Here's how copyright laws can be dangerous.

001100 010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 192 points – Watch a police officer admit to playing Taylor Swift to keep a video off YouTube
theverge.com

A malicious law enformement officer or a criminal can exploit copyright laws to prevent criminal activities to be posted on mainstream platforms. Read the article for a real life example.

No matter your stance on copyright laws, I think we can all agree there needs to be an exemption to copyright laws where if a video or audio recording contains copyrighted material but also contains unrelated content (like police violence or other criminal activity), then that should be exempt from copyright laws. Beside, who wants to listen to music that also has a cop screeching in the background, therefore, this wouldn't affect music subscriptions services in any way.

Even with such law, I don't have hopes of youtube changing their policies. I'm honestly sad for the future.

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So in other words, the officer is committing copyright infringement by publicly playing music for others to hear.

i mean... is it illegal to play music in public (not counting noise disturbance)

of course the cop is evil though

Playing music in public isn't illegal, if you're playing it for yourself. Playing music for the purpose of sharing it with other people would be though.

Think of it like a movie. You can watch a DVD at home no problem, but if you set up a cinema out in the park and open to the public, that would be copyright infringement. The intent is what makes the offense.

Everyone should watch Tom Scott's video on copyright law to see just how outdated the laws currently are and how that hurts online platforms' ability to fairly moderate this.

I could agree to this. YouTube definitely shouldn't be doing their copyright bullshit for shit like this. Cop knows exactly what he's doing. Prick.

On another note, you could probably use some audio software to remove the audio altogether, attempt to separate the music and the vocals from the cop and people talking. Remove the song, reapply the audio to the video and upload. I've done it before but the quality never came out as good in the end. Pain in the ass but there's definitely ways around this.

Would a noise cancelled recording trigger copyright takedown, treating the song (copyright media) as noise?

You could, but then you risk the "court of public opinion" deciding that your video is faked or something. Especially in the age of deepfakes. Uploading the original, unedited video is the best.

Doesn't this usually fall under the Fair Use policy? Like, how you are allowed to post copirighted content if you are using it as a joke or as a comentator and such?

It does, obviously. Doesn’t matter, Youtube will flag it.

But that's a YouTube problem, not a copyright problem, right?

No its generally a copyright problem. Easier to overregulate as explained in another comment.

But the reason why YouTube overregulates is because of how massive their service is. They couldn't pay lawyers to check every single video, and they can't take risks of copyright infringement.

Do you have any proposed solution? It just seems like Youtube's nature make this a very hard problem to solve, it's not a copyright thing itself. I really can't imagine a solution. Having someone check every claim would be insanely difficult. But removing copyright all together would basically remove all incentive from content creators because anyone can clone their creativity and ideas with zero effort.

'anyone can clone their creativity and ideas with zero effort.' <- This is already happening.

I think a better solution would be for copyright claims to have evidence, rather than just immediately presuming guilt for the accused.

I really have no idea though. There's smarter people than me who have better ideas how this could work.

The way YouTube moderates copyright is somewhat forced by outdated laws. Tom Scott made an excellent YouTube video or two about this topic which is definitely worth the watch.

Just watched the video. He has 2 points:

  1. copyright is hard because it has to go through bureaucracy. But one thing is the law itself and another is the process. If the process is slow is not the content of the law's fault. This is why YouTube created Content ID, to try to resolve these cases in a more agile way. They are too massive to make every case go through the whole legal expensive path.

  2. the threshold for content to turn into public domain is too large. No idea how this relates to YouTube copyright issues though. Yeha, maybe the threshold is too large, but is that related to the complaints content creators have around Youtube's Content ID? Nope. That's just something he wanted to throw in there, which is just opinion.

Thinking about it.... Maybe lowering the threshold could be a relief on the bureaucracy because there would be less open cases. Still, not sure if that would be enough. We're uploading content exponentially, any justice system would collapse if experts had to check every single case.

This is a very hard problem to solve. With the HUGE incoming wave of AI generated content and the copyright issues surrounding AI, I'm expecting the shit to hit the fan spectacularly.

I think you are right in theory, but it looks very different in practice. These automatic takedowns are done by the company hosting the files without any official legal regulator getting involved.

The rightsholder of such music licenses usually have vastly more resources and there are no negative consequences for false flags. This means it is better to overregulate which leads to a form of censorship.

I'm not a lawyer, but they need to make it absolutely clear that recordings that include copyright music shouldn't be copyright infringement unless the recording is solely containing the music and nothing else. Like if someone is talking over it, it should be automatically exempt. (Most pirates wouldn't talk over music just to avoid copyright laws. Most pirates are gonna want the original, high quality version, not one where there are people talking over it.)

I think such a change would be acceptable to most people, even those who are against piracy.

Exactly my thinking, how can a shitty recording take someone not to buy/stream music. The filter should not take down recordings of recordings, in my opinion. Nobody loses any money with this.