Washing machine chime scandal shows how absurd YouTube copyright abuse can get

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 450 points –
Washing machine chime scandal shows how absurd YouTube copyright abuse can get
arstechnica.com
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Google is absolutely allergic to hiring humans for manual review. They view it as an existential issue because they have billions of users which means they’d need to hire millions of people to do the review work.

This isn't unique to google but if the system continues to be designed to allow companies to mask the true cost of doing business we will never move ahead past it.

We undervalue ourselves repeatedly at the sake of cheap products.

I’m not sure what you mean by “true cost of business.” The biggest cost here is the issue of copyright claims and takedowns which were created by law in the first place, not by a natural phenomenon.

No matter what system we design, you’ll find that people adapt to take advantage of it. Well-meaning laws frequently have large and nasty unintended consequences. One of the biggest examples I can think of is the copyright system — originally intended to reward artists — which has led to big publishers monopolizing our culture.

That seems a bit excessive, say all 8 billion people were using Google products, 8 million reviews would be 1 per thousand users which seems like many more than are needed since almost all users of Google are passive and don't create content.

There are an estimated 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per day. At 8 hours per day it would take 90,000 people just to watch all those videos, working 7 days per week with no breaks and no time spent doing anything else apart from watching.

Now take into account that YouTube users watch over a billion hours of video per day and consider that even one controversial video might get millions of different reports. Who is going to read through all of those and verify whether the video actually depicts what is being claimed?

A Hollywood studio, on the other hand, produces maybe a few hundred to a few thousand hours of video per year (unless they’re Disney or some other major TV producer). They can afford to have a legal team of literally dozens of lawyers and technology consultants who just spend all their time scanning YouTube for videos to take down and issuing thousands to millions of copyright notices. Now YouTube has made it easy for them by giving them a tool to take down videos directly without any review. How long do you think it would take for YouTube employees to manually review all those cases?

And then what happens when the Hollywood studio disagrees with YouTube’s review decision and decides to file a lawsuit instead? This whole takedown process began after Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube!

But they don't have to review every video, just the ones that are flagged by the AI then contested, which is probably a fraction of a percentage of all of them.

Just go to a public library, get on a computer and search for transparent undergarments. Or better yet, "the black tape project".

This will ensure the computer is going to be tainted forever with soft YouTube porn for everyone to enjoy.