Google Drive remains a haven for movie piracy
Google ignores DMCA safe harbor requirements Writing about online piracy and Google is a bit like...
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Category: Google
YouTube continues to profit off the pain of others.
YouTube is a money machine for Google. While actual numbers are hard to come by, it’s estimated that the online video hub brings in upwards of $15 billion annually.With that much money at stake, it’s not surprising that its business model continues to put profits over people.
In 2015, following the on-air murder of a television reporter and her cameraman, gruesome videos of the event were quickly posted on YouTube with with ads alongside. I wrote a post about it at the time:
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YouTube’s Content ID Easily Fooled
When people talk about effective ways to mitigate the impact of online piracy, YouTube’s Content ID is often used as an example of what works. Unfortunately, despite its role as poster boy for anti-piracy tech, in reality it falls flat as a gatekeeper against online piracy.
Aside from a labyrinth-like user interface that seems likely to have been designed–not to help– but to discourage rights holders from using Content ID, the actual fingerprinting technology behind it can be easily fooled.
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Why is YouTube such a garbage dump?
Time for YouTube to get serious about cleaning up all the junk, spam and malware files on its site
YouTube is great for finding videos about pretty much everything. Need to learn how to fix a furnace or use the latest camera equipment? There’s bound to be a video shows you how. Unfortunately, amid the useful stuff, YouTube is also chock full of garbage. The question is, with its massive technical resources, why doesn’t the site do a better job keeping house?
I’ve written before about the epidemic of fake “full-movie” uploads that fill YouTube. That was in 2012. Now, six years later, the problem still exists. Apparently, YouTube isn’t concerned that its pages are full of spam files, many of them fake pirate movie uploads that lead users to sites rife with malware and money-making scams.
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Improving YouTube’s Content ID could help creators of all stripes
Why not make Content ID more accessible and transparent?
Much has been written about YouTube’s Content ID program, a fingerprinting technology that allows rights holders to find and claim their music or movies when uploaded to YouTube. The technology was introduced in 2008 in the wake of Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube and since then has helped (some) creators mitigate the problem of piracy on the popular UGC (user-generated content) site.
Those who have access to the Content ID system can uploaded reference files and use a dashboard to choose how matches should be handled. They can be limited based on audio, video, and length. Matching content then can be blocked, removed, or monetized based on territorial rights.
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BOGUS fair use claims hurt creators already victimized by piracy
YouTube users claim Fair Use as a defense for uploading full copies of pirated movies
There was a lot of talk about fair use and takedown abuse at last week’s the U.S. Copyright Office’s Section 512 roundtables in San Francisco. Many of those who spoke, bemoaned how poor, innocent uploaders were victimized, time after time, by malicious DMCA takedowns.
It’s a tried and true talking point, convenient, but disingenuous all the same. Some of us, myself included, tried to make the point that creators, whose work is routinely (and massively stolen), are often (doubly) victimized by malicious fair use claims.
I thought I’d share an example of this that occurred just this week on YouTube. On Tuesday a full-copy of the Swedish indie film “Kyss Mig” (all 147 minutes of it) was uploaded to YouTube by a user aptly named “Free Movies.” As an added flourish, the user-name included the notation, “free movies bitches.”
Google updates its anti-piracy report
Google’s updated piracy report offers the some well-worn excuses
It’s that time of year. The time of year where Google rolls out a shiny update on its “How Google Fights Piracy” report. Google began the tradition in 2013. At the time I noted that Google’s claim to be a “leader” in the fight against piracy was its first mistake. With today’s update, it appears the Silicon Valley giant hasn’t backed down from that dubious claim (or many others).
Katie Oyama, Senior Policy Counsel, Google asserts that, “We take protecting creativity online seriously, and we’re doing more to help battle copyright-infringing activity than ever before.” Yet, in spite of Oyama’s rosy quote, in truth the reality (for creators) battling online piracy continues to be a bleak one.
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More Google DMCA misdirection…refusing takedown requests for Blogger sites with custom domains
Hop aboard for another spin on Google’s DMCA Merry-Go-Round
It’s not news that Google-hosted Blogger websites are a favorite storefront for online pirates. It’s also not news that Google does its best to obstruct DMCA takedowns by setting up various roadblocks along the way. Today I discovered yet another example of just how difficult Google makes the DMCA process–this time with Blogger-hosted sites that use custom domain names.
When you create a blog using Blogger you’re given a domain that ends in blogspot.com. However users are free to use a custom domain name instead. That’s all well and good, unless the website distributes pirated content. In that case, if you’re a creator trying to get your pirated content removed (by Google), you’re likely to run into problems.
Usually, when one of these pirate entrepreneurs creates a site on blogspot.com a rightsholder can send a DMCA by using Google’s annoying web form (or annoy them by sending an email: dmca-agent@google.com). However, if you use the same DMCA form to report a blogger-hosted site with a custom domain, Google won’t remove it. They’ll just send you back to the beginning.
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Google-funded study on copyright takedowns drops the ball
Google-funded report generates desired headlines and conveniently downplays the role of DMCA counter-notices–ignoring fact the system is weighted against rights holders
A new report on the DMCA notice and takedown system, Notice and Takedown in Everyday Practice, was released yesterday. Co-authored by researchers at Berkeley Law and Columbia University (collaborators for The Takedown Project), the release is clearly timed to generate buzz to coincide with the April 1st deadline for comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the state of the 512 statute.
The study is said to offer, “a rare, in-depth, empirical look at ways online copyright disputes are handled between Internet companies, such as Google and YouTube, and content creators, such as movie, music, and publishing companies.” Hmmm, color me a tad suspicious of any piracy-related report funded by Google*.
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Google really, really doesn’t like you to send DMCA requests via email
The Google team doesn’t seem to appreciate email as a form of communication
I’ve written about Google’s laborious and time-consuming DMCA takedown maze, a process that forces creators to find, then fill out cumbersome online forms. I’ve also written about the fact that Google makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find the email address for its DMCA Agent–in apparent violation of the law’s requirements.
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YouTube’s DMCA decision and the campaign to morph victims into villains
YouTube will pay copyright court costs for a few users–not because it’s right–but to protect Google’s bottom line
According to a story in today’s NY Times, the folks at YouTube are ready to pony up cash to support some of its users “fair use” claims in court.
“YouTube said on Thursday that it would pick up the legal costs of a handful of video creators that the company thinks are the targets of unfair takedown demands. It said the creators it chose legally use third-party content under “fair use” provisions carved out for commentary, criticism, news and parody.”
You’ve probably read a lot about “fair use” lately. It’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s mantra and if the folks there had their way, pretty much everything and anything would be considered “fair use.” Fair use an important legal doctrine and when applied properly (criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research) is not an infringement of copyright. However, these days, too often is used as a disingenuous defense for copyright theft.
The tech-funded campaign to turn villains into victims
When a court recently ruled that a snippet of a Prince song was indeed “fair use” in the notorious Dancing Baby case it gave a boost to efforts to use fair use as a cudgel against rights holders who legitimately assert their rights using the DMCA takedown process.
Note that the actual video at the center of this case was reposted after the uploader sent a counter-notice. The only reason the case ended up in court was because the uploader, Stephanie Lenz, filed suit and the only reason she did so was because she was bankrolled by the EFF. The EFF saw it as an opportunity to advance its Google-funded agenda.
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Google’s continued do-si-do around its piracy pledge
Google continues to dodge responsibility for its role in promoting online piracy
This past week members of the House Judiciary Committee traveled to California to hold a pair of roundtable discussions on the future of copyright. On Tuesday committee members were in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley, and on Wednesday traveled to Los Angeles to hear from a variety of stakeholders discussing everything from overhauling an out-dated U.S. Copyright Office to DMCA circumvention for tractor repairs.
Though I wasn’t at the LA event, I read with great interest a report in Variety by Ted Johnson that documented an exchange between Google’s legal director for copyright, Fred von Lohmann and Richard Gladstein, founder of Film Colony…von Lohmann’s posturing on Google’s piracy problem is nothing new, but it is worth pointing out how his statements are carefully crafted to dovetail with Google’s own (vague) propagandistic promises.
