Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not piracy either. Torrenting an album is piracy, but listening to a bootleg on YouTube isn’t.
YouTube noticed this at some point and is now happy to let everyone know how much pirated music is available on their site. One of their main points for shilling YouTube premium is how their music catalogue is way better than Spotify. Of course the piracy site has more. That’s always how it works. Spotify actually has to license the music on their platform and is subject to copyright law. They can’t just get the Neil Young discography from soulseek one day and wait until his estate notices, facing no repercussions whatsoever aside from agreeing to a takedown request. Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.
Not that I’m complaining especially when a lot of the music on youtube isn’t publicly accessible anywhere else. It’s just been extremely strange to see this go from an “open secret” to something they’re shouting from the rooftops and face no repercussions for. In the future I want everything to be like that and I’d rather keep youtube how it is than see them get the punishment that by all rights they should be getting. It’s just so strange that this is the position things have ended up in.
Note: The following text is intentional abuse of the tagginator bot. Fuck you.
#ADHD #BOSTON #NYC #OpenSource #FOSS #SelfHosted #Soccer #3dprinting #Memes #GodotEngine #Unity #UnrealEngine
You’re missing some key facts:
- A lot of music on YouTube is fully licensed and uploaded by the owners or Google themselves. Like VEVO music, for instance.
- Google runs a content match algorithm on all uploads to detect music and movies. If you upload more than four seconds of a song, Google will detect it and transfer all monitization of that upload to the rights holder. This is why music documentaries like Trash Theory only have frustratingly short clips of the music they are talking about, and why channels like Techmoan, which documents weird music formats and playback devices, can also only share extremely short clips.
The rights holders are getting any and all money on music uploaded to YouTube, and your entire premise is flawed.
I would also add that google very much understands the implications of streaming music.
This is speculated to be why you can’t get Youtube Premium without Youtube Music (in most countries?). Because all the license holders would lose their minds if they weren’t getting a cut (and apparently the ad revenue from music videos isn’t enough).
That’s the thing that drives me fucking nuts. Use 10 seconds of a song in your 10 minute video, and they get all the money for your work. They should get whatever the percent of your video is that their song occupies at best. If you’re talking/acting over top of their music, then you’re splitting that percentage in half.
I don’t know if they’re still there but it used to be if you looked at the description of any officially uploaded music on youtube, there’d be a laundry list of music rights groups for like a dozen countries/areas
Google doesn’t just get blanket rights to stream a song, they have to license the rights to play that particular song separately for each individual country where they want to stream it
His logic chain may have been flawed for his argument, but his premise is not wrong. YouTube providing a distribution platform for any type of music video means that content holders are putting music on there and suffering the same rules as anyone else. To the best of my knowledge, Google does not pay any additional license fees to content owners should they elect to upload a music video to the platform. The owner makes ad revenue just like all other creators. This effectively circumvents the costly licensing agreements that the likes of Spotify and Pandora have to enter into.
Do they still do takedowns for videos based on that content IDing if the video isn’t even monetized in the first place?
Like, I know youtubers who try to make money hate this, but what about youtubers who aren’t in it for the money but just want to throw content on the platform? Can stuff like AMVs actually stay up?
Because, frankly, I’ve found that it’s been pretty easy to dodge YouTube ads, by means of uBlock Origin.
If I recall correctly, the copyright holders can decide what they want to happen automatically.
The automatic options are something like:
- Disable all ads.
- Enable ads (if disabled) and take all (?) money.
- Mute/remove the infringing content.
They can also do stuff like issue copyright strikes but I believe that those have to be done manually since they can be so destructive to creators.
Tom Scott made a really good video about how copyright works in general and how it works on YouTube, I highly recommend it. https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/1Jwo5qc78QU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
They don’t take it down often. But non-monetized videos will get set as monetized, ads will be added, and the profits go to the Copyright holder.
And there are notorious “blockers” - publishers and bands who copyright strike and remove all third party videos using their music. Reference Rick Beatos various videos and rants on this topic.
Well, the gigantic pile of low-end audio I ripped using yt-dlp begs to differ. Half a million tracks so far. Perfect for my OpenSwim headphones. Tiny mp3s to maximize my 4GB of storage, and shit quality to match what I’m getting from bone conductors (which are, for no compelling reason, compatible with FLAC).
I swim a lot, and have a lot of free disk space, so I promise this makes sense.
Buying an SD card full of Roms is piracy, that’s why you have to buy it from Chinese companies and not walk down to the Walmart.
YouTube has agreements with the record companies to pay them for money generated through music uploaded to YouTube. For music where they don’t have an agreement the DMCA means that the uploaded need to verify they have the copyright to thing they upload. Otherwise no social media or file hosting sites could exist.
With the SD what you’re talking about is reality but I meant it in terms of normies perceptions. I watched some retro handheld reviews on YouTube and it started surfacing videos about SD cards of retro roms you can buy. There’s always people pointing out that you can just download the same rompack from archive.org, and there are people replying who say that’s piracy. I couldn’t make something like that up if I tried. Here’s another one specifically about YouTube. If you torrent a song, that’s bad. But if you use a YouTube to mp3 website that’s different. My family sees it that way.
Your family may be hydrophobiacs.
(because a torrent is a water stream! get it? hehehehehehehh)
Removed by mod
Is pirating old snes and genesis roms really piracy if there’s no other way to get it?
Roms are the reason half those games are still around and not dead media. The popularity of roms is why Nintendo made the throw back, video game companies roll up all the time, very few have longevity and even if those most would’ve been fine just letting the old games die in obscurity.
Legally speaking it’s piracy and copyright infringement.
Unofficially, it’s a moral obligation to download and seed.
In the eyes of the law it’s piracy. But to me if something is not being sold, it might as well be public domain. And there’s literally no difference between buying a second hand mario 3 cartridge and pirating the rom in terms of money the creators get. That’s way more ridiculous to me than the youtube thing.
Oh doncha know manufacturers are already working on that.
The whole subscription economy grift. They’re gonna say you own the basic version arguing against the ‘if you can’t modify it you never really own it’ crowd, until they’ve spent enough money to bribe those in power to fashion their win for them, then they’re gonna turn around and say we never really own anything and make reselling illegal.
Reselling takes care of itself if you simply stop offering physical media…which, idk…seems to be the trend of the last 15 years, don’t cha think?
No idea if you have ever uploaded to youtube but I can’t upload audio of my dick slapping my ankle without Disney or universal claiming royalties.
Tbf Walt Disney himself invented the sound of a dick slapping an ankle
It was the last thing he did before being frozen
Let it go
Lets go of dick
Dick slaps ankle
YouTube and Spotify are paying license fees to be allowed to play music on their platform.
I worked for one of the YouTube founders once, killed me when he explained how they benchmarked all the Copyright detection software available at the time and then picked the worst one to use for their licensing system.
deleted by creator
Is this real?
They posted it on the Internet, so it has to be.
I only use the best lie detectors
You think someone would just do that? Just go on the internet and lie?
Tagline for Lemmy (every social media in existence)
I wanna know who is paying YouTube to allow those stupid fake movies trailers. I wish YouTube had a block channel option.
There is a block channel option. I use it all the time.
All I’m aware of is the don’t recommend channel option. I still get stupid fucking channels (like emergency awesome) when I search. Am I missing the option somewhere?
Wtf is the tagginator bot?
Not sure, but I think its purpose is to get get these posts appear in meta search engine results (SEO).
AFAIK it’s for discovery on Mastodon via hashtag.
afaik… as far as i know… hm…
afaik these acronyms are getting more insane asap fr fr
ASAP was first used in the US military in the 1950s, and AFAIK originated on usenet and has been used since the 80s. If you are 35 or under, both of these acronyms have existed since before you were born fr fr.
AFAIK is a very established and widely recognized acronym with decades of history. Just saying.
IYKYK W/E IG. SMH.
Thats the spirit!
Aren’t most songs on YouTube uploaded by the artists themselves?
Probably, but at least with genres like vocaloid, you’ll find plenty of people taking songs/videos from sites like Bilibili or Niconico and they’ll either just straight up upload the video or will instead just slap on subtitles and upload without consent. There’s also a similar phenomenon with anime music as well, but that’s usually for just the music.
If the original artist reports the pirated song, YouTube will most likely remove it.
If no one reports it, then YouTube is going to keep it.
There are a ton that have weird fucking usernames. I was confused at first why my Bluetooth was showing BobByJimSmith4345 as the “artist” after telling it to play a song, but yeah they’ll pretty much just look whatever up by name from YouTube and play it.
No, certainly not most. Some, for sure, but tons of albums are uploaded by some random dude.
I can’t speak for other countries, but in Italy YouTube pays a lot of money to the Italian copyright holders company for all the potentially pirated videos uploaded by its users.
The music on YouTube isn’t any more piracy than unblocked Spotify. YouTube’s “official” music uploads (these that are a square with a blurred background behind the square) are acquired by paying DistroKid or record labels. Unofficial uploaders usually aren’t monetized, either bc they didn’t enable it、are niche、or got ContentID’d by YouTube. Those few that are monetized(e.g. Si𝚕vaGunner and Gi𝚕vaSunner (i.e. not Si𝙸vaGunner or Gi𝙸vaSunner)) usually get DMCA’d eventually.
Downloading from YouTube is piracy though, though like OP says some don’t think so for some reason.
And many non-official uploads are let stay because somebody sent them a dmca and they chose to keep the video up but let monetization pay out to the org that copyright claimed the content. So the ancient “song name (hd)” video from cheeselicker9000 isn’t official but the record label likely gets paid for any ad revenue they make from it. Most labels just strike the non official stuff and upload their own nowadays though. I know when I did some youtube that was one of the options for a response, just letting the claimant take ad revenue and manage monetization.
Yeah, that’s what I meant by “got ContentID’d”.
Ah gotcha, I didn’t know the term for that :)
Why are you using Chinese enumeration commas?
i.e. “、” instead of “,”
to separate the list from the regular comma
that’s what ‘-’ is for
how is the hyphen for that
Downloading from youtube is piracy? How? If it was like a Youtube Red show, sure, but the normal videos everyone can see for free?
For me piracy begins with aquiring things or features which usually cost money to get whilst also taking into account if its obvious a thing should cost money in such an environment (thats also how our piracy laws are worded here).
So our piracy laws also classify things as piracy if it was obvious the deal was too good to be true like Windows for 2$ on eBay or chinese ROM cards for 5$ with hundreds of games.
Videos on youtube, including music, are a normal occurrence. A full blockbuster movie is usually not.
acquiring things or features which usually cost money
YouTube’s and Spotify’s download features usually cost money
If it would be hard to do and having to bypass DRM yes, but its actually similar to what the player already does.
A court already ruled here that downloading youtube videos does not break the piracy laws by providing own means of downloading and saving the unprotected data.
Of course that does not include allowing the download feature of the client itself.
- It is actually a bit hard to do. yt-dlp had to bypass some anti-downloading speed limits or something, which is also why youtube-dl is so slow
- I’m not sure if that extends to official YouTube music uploads, since they are copyright protected. I also can’t find the case you mentioned.
Well, this is certainly one of the takes of all time.
Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.
That’s kind of exactly how the DMCA works. That’s the bargain, you take down offending content and make an effort to ensure it does not return and you are allowed to continue to exist and not be sued directly. The problem is that this goes against torrent sites’ entire raison d’etre (usually under the argument that they don’t even host offending content, just a torrent file) and so it never happens this way.
Just playing devil’s advocate (I hate the DMCA for many other reasons), but if service providers were directly liable for what their users did, the Internet never would have grown up to what we know it is today.
I was under the assumption that Youtube had to pay artists for their music being on there? Is that not what is happening?
And if not, how has Youtube not been cease and desisted/sued into absolute oblivion?
They have to pay for anything official.
The rest is the “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA. Effectively, sites aren’t liable for user generated content if they respond to official DMCA takedown requests in a timely manner. YouTube also goes beyond that to directly work with copyright holders to preemptively remove infringing content with content ID, which scans everything for violations, and their own tools to report infringement. They don’t need to do that for the DMCA protection, but it’s probably cheaper at their obscenely large scale.
See my comment. TL;DR yes they pay DistroKid or the labels.
And if not, how has Youtube not been cease and desisted/sued into absolute oblivion?
Because YouTube is owned by a trillion dollar conglomerate.
No, it’s because they are a trillion dollar conglomerate that PAYS.
As the founder of the Pirate Bay said , Google is considered good guys because they are business guys.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16796058/youtube-universal-music-group-sony-agreement-royalties
They pay rights holders, who supposedly pay artists.
What with all the stories about the companies taking pretty hefty cuts for things, I’m gonna bet that the “supposedly” is doing some heavy lifting there, heh.
Safe bet.
Historically, even the “lottery winning” successful artists got such bad deals. The Beatles (famously, I thought, but I’m having trouble finding a source today…) received one penny for every dollar earned, but a fraction of that penny was held back for marketing, and another, and another…
I can tell you that there are more than a handful songs on there preformed live by my band and then someone uploaded it who was there and we are not getting paid anything. I will not go after them obviously because I don’t have the time nor money to do so.
Big labels have a direct line to YouTube via ContentID. Indie artists have to do it the hard way.
So does that mean albums ripped and uploaded to Youtube do result in royalties being paid to the artists?
What about in the case where there are no ads?
Isn’t that one of the points that OP is making?
Yeah it’s kind of the entire point I was making. If I could only listen to the music on YouTube that’s been properly licensed and identified, then I wouldn’t use YouTube for music. In that situation it would just be another Spotify.
Here’s an example of something that’s absolutely not supposed to be on youtube, which the IP owner goes to great lengths to enforce. But people keep reuploading every time it’s taken down. It’s literally a bootleg.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xtukRSw6k1w?si=IpVSw7ErcaGSc32
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Live music isn’t what I’m referring to though, it’s the ripped and uploaded albums
YouTube pays the uploader, who double promises that they totally have the the right to the song.
No. YouTube’s “official” music uploads (these that are a square with a blurred background behind the square) are acquired by paying DistroKid or record labels. Unofficial uploaders usually aren’t monetized, either bc they didn’t enable it、are niche、or got ContentID’d by YouTube. Those few that are monetized(e.g. Si𝚕vaGunner and Gi𝚕vaSunner (i.e. not Si𝙸vaGunner or Gi𝙸vaSunner)) usually get DMCA’d eventually.
When you upload a song, you indicate whether it has copyright and who owns it, Then, whenever its played they pay the copyright owner based on an audience size basis, similar to Spotify.
If you don’t, the copyright owner informs Google, and they close that link.
Even if you have music playing in the background of an instructional video, the copyright holders will go after you.
Until it gets copyright claimed then it goes to some Indian company who triple promises they have complete custody of all Ozzy Osbourne IP.
Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy
Literally never seen this argument, not even once. Guarantee you it’s a very small minority just assuaging some vague guilt (which is BS anyway because it’s still not your ROMs).
People do it primarily because it’s convenient. Downloading and testing hundreds if not thousand of roms - not to mention replacing all the bad ones - would take potentially days of work. Or you can spend like $10-$50 and be done with it.
they have a deal with Vevo i think
I mean… It’s been like that through all humanity history, if big guy says black is white, then black is white it is, remember school if you want to examples of that, also another examples can be found in politics of all countries throughout history
I caught a petty larceny charge and couldn’t find work for like 7-8 years (turns out petty larceny is considered “relevant” by basically everyone) after missing a $5 pair of sunglasses at self checkout on a $1-200 purchase, because the LP person lied when the judge said he saw no intent and told him “I watched him remove the tag and that’s intent if I ever saw it.”
Mind you, this is AFTER she provided a picture of the “stolen merchandise” with the tag still attached - Doesn’t matter because LP is considered a “professional witness” so if they say the sky is neon green, legally the sky is neon green. 🙄
So they lied in court and got away with it? Sheesh.
Yep. Doesn’t matter that she contradicted her own evidence. She’s a “Professional Witness” so her word overrule ms anything else.
The way it was explained to me, “as a loss prevention employee she has no stakes in whether you get charges or not” but idk I imagine if you’re an LP person who doesn’t get any convictions you probably won’t have a job long. 🤷
“no stakes” my ass.
They’re powerful. You’re not. Facts don’t matter. Power matters. In piracy, we have the power.
Who cares? Google has a legal team for such things, i don’t.
Who cares
Me. We have a living breathing example of why public file sharing is a good thing that exposes music to new audiences and I want people to recognize that.
