@David Wallace
You are absolutely correct. You Tube thought the music was from an individual recording which it specified. However, after I listened to that recording, which I found on You Tube, it was obviously not a direct match. The list of available music provided by the hotel was all public domain.
The worst aspect of this was the dispute process. It seems all the other failings were at least reasonably founded.
You may not have a problem with copyright law - but it is a problem, its amoral and wrong and will need to be severely changed, or perhaps even abolished (āHow do we make sick amounts of insane money then?ā āGet a jobā)
Meanwhile, someone will invent a system to encrypt video, so as to hide it from big brothers scanners.
Jeff, they talked about your post on the TWIT podcast this week.
I see the internet as a dark place when the media groups jump in the wagon and start making all the same mistakes Iāve seen made on television. First things first, the world is global. Internet is global. Content should not be copyright-hold on a country basis.
Europe has been importing Hollywood latests videos and shows 6 to 12 month latter with the sole premise of seeing if itās a hit in the US. If itās a success the show is gonna cost more. Thats hit. Solo. Well, this sure set up a fast lane for piracy.
I do get crossed when I see a YouTube video with the nagging āvideo not available in your countryā. There is absolutely no excuse for a global media corporation, these days, to exclude a video from a certain audience based on geographical criteria (wars and other bans aside).
YouTube sure is going fast in one direction. I just donāt know if I like the direction that much. I do understand the issue of copyright but donāt forget the Viacom issue where the copy-holder is both depending on YouTube (by leaking copyright videos) and then suing the very own videos that had been leakedā¦
Is there a reason, other than maybe bandwidth, that you wouldnāt be able to host the short video clip on your own server? Or is the issue simply bandwidth?
Well on one side I am worried that this will be applied to political speech or other āpublic figure embarassementsā. Just file for copyright infringement and snap! Your video of the Prime Minister insulting [women|immigrants|judges] might be taken down (Iām not talking about civilized countries here, but places like this: http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/02/24/google-execs-convicted ).
On the other hand, do you think this would give a huge boost to research towards sub-optimal voice and āconversation topicā recognition?
For example, suppose you record your lecturer talking about Hegel. You upload the video to youtube and it gets ārecognizedā by matching speech to their library. It can be tagged automatically, etc. Furthermore, the other parts of the conversation can become a new baseline to match philosophy videos, and hence grow a āsemanticā base. That would be even a nicer feat.
Digital video watermarking has been around for a long time. I would imagine that most digital video is now watermarked. If so, Youtube probably just detected the presence of a watermark, and determined that the video was not user generated. Youtube could check for the presence of a watermark using only a couple of frames of video.
Have a look at this article talking about video watermarking:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/researchDevelopment/productFeatures/cinema.shtml
Kodak is currently the only company to publicly announce and demonstrate (at ShoWest in March 2001) that its watermarking technique can hold up in real-world testing; that is, the watermark can survive the actual process of capturing a projected movie with a camcorder. Moreover, the amplitude of the Kodak watermark is such that it is invisible to the viewer in the theater, thus maintaining the image quality that is such an important part of the movie-going experience. In the ShoWest demo, 16 bits of information were embedded in each frame of the movie, and it took less than 15 frames (0.5 sec) of captured video to extract the 16 bits with 100% reliability. Often, the watermark was successfully extracted using fewer than 15 frames, sometimes only one or two frames.
Hey Jeff, interesting article. I do not know how youtube specifically does this, but a standard technique for this sort of thing is to treat points in the video/audio sample as points in a several-hundred-dimension vector space. You then need a way to rapidly identify when any sample point is close to any of the millions of data points in that vector space. The search algorithm needs to be optimized for rapidly finding matches without computing the distance metric millions or billions of times, particularly since the query is likely to be ājunkā, ie, no match. If you or your readers are interested in a gentle introduction to some of the math involved in this kind of search, I did a series of blog entries on it a few years ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/tags/high+dimensional+spaces/ Or, see the paper I based this series on for a less gentle introduction: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/jplatt/bitVectors.pdf
Copyright law, and by extension fair use protection only applies when youāre up in court accused of copyright violation. It canāt be used to force Youtube to host a clip for you.
You are free to host the clip on your own website if you like, but then you do run the risk of the copyright holder suing you for copyright violation (if they found out that youād done so).
Even then you can then choose to ignore any ācease and desistā letters you receive if you like, and rely on the copyright holder either not pursuing the case because the damages are likely to be minimal, or following that you can hope that your āfair useā defense wins in court.
Even if your āfair useā argument looks rock-solid you could still, however, lose (contrariwise even if your argument was feeble you might, with good lawyers and through a technicality, win).
Human laws are radically different beasts to the natural laws of physics, relying as they do on the subjective judgment of people, even though as engineers we like to think that they are both kind of the same. And of course our criminal and civil laws actively need to be applied (as opposed to say, the second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of closed systems never decreases, regardless of whether anyone is actually paying attention to the system in question or serving it with injunctions.)
I think the solution here is for Youtube to allow linking to video exerts on the original copyrighted upload. IE being able to link to 2:35 - 8:56 on the original clip.
Maybe you could use DropBox for hosting the files? Not sure what DropBox ToS says about that
Oh, just in case 
http://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTM4MTg1MzI5
Iām with the dozens of people who ask, āWhy does the content owner get to decide if your use is āfair use,āā You are the one at risk if your use isnāt deemed fair use, so if you are comfortable that you could prove fair use if you needed to that should end it. I would think YouTube would have discharged any obligation it had when it informed you its automated system thought the clip might be a violation.
I canāt help but see the irony of thisā¦
Joel and yourself are doing your best to monitise the content of SO for your own good, and yet you are outraged when youtube blocks you from trying the same (in kind) with someone elses content.
LOL.
This is an interesting question. Since you suggested the clip usage would be fair use embedded on your blog, but not necessarily freely available on Youtube, did you try setting it to āprivateā on that site, but embedded on your blog? Is it even possible to embed a private video on another site?
Interesting article. If interested, please see a related review I conducted: http://weiskopf-iplaw.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-offerings-from-google-make-you-say.html
Honestly you should sue the copyright holder.
What you are doing is clear cut fair use. For the copyright holder to disregard your fair use dispute to their original automated DMCA taken down (which you then disputed through that form) they are in violation of the law.
People need to fight back against the content syndicates. Itās absolutely imperative to defend our fair use rights. The DMCA is one of the worst laws passed regarding technology and the internet as a whole and it was bought and paid for the by the RIAA and MPAA. While I hope it gets overturned at some point in the future currently the only option to fight back is to use the letter of the law against the companies that wanted the law in the first place.
And the lesson is: donāt use YouTube. Especially since theyāll delete your COMPLETE account and give you no explanation or recourse.
Copyright is something we should be trying to defeat or work around.
YouTube will need to soften this, lest they lose their place on the net. However I agree with Jeff that this isnāt really their fault itās the copyright holders that donāt realize the world is changing.
I miss the old fake Orange captcha.