with this channel we by which I mean mostly me have uploaded copyrighted content to the channel lots of times before and we've never had a video blocked or taken down I've blatantly stolen like when I basically made a music video for a Willie Nelson song and then there are more questionable cases like when I released a song called the subway where I used to go which I would argue is parody in all of those cases those videos were not blocked or taken down they were claimed which means that the money that they earned through Google's Adsense product went to the record labels of gautier and Willie Nelson respectively when YouTube's fancy-dancy Content ID system finds someone's property in someone else's video they give the rights holder the option to do one of four things one they can basically do nothing and just track the video two they can claim the video and make money from it three they can block the video in certain countries or in all countries or four they can take the video down off of YouTube and issue a copyright strike inside YouTube's dashboard a rights holder can set up rules simple ones like everyone who uses anything gets a global block or complicated rules like claim any view from Croatia that contains more than 30 seconds of my property but this is almost never done manually it's just done with these filters only this last thing the takedown is a legal step it's the only step that is not automated and it's the only step that requires an electronic signature it is also the step that's most impactful a copyright strike affects the channels ability to monetize and channels that get three of them can be deleted from the platform along with all of the content from that chance so you only get a copyright strike which is the big deal if the rights holder decides to give you a copyright strike which is from a creators perspective uncommon and completely random this policy and the way that rights holders interact with it actually encourages creators to take these kinds of risks and I would argue that this is actually a good thing I think it frees up creators to do more interesting things that allows for everyone to interact with an electoral property in a more malleable and less strict way and it allows rights holders to allow uses that actually benefit them losing monetization on a single video which is the most common thing that happens isn't that big of a deal for most creators and the claiming system is actually pretty genius because it allows these big giant companies who would otherwise be yelling at Congress about how they need to shut YouTube down to get a whole new income stream so they stop yelling so much so l Mills can use I'm walking on sunshine in a video and she might lose her youtube revenue but she might also grow her audience and make money selling shirts or doing a brain deal and I can use Elle's footage in my video without asking her because I know that the worst that's gonna happen is that I'm gonna lose monetization which sucks but isn't the end of the world now of course this is not a perfect system and has two very big flaws one only large rights holders have access to this system if you're an independent filmmaker or musician or photographer it's very difficult to get your content into the Content ID system YouTube does not and will never let everybody into the system in part because it's very easy to abuse which leads us to the second problem it's very easy to abuse even sometimes accidentally here's a hypothetical situation for you say The Daily Show includes some footage from NASA that's in the public domain in a clip that they upload to YouTube they then claim that clip as their property but then other people also upload videos that have this same public domain clip from NASA in their video the Content ID system doesn't know the difference between the part of the Daily Show clip that's their property and the part that's in the public domain all those people suddenly have their content claimed they might not know how to dispute that claim or they might be afraid to dispute that claim because they might end up with a strike on their account false claims have been a huge issue since the beginning of Content ID and they remain a really big issue especially for small and medium sized creators who basically have no recourse if they hit that third strike so it's a system with problems but it's not not working there's lots of interesting creative things being done on the platform so far YouTube has allowed that stuff to continue happening without being sued out of existence well it's a creative and economic ecosystem built on policies and individual choices not on the law apparently this is all possible because of what's called safe harbor laws and we have a really good big one here in the US that basically says rights holders cannot sue YouTube for the laws that have been broken by the users of the platform and that turns out to a little bit weakened intellectual property because that means that we can use video from the English Football Association or whatever it's called and they can block our video they can take down our video they could even issue us a copyright strike but they can't really sue us because the amount of money it would cost to pay lawyers to sue us is literally more money than our company has in its bank account doing this individually for tons and tons of small creators it's just not logistically possible but doing it all at once for all content that had English Football Association stuff inside of it that was uploaded to YouTube if they could sue YouTube for that YouTube has tons of and has had lots of English football association of stuff illegally uploaded to its site that would be a great lawsuit waiting to happen but safe harbor laws make it so that YouTube isn't responsible for the dumb decisions of creators like me which is good cuz John and I are like among the more trustable YouTube creators and you still can't trust us to not break the law so the system is kind of set up in a way where YouTube has figured out how to satisfy the requirements of the law and from there the law doesn't matter anymore this isn't how it's supposed to work like if you break the law you're supposed to get fined or arrested you are not supposed to get claimed or taken down copyright law or even the the modern idea of what copyright is was not designed for a world in which literally everyone is a distributor much less for a world in which everyone is a rights holder it's not law it's YouTube's policy informed by the law but its consequences are just as significant like having your channel D monetized or removed to the platform isn't that different from a fine now you can challenge a takedown or a block but if you do that in my opinion at least you're much more likely to get a strike for example the Football Association didn't issue a strike to our channel but if we challenged their block that would annoy them because a human being would have to deal with it and most of these arguments come down to what's called the fair use doctrine though it is often claimed to be simple by creators like myself fair use is not simple and in fact we have pretty much an entire episode of crash course intellectual property dedicated to explaining how unsympathetic oppe right law does not work great in today's society you should watch it but there are literally not enough lawyers alive in the world today to argue all of the fair use cases that YouTube has created for us and courts have not been consistent at all in how they determine what is and is not fair use even within individual countries and there are also hundreds of different countries all with different laws so you can see how this can get complicated really fast this isn't to say that you shouldn't dispute claims if a claim has been made on your content and error or if there's a good case for fair use dispute that claim that's the only way this is works but if you just Hank green style used to Willie Nelson the song because it made the video better don't dispute that claim that's how you get a strike so John was your video last week fair use probably not what was it an excellent promotion of the FA Cup was it great content for the rights holder was it better for them to have the content on YouTube than to have it removed I think everyone even the English Football Association if they actually watch the video would agree that is probably better for that video to be out there than to be blocked so that brings up another hairy question is it okay for rights holders to take down content when they don't like it but leave up content that they do like and we have in fact seen this explicitly among independent creators where creators are commenting on each other's content in ongoing drama feuds and then they escalate that by issuing takedown notices and copyright strikes on a channel that they're feuding with so would it be okay for the Football Association to leave your video up if they like it but take it down if it's really mean about football Minh talks about how it's the dumb sport ins very slow and no one ever scores goals not my personal opinion I'm just saying that's a video people could make again it doesn't matter this isn't about law anymore no one has the time or money or inclination to take any of this stuff to court the current state of copyright is kind of only peripherally related to the law it's much more related to the policies of the platforms on which we operate our businesses and our lives which is a strange situation to be in as we realize that we are kind of citizens of corporations when YouTube changes policy in ways that benefit creators which it has done for example when it stopped sending money to rights holders who claimed videos immediately and instead held that money while waiting to see if there was a dispute it doesn't do that for legal reasons it doesn't because its creators yelled at it enough that they listened almost like a government and changes in YouTube's policy have real-world legitimate effects on intellectual property and how creative people interface with it that's what I mean when I say that we've moved beyond the law for me you to policy matters far more than the courts when it comes to copyright and we didn't really have another option because copyright as written is fundamentally broken we know that because we are all constantly breaking the law and no one cares here's an example this jiff I don't know in this jiff it was absolutely stolen but everybody agrees that gifs are ok because culture blew past the law and also apparently standardized pronunciation of the word yeah but somewhere between gifs and soccer highlights there's a line and no one knows where that line is but it is not being defined by governments at least not at the moment seriously if you're in the EU look into article 13 it's pretty scary makes intellectual property much stronger which in my opinion probably makes creativity a lot weaker if you examine this for long enough it becomes very clear that all of this is much more about like how we feel what seems right and also existing tears of power than what like the law says it's a mess and John if you look closely there might be a way for you to watch the video that you up a little last Tuesday those slightly modified for people who might have missed it I'll see you on Tuesday

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 626,140

Rating: 4.9017348 out of 5

Keywords: copyright, law, courts, government, intellectual property, education, youtube, internet, gifs, content, vlogger, online video

Id: BL829Uf2lzI

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/lyamc]

What I like is he says that using other people's intellectual property (song parody, clips for making a different video, music in the background) is illegal.

And by like I mean it's retarded.