this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 156 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

You're missing some key facts:

  1. A lot of music on YouTube is fully licensed and uploaded by the owners or Google themselves. Like VEVO music, for instance.
  2. 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.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent 11 points 11 months ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 123 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Tbf Walt Disney himself invented the sound of a dick slapping an ankle

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 11 months ago (4 children)

YouTube and Spotify are paying license fees to be allowed to play music on their platform.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

That’s fucking genius. I love it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

They posted it on the Internet, so it has to be.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wtf is the tagginator bot?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not sure, but I think its purpose is to get get these posts appear in meta search engine results (SEO).

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (5 children)

AFAIK it's for discovery on Mastodon via hashtag.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Aren't most songs on YouTube uploaded by the artists themselves?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

No, certainly not most. Some, for sure, but tons of albums are uploaded by some random dude.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's what I meant by "got ContentID'd".

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Well, this is certainly one of the takes of all time.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (19 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

they have a deal with Vevo i think

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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. 🙄

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Who cares? Google has a legal team for such things, i don't.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I believe their copyright claim system is set up so that any ad revenue for a song goes to the copyright holder, and they can have the video taken down if that isn't enough. It's why YouTubers are so careful not to use too much of a copyrighted song in their videos.

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