Where’s the fair use Youtube?

Let us go into further detail as to why we "walked away" from YouTube.

YouTube at the time of this posting is the number 1 video service that the entire internet goes to for all of its user-created content media needs. There was a time when even we used it. We now host almost all of our video blogs locally. This decision was mostly for a different problem dealing with links dying/moving around. But lately, another problem has come up dealing with a tactic known as "Content Citation." YouTube even hit us over a demonstration video we wanted to show to people who responded to this blog. That one of my hacks indeed does work.

Origin of "Content Citation."

Content citation came into play after Google purchased YouTube and the media companies immediately began filing lawsuits against Google. Google then sidestepped this issue stating that they will offer tools to corporations and creators of Hollywood allowing them to distribute citations and even warnings on YouTube posters to protect their content from being posted. While it is good to have such citation for blatant piracy where the entire video is played in its whole. Corporation networks step over this line and begin attacking anything that has even a remote sound pattern to what they may feel is copyright.

1st amendment? What's that?

Every country has a different law about freedom of speech (if any at all) but to a lot of American creators, it is a violation of the 1st amendment dealing with the concept of fair use and even parody. Where you make fun of and or comment on a video so much that you are only using pieces of a video/song and not the entire produced content. Which in the minds of courts throughout the United States is totally legal.

As a corporation on YouTube:

You can file as many copyright claims as you want on YouTube with no penalty and no remorse or even basic regard for the laws of 1st amendment rights. Because this is the internet and those rights don't apply. Even if you are blatantly in the wrong there is no penalty to you. You do not have to prove that you are a real business. Simply stating that you are a business and they are violating your rights and YouTube immediately takes action on your behalf. With little to no fact-checking or human interaction. You are allowed to do this as much as you want and you can focus on one channel filing claims to every single file on there.

As a YouTube user:

There are two events that happen when a corporation files a claim.

Flat out copyright strike!

Your channel is allowed three strikes before all of your uploaded videos and content are nuked off of YouTube. You have the right to contest each strike however each appeal process can take anywhere from 30 days. If you are lucky the copyright holder actually gets back to you in order to defend yourself. Otherwise, the process can take up to 90 days or more before a citation can be contested and resolved. During that time, you can get more strikes. You can have your channel shut down before you get an opportunity to defend yourself. In order to get a strike against you. A company has to go very far in writing a take-down notice against you. So unless you're being very blatant about publishing full-length videos on YouTube. Or the copyright holder and/or its agents have a lot of time on their hands; (which they do!) This is just one thing you could deal with.

Monetization claimant of copy-written material.

In the passive-aggressive department. This is what happens a lot more on YouTube. Where companies are filing copyright claims on your videos allowing you to keep them running. But all of the revenue from your video streams goes towards the companies that filed the claim. Often these companies are subsidiaries and/or agents of major Hollywood companies that serve as nothing more than internet tax collectors. Slamming as many accounts as humanly possible to get the most reward from every video source. This method is legal domination over YouTube. Once again you have the right to contest the claim and it takes a very long time. If you rely on these clicks in order to subsidize your existence you get nothing for up to 30-60 days while the claim process is being reviewed. If you win then you begin to receive ad revenue from the video the day you won. Not the day you uploaded that video! You don't even get your money back for however many days the company has failed a claim on you. That money still goes off to those agents for the days/weeks they filed that claimant upon you.

Make sure your aim is true! Or we'll punish you YouTube user!

Also, if you misfile your dispute that can be considered as an automatic strike against your account with no questions asked! You have to be extra careful about how you file everything with YouTube because, unlike the person who filed the claim against you. You have to be verified as a legit user and you have to make sure all of your claims are legitimate. Also, you are allowed up to 3 disputes at a time, Unlike the corporation which can file an unlimited amount of disputes on your channel alone. Potentially locking you out before you even have a chance to respond.

Example of a YouTube copyright claim and dispute in progress.

I decided to use one of my own videos for this blog because it illustrates how hilariously insane the entire process is. The YouTube claimant is from a company by the name of AudioSparx which clearly has people that constantly feed YouTube bots for patterns to look out for. Obviously, they fed in the pattern of classical music which is public domain, and immediately went on the attack pulling whatever ad-monetization for my video into their pockets. This video only has 200 hits so the "profit" is non-existent in my case. However, you have to think these guys are probably doing this at a rate of a few thousand entries per hour.

Copyrighting classical music that is public domain is "cute".

They state that their content is: William Tell (Full Overture) - Apollo Symphony Orchestra. Huh, when we YouTube "Apollo Symphony Orchestra" we do find their variant of William Tell, but it sounds nothing like the one that is in the game we were playing which is BombSquad for the Ouya. On top of this. the Apollo Symphony Orchestra is actually a high school musical group. So if AudioSparx is claiming to represent a high school and they aren't. Then AudioSparx is committing fraud at that level! We also went over to the AudioSparx website and typed in William Tell. The closest we could find to the game is some ultra-shitty midi to synth conversion that they did and are somehow wanting $80 for it. Disgusting on so many levels. This company needs to die in a fire. AudioSparx is the real monster of the net. Not music pirates of 11-year-old children sharing Metallica albums. No, this company. Someone who takes public domain music and attempts to snag a profit off of it regardless of how small. Companies that use a removal process like a hammer turn a penny in their favor regardless of how much they are sapping from the user base of the YouTube community.

Here's the real kicker boys and girls. all AudioSparx has to do is deny the claim without any basis of evidence or proof and that claim immediately turns into a strike against my account! Lol! It's a good thing I barely use YouTube for anything serious. Because if I actually made money on that server I would be fuming mad at this point!

The future of YouTube:

We're reminded of a person who used to tell people that money is what kills the freedom of communication just as it's killing television. I just kind of wrote him off as a socialist. But there's a balance that every company has to play, or else you descend into madness eventually getting replaced by something bigger/better/smarter. With idiots like the Fine Brothers patenting the word "React" on YouTube there-by banning anyone from using said word unless you work underneath them and they effectively take your money from you voluntarily. YouTube is heading down a bad road. What really stops a greedy lets-player from copyrighting that word and then turning around blasting every single channel off of the map? How about movie reviews? On top of all of this, you have the big media companies shoving money into YouTube's throat to make their channels bigger than anything user-created. YouTube is no longer a space for user content anymore as much as it is a channel for filtered content only allowing certain people to get rich while the rest suffer under a tyrannical system.

But S, I heard YouTube backed away from shutting down channels in this manner, isn't this old news?

YouTube has taken the stance that if your channel is large enough and there is a big enough outcry to YouTube eventually a live person will step in and correct the issue. It's just sad it requires thousands if not millions of users on your behalf in order to finally be proven innocent in the land of YouTube justice. If you are a no-nothing user with hardly any subscribers, you are shit out of luck when it comes to any live human interaction from the video tyrant.

What the hell are you going to do now S?

Self-host all of the things!

As for what I a lowly blogger intend to do about it? Well, that's simple really, just like what I did with Furaffinity. I am and already have walked away from YouTube. Go ahead, strike my account down. I will become more powerful than you will possibly imagine! But seriously, just because we're no longer on YouTube does not diminish the popularity of my articles. Google as a search engine has been trained to find bloggers who host their own videos and index them with quickness. We just searched our own site on Google and switched to video tab mode. We get a display very similar to how the original YouTube displayed things. And these are all legit videos on my site! In fact, it makes my articles even more relevant because all of the data is in one location and is not being mirrored and shared by multiple domains. And it isn't just Google doing this. Bing is slowly catching onto this madness as well. If anyone knows how to make Bing actually do video previews of personal blogs I would like to know. Who knows, they may even give sites that host their own content preferential treatment someday because we're not using their data centers to transmit video. We are using our own. I'm fully aware there is blogs out there warning people not to host their own videos. but with the Invention of WebM combined with other fallback media sources. The problems of hammering on your hosting providers' memory resources are a lot less threatening than when we were hosting pure MP4.

Final thoughts.

Update: 2/22/2016 Apparently, time operates differently in YouTube land. What was initially a long 30 or 60-day wait got knocked down to two days! YouTube must be doing something right. Or they are simply acknowledging the fact that all of these claimholders are dead wrong. This entry ends on a positive note for now. Perhaps there's hope for YouTube after all. We are personally not going to reverse our decision on hosting my own videos. However, it's nice to see that things are happening for the rest of the internet universe for the better.

So S, does this mean you welcome YouTube with open arms?

No, because although it is a positive step that YouTube resolved this issue so quickly it changes nothing. It's really their policy and the way they want to handle things as a whole. I will probably keep my account just to throw all of my garbage videos onto. While keeping my tutorials safe on my own site where it belongs. Like FurAffinity, it will be a data dump that even if it gets blown to bits like what happens to all web 2.0. The only reaction that anyone would get out of my is is the following.

Oh, that happened. Guess it's time to find something else to poke fun of.

Update 10/14/16:

But wait! There's more! - Billy Mays

Continue reading 2 of 2:

YouTube - Round 2 - Censorship fight!

For those interested in how to host your own videos within WordPress this should help you.

Server protect you and don't die.

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