"
Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at
@ChainPatrol
. We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again.
We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.
We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it's never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We're very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction.
"
This seems like a huge abuse of the copyright system to me. It sounds to me like ChainPatrol doesn't actually have any IP to protect, but they are instead deputizing YouTube's copyright system to fight what they deem to be crypto scams. Absolutely wild if true.
There are lots of “companies” like this. Don’t think about buying this apologetic do-gooder tone, it’s an id claim troll trying to cover his ass after touching something they can get face punched for by the whole internet. Which the internet should do anyway. Imagine what it did and continues to do to channels no one cares about that much. These parasites don’t deserve to exist, regardless of the official stance.
I'll offer a slight adjustment; "Finance in general encourages risky behavior". It is an industry explicitly dealing in moving and dealing in risk.
We periodically become very aware of this. See financial news in 1893, 1901, 1907, 1910, 1914, 1920, 1937, 1949, 1953, 1961, 1970, 1973, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2011, and so on and so on.
It's almost as if a zero-sum, value neutral industry controlling the bulk of world finance is inherently a very very bad idea.
You're confusing things that you value in life with things with economic value.
Also you don't seem to see that something that stores your economic value better than anything else (the "infinite" outcome) would be of great value to your life.
You could also see it as economic value is commonly extremely divorced from any useful human measure of value. Enough money to feed the world is "made" and "lost" though market oscillations that aren't really based in any practical reality. Like Tesla being worth more than the rest of the next 35 car companies, say. Or just one of the several apps that calls a cab being worth the GDP of Kenya. Or the value of Bitcoin.
The fiction is that the market is an infinitely rational representation of value, denominated in the same units humans buy food and shelter with, and generally correlated with their ability to do so. But it seems "the economy" has less and less to do with life on the ground.
Economic value is entirely rooted in life on the ground, but it is simply the demand part of the equation.
Its equal to demand (in £) divided by supply (kg/gallon/BTC etc).
Market oscillations are all based in practical reality, but if they don't make sense, you're just not aware of their cause. For example, multiple traders around the world simultaneously buying /selling with high leverage according to obscure technical analysis of the price chart.
What distorts everything is that the value of what we measure economic value in is itself devalued by 50% every decade through supply inflation. Economic value over time != price over time.
I mean this is what all the textbooks say, but it's cold comfort to people who want bread, clean water, a roof and a warm bed rather than some economist-approved funny money on a graph somewhere.
Everyone's been told to trust the system, the market knows best. At this rate, I don't think they will continue to do indefinitely.
Now we're on a completely different subject, but that's fine.
Trust what system exactly?
If there was no poverty, there would be no motivation to work and build a roof over your head or grow crops to make bread. Unfortunately, the funny money that I show in the graph means that it's not a fair playing field.
If you want to fix the world, fix the money. The world is desperately in need of a digital money that can't be created with no effort, and by just a few select people (i.e. banks). The money we're using is toxic.
>If there was no poverty, there would be no motivation to work and build a roof over your head or grow crops to make bread.
The motivation would be to maintain one’s station, whether that station were impoverished or rich. Most of America isn’t in poverty, yet still works hard to try and achieve higher status, greater luxury, etc.
>the money we’re using is toxic
Is this the root cause behind productivity gains not going to workers for the last five decades? Genuine question, cause that’s the main issue I see.
> The motivation would be to maintain one’s station, whether that station were impoverished or rich. Most of America isn’t in poverty, yet still works hard to try and achieve higher status, greater luxury, etc.
Poverty is relative, but I do recognise the distinction between needs (survival) and wants.
> Is this the root cause behind productivity gains not going to workers for the last five decades? Genuine question, cause that’s the main issue I see.
Yes! Absolutely. I believe it's the primary mechanism that's behind the enormous gains in efficiency going to the rich rather than the general population.
It's a deep subject, but to try and summarise as best I can: Every decade in the USA the banking system and government combined creates double the currency out of thin air (in the form of loans) and charge interest on it [https://imgur.com/a/1ljSLgA]. The deal is that they must destroy the money when it's repaid. By keeping interest rates below the natural free market rate, they both monopolise lending and incentivise borrowing and so the total borrowed just keeps increasing over time. They can still profit enormously because the money they lend is not really theirs and was created out of nothing as the "loan" was made.
This has been going on for decades and sped up in 1971 (wtfhappenedin1971.com) when the dollar was "temporarily" non-redeemable for gold (because of all the money printing they had already done)
Each time the money supply doubles, the value of the monetary unit halves. It works out at about 7% a year over the last 100 years.
It's no coincidence that that's the approximate rate of increase in real-estate prices over the decades. It's not real-estate going up in value - it's that the dollar is falling in value.
Consummables are falling in value at around 5% a year (due to the productivity gains), giving a net price increase of 7-5 = 2%. So if you are getting an annual nominal pay rise of say 2%, you're actually getting a pay cut of 7-2=5%, but "luckily" consumables are falling in value at the same rate, so you can still afford food, a car etc. What you can no longer afford are the things that haven't gone down in value - hard assets like real estate, gold etc. - things that have a relatively constant supply/demand and therefore, value. These are the things that the bankers and their friends buy with all the interest they are collecting.
By giving the entire world a stealth 5% pay cut each year, the banks and those closest to the money printers are stealing away all the productivity gains. Look up the Cantillon Effect. It's a kind of pyramid scheme where the bankers take the main gains, but then reward those who support the system by taking out loans with a cut. Once you realise that the money is devalued at a faster rate than the interest, you can see that you're paying back less economic value than you borrowed, even with interest. The people who really suffer are the savers who have their savings stolen essentially at a rate of 7% minus whatever interest rate they are getting. Obviously pensions are affected too. Anything that's denominated in dollars, pounds, euros etc.
It all started with banks lending out the gold you'd given them to look after, behind your back. A fraud that has grown to monumental proportions. They are now collecting interest on all the money in the world, and they printed it all out of thin air.
Sure. But what they are really doing is giving you a pay cut each year without you realising, and the bankers and their friends closest to the money printers are pocketing it.
Compounding even 3% annual cut in real value adds up to an 80% pay cut over 50 years.
Even worse the people nearest the money printers are largely engaged in the business of starting (and most frequently losing) foreign wars of choice. The human suffering created by the system is immense.
Yes. As they're incentivised to "lend" (print) as much money as they can, to obtain the interest, the outcome is that they're encouraged to start wars and fund both sides, because war generates the highest demand for loans. The longer the war lasts, the better.
Inflation makes the problem worse, but even if inflation were zero percent, no company is going to tell its employees they can work 1 hour per week because the company is paying for the employees time.
On top of that, the fundamental competition inherent to a free market says that a company with employees that only worked 1 hour per week would be out competed by a company full of employees that worked more than that. (Up to a point, obviously.), so the company can't let it's employees take advantage of increased productivity with a shorter work weeks in order to stay competitive.
Getting rid of fractional reserve banking and inflation isn't going to change those underlying facts of capitalism.
Its not about working less, it's about not having your wages stolen. If people understood they were getting a pay cut each year, they likely wouldn't stand for it. Instead they celebrate it as a pay rise but wonder why they can't afford nice things like a traditional family with an average-sized house and 2 kids, holidays etc, all paid for only by the husband who has an average job while the wife stays at home.
> You're confusing things that you value in life with things with economic value.
If you think about it, the "economic" value is just the market trying to discover what everyone value in life.
> Also you don't seem to see that something that stores your economic value better than anything else (the "infinite" outcome) would be of great value to your life.
Finding a cure for cancer will be infinite value and most people will give anything for it - including all Bitcoins in the world. This - finding the cure of cancer - is the way better store of value than anything. The reverse is not true.
It's worthless. I wouldn't buy a litre of air for even a penny. But put me at the bottom of the sea, out of oxygen (i.e. no supply), and I'd give you everything I have for it.
You can definitely use your IP to take down scams.
If someone is using your name or your company's name to scam people, it is in your interest to save your name and provide people assurance that they can do business with your name.
>You can definitely use your IP to take down scams.
Key point being, that you have IP to use in the first place. But the parents' contention is that ChainPatrol and/or their clients don't have such IP, and are merely weaponizing the copyright/trademark takedown process to take down scams, which isn't the same thing.
My understanding is that arbitrum has an IP, but this video was not using their IP, that it was a false positive in terms of identifying the IP, in addition to a false positive of malicious intent.
What you are saying is that these claims never relate to IP and it was only a false positive of malicious intent?
>What you are saying is that these claims never relate to IP and it was only a false positive of malicious intent?
I'm not sure how you got that impression. If you read my previous comment it's pretty clear I only objected on the basis they don't have relevant IP, not on the principle of being able to use IP to issue take down scams.
It's true that trademarks are the best tool for that kind of protection, and that it is distinct from copyright. Note that I used the term IP though, which is a yet third distinct term.
There aren't that many channels with over 5M subscribers. 3Blue1Brown is 706th in the world. It's insane to me that YouTube still doesn't have a manual sanity check for claims against their top ~1000 channels or so. That couldn't possibly cost much, and it would fix a PR problem that hits so often you can use it as a calendar.
The reason they don't is because they've made their own version of the DMCA takedown system but my understanding is that that system/law gives the strongest liability safe harbor if the platform just takes things down in response to takedown requests without taking any steps to validate them. The weaselly lawyer approved version is to just let the claimant and the poster duke it out with counter responses etc and just be passive.
> We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.
So did ChainPatrol have the video taken down for copyright infringement or for "attempting to steal user funds"? Did ChainPatrol have to file an actual DMCA takedown notice to take down 3Blue1Brown's video? If so, would this not be perjury?
That is my understanding too. We do not have a disagreement on that.
> he got a copyright strike, which means a DMCA takedown
Here is where we disagree. A youtube copyright notice / copyright strike is not the same as a DMCA takedown.
The DMCA takedown process as described in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Title II. Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act provides more rights for the content owner whose work got maliciously or mistakenly taken down. They have access to a counter notification process and §512(f) makes those who knowingly materially misrepresent content as infringing liable for damages. You don't have the same rights and affordances with the youtube copyright notification system.
It is similar. If you squint it looks the same. But it is not the same.
> A youtube copyright notice / copyright strike is not the same as a DMCA takedown.
Yes it is. YouTube doesn’t magically get to ignore the DMCA, so their process is built around that (along with layering Content ID on top to allow for a middle ground where videos can stay up but redirect some or all monetization to the copyright holder).
If you click through the link I posted above, you’ll get to this page which shows the complete process, including the counter-notification step: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13823830 Do you have reason to believe 3blue1brown can’t file a counter-notification in this case?
Does YouTube's system also make a malicious complainer liable for damages? The DMCA does. Here's the relevant section of the law mentioned by krisoft:
(f) Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or
misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by
the alleged infringer [...]
DMCA’s perjury provision is completely toothless; it might as well not be there. It doesn’t even require you affirm a copyright violation, just that you act on behalf of the rightsholder.
This is a perfect example of how ineffective it is.
IIRC the only perjury penalty to DMCA filers is if they are acting on behalf of some copyright they know they don't own or aren't authorized to protect.
Haha, they see themselves as ‘good cops,’ deciding what content is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s not even about copyright—it’s about what they think is good for users and what isn’t.
And in the process of playing ‘police’ they end up taking down one of the best videos explaining how Bitcoin works.
They probably should've consulted with a lawyer before making that statement. It sounds like a footgun that would help any prospective litigant build a case against you.
This is par for the course in crypto communities. There are multiple competing Bitcoin subreddits, mainly because each one decides which info to censor because they don't like a particular coin/fork/tech.
It took three people on Reddit to start a rumor that Anne Hathaway was a bad person. Probably due to they thought her as Catwoman was going to be like Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern. And they were still seething over Katie Holmes.
So the big-name channel gets a personal response. What about the many non-famous channels that ChainPatrol must have made false claims against? How many strikes or false claims does ChainPatrol get before they are permanently booted off YouTube and all their revenue streams get taken from them?
This seems to be a new shakedown racket of a business. "Subscribe for our services, or be victim to our shoddy automated takedown notices". Not too dissimilar to online ID protection services, that simultaneously sell your information
That doesn't make much sense, at least in this particular case. ChainPartrol's website describes themselves as "Real-time Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies", so it's unlikely that youtube creators would subscribe to such a service. Maybe if they were issuing takedown request for other "Web3 Companies" this allegation would have some merit, but that's not what happened here.
It's common for one set of scammers to target another, to take their competitors out. So it's quite possible for them to be abusing the copyright system to take-out scamming competitors.
Heh, PirateSoftware, he talks about this, being both sec ops and having worked at blizzard. Apparently it's really common for the big coin farmers (which blizzard doesn't like, and would ban if they could identify all the players) to tell blizzard about zero day exploits to prevent their competitors from using them and crashing the market for gold.
Unless they're compensating the entirety of the Youtuber's lost revenue, this is worth as much as a granny tech support scammer claiming they were really planning to help out granny fix her computer.
You need to name and shame… and also have enough influence to have your post rise against the sea of garbage out there.
Most people’s post wouldn’t get looked at at all, 3blue1brown is fortunate to have such a large audience so that his complaint gets looked at by a human.
A common thing scammers do is copy material from other sites that the scammer's victims are familiar with and trust. The scammers put that material in their own sites to try to trick the victims into thinking that are on the site they trust.
Yeah so I imagine how this would work to steal people’s funds in this case is to take copyrightable brand assets from someweb3company.xyz. Use them to make a youtube video saying something like “someweb3company.xyz is doing a limited time offer of a free thing. Log in with your wallet details at someweb3company.totallylegitoffer.xyz to claim!” Or some variant on that. Logging in with your wallet gives them permission to steal all your stuff. Because “logging in with a web3 wallet” is actually signing something with your private key. That something can be a json token thing for logging in, but it can also be a transaction and the UX is so god-awful that people often don’t pay much attention to which they are doing and get ripped off.
I think https://chainpatrol.io/ is fake. Look at things like the "legal terms." To make a DCMA (US Law) counterclaim, they want "a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Province of Ontario." [0]
If you are unsatisfied with our services, please email us at [EMAIL ADDRESS] and we will address your concerns in a prompt and timely manner. [0]
Good morning, isn’t it? This goes for years, happens to every youtuber from time to time. And if they are tiny and have no creators community, they often just swallow the “demonetization” fact.
This company is basically an extreme nobody and has like 1-3 likes on their posts. It is absurd how imbalanced the power is with regard to automation and copyright strikes.
There's nothing absurd about it, our society is not built about making people with a lot of likes comfortable, it's built around making people who own stuff comfortable.
From their home page, it looks like their stated goal is to remove brand impersonation materials. Lookalike websites, social media compromises, malicious links, etc. They allege to work with registrars, contribute to blocklists and take down scam content. True brand impersonation of this ilk almost always includes copyright infringement.
Sure it's possible that the company is a truly malicious actor that has a fake website and does not actually submit any valid claims, while working alongside the top brands in the industry to tear down that same industry. Personally though, I think it's more likely the company is a startup rushing to grab profits, has bad algorithms that come up with a lot of false positives, and is generally a bull in a china shop. Not that that's excusable, but being sloppy and taking shortcuts that hurt people is a bit different from being a "copyright hit company" where hurting people is the company's entire raison d'etre. The former calls for better regulation; the latter calls for being stamped out.
I don't know if you've tried to consume any crypto-related content on YouTube recently, but YouTube has a major problem with fake "live streams" from "Elon Musk" and other prominent crypto figures who promise they'll "double your crypto for a limited time" if you just send it to them within the next ten minutes. Someone's gotta fight that, on behalf of both the scam victims and the impersonated brands, because YouTube themselves don't give a shit.
Depends on the logo. If it's just text or a simple shape, it can't be copyrighted.
3Blue1Brown's logo is (probably) copyrightable, but the TED or Veritasium channel logos are (probably) not. If it could be claimed to be derivative of some other work, public domain or not, you may not fully own the copyright either. In general, it can be a big fuzzy grey area that needs a court to decide fully. Meanwhile, a trademark infringement would be easy to show.
The system intentionally does not require scrutiny.
Youtube implemented this system as part of a lawsuit with Viacom who was going to take them to the cleaners. Putting all the power in the hands of the people making the claim was intentional.
If someone's video gets taken down incorrectly and then later put back up, Google does not care, someone else's video got the ad slots anyway. There's more content on Youtube uploaded every second than can be watched.
From https://x.com/ChainPatrol/status/1876456092164653328
"We found that this video was never reported in our system, and our system did not flag it. This false positive was due to human error, not bots or AI. One of our analysts, responsible for submitting takedowns, accidentally copied the wrong link while reporting a malicious video."
I think a good baseline might be that you need to deposit say $1M and then when oops, you accidentally made a bogus claim it's OK that $1M is split between the victim of your oopsy and Youtube for their trouble - you just pay $1M to get back into the game. Outfits like this could explain to their investors that while their technology does sometimes have little goofs that cost a few billion dollars per year, once they invent perfect AI they can scale infinitely and make that back easily, so if you invest $10Bn of your fiat currency today, in 18 months they can 100% guarantee nothing in particular, wow.
This works for actual creators, who are occasionally slightly inconvenienced but handsomely rewarded when that occurs, for Youtube, who get paid each time these "rare" mistakes happen, and for the companies "innovating" by making up nonsense and taking people's money. Just as well the "investment" goes to a Youtuber as to some random office park or an ad firm.
I don't think so, since YouTube is operating their extrajudicial "go the extra mile for copyright holders" copyright claim system. It isn't required by law and this is what's being abused, not plain DMCA claims. For regular claimants, the regular (and free) DMCA system would still be in effect.
The bonus is that filing fraudulent DMCA claims has real legal repercussions under the law. I don't know if there's any real consequence for lying about copyright ownership to Google under their made-up claim system.
It isn't required by law, it's required by people who would sue the pants off it if it didn't kowtow to them.
Which is way scarier than something required by law. Law can be lobbied about and changed. Law has limits. Law can be ignored when you are rich and powerful.
Lawsuits from megacorps, on the other hand, cannot.
Nah, I'd expect under this model insurance would become readily available. Insurers live on the margins, so even though it would cost a lot of money if you crash that boring mid-range car into somebody's house, the insurer doesn't charge you a lot of money to insure you against that risk, they're betting that on average you're not going to do that. As a safeguard they probably don't insure kids who just got bought a Ferrari as their first car, or anybody who has just done time for crashing their car into a house on purpose, but mostly they're just playing the numbers.
That's already the status quo, random nobodies with their art ripped off by OpenAI or some content mill on YouTube don't have the benefit of hiring companies to perform takedowns.
Wouldn't this mean that the only people able to make claims in the first place are people with $1M to spare? It might deter aggressive claims, but also prevent individuals from making claims on violations of their copyrights.
Wouldn't this keep anyone without a spare million from making copyright claims, and incentivise YouTube to encourage these "mistakes" since they get paid for them?
Just a friendly heads up. Anyone who wants to avoid Twitter, since it has become so toxic, can use the domain xcancel.com in place of twitter.com or x.com. like so:
Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at
@ChainPatrol
. We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again.
We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.
We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it's never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We're very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction.
The database they are comparing to is probably not only youtube videos. So the freebooted or matching video, in their database, has a creation data which is earlier than the 3blue1brown video.
As other threads have pointed out, Google's copyright violation system is a process that's private. It's before the DMCA laws get involved.
So maybe it's a ToS violation?
(This isn't defending the person issuing copyright strikes. Their behavior, right or wrong, just isn't perjury. I think. Good thing I'm not anyone's lawyer.)
The original Twitter link doesn't show any replies either. Maybe it does if you're signed in, but I no longer have a Twitter account (and nor do most people).
Generally a good idea, but there are edge cases that need to be handled for this to work.
A copyrighted video might not be uploaded to YouTube, in which case you'd have to fall back on the video creation date, which would have to be manually added in their DB (e.g. Hollywood produced movies).
You can also have leaks of videos before their official release. Admittedly a rare scenario that should can be accounted for in other ways (i.e. skip this check if before upload).
...but he only posted this to Twitter. Not his own blog, nor bsky, not to his Patreon, or to Reddit - only Twitter. Nitter is always just going to be an echo of Twitter. Discord and Reddit and HN and a personal blog serve different purposes. Bsky and Mastodon and the rest (including Threads) are doomed to never become the next Twitter unless we can get people to start changing their habits.
I think just not engaging with content on Twitter is far more likely to produce that outcome than consuming the content on Nitter.
> Nitter is always just going to be an echo of Twitter.
Nitter is not going to be an echo of twitter, it was a proxy for twitter, and it's already dead.
> Bsky and Mastodon and the rest (including Threads) are doomed to never become the next Twitter unless we can get people to start changing their habits.
Why should anyone be concerned about that? None of the above have shown themselves to be any better stewards of anything than twitter has. They're all objectively mediocre options, (including twitter) and personally identifying with any of them is silly.
Unfortunately some companies and content creators still post there. It's a good way to find what the subject is about to identify external sources. So you can participate in less toxic discussions like on HN.
Not a great idea to post nitter links any more in public forums. The (very few) instances that are left are using small pools of private accounts, and get saturated to uselessness quickly. And especially to big forums like this, that have been known to take down fairly robust sites.
Don't kill what's left of nitter in order to make a pointless statement about twitter being "toxic."
I don't think using the service alternately is a good idea. Just don't use it. Twitter has always been known for being toxic. Now the baby troll leads it .. I could never sell my soul like that.
Just don't use any social media. You'll be more healthy and secure.
It's deeply haunting to think about how badly AI is going to mess up the world over the next few years. Today, it's YouTube videos. Later, it will be a rejection of the insurance claim for a kid's life-saving surgery.
If you're in a position of influence in an organization that's losing its marbles over AI, please, at the very least encourage others to pump the brakes and think.
If there was ever a time to speak up when you know implementing something will lead to a likely disaster, it's now.
If only this had to do with AI. This has been going on for many years, long before LLMs. These are simple scammers. Many a good article has been written about the way these scams work. With or without AI, their claims are entirely bogus, they have never needed AI to pretend to have a claim, and nothing has changed in that regard.
UnitedHealthcare is already using AI to deny claims, and reportedly I've heard that 90% of the AI denials that are appealed end up approved when it gets to a human.
One of the reasons that copyright processes are so biased towards traditional rightsholders and against individual creators is that the latter group is simultaneously captive to the platform and unorganized/decentralized; YouTube needs licenses and goodwill from, say, Universal, far more than it needs 3blue1brown individually.
And the incentives for rectifying this are skewed: video platforms simply need to address individual cases with influential creators just reactively enough so that collective action isn't incentivized; that's far cheaper, and far easier to not need to coordinate with traditional rightsholders, than addressing the problem systematically.
If we believe that the vision of being an independent content creator is important to humanity - and I think it's becoming vital as "a way to distinguish myself" that folks are able to dream about from an early age - then we need to seriously work to protect it. Not everybody will get their "big break" but we can at the very least start having conversations about protecting creators from an AI-driven DMCA bot arbitrarily destroying their career through automated channel-disabling rules.
The state of content producers (including app developers) on the internet today is the same as that of factory workers in the industrial revolution. Everyone's work is immediately replaceable with that of someone else, who is more than willing to step in to take the spot. Workers solved that with unions that can coordinate the workers' actions.
In concrete terms, a content-creators union might act as a middleman who is able to make all the contents from all its members simultaneously and immediately unavailable on the targeted platforms until some agreement is met or either side gives up.
While the presence of an algorithm that "auto-scabs" makes a full-fledged strike fundamentally difficult, a threat of a coordinated campaign where large creators encourage users to install ad blockers and go off-site for donations, rather than buying superchats/subscriptions on platform, might be meaningful enough to compel achievable asks like copyright strike reform.
The clear-headed perspective would be to assume that a YouTube channel could disappear at any minute and there is little recourse unless an attorney is hired. It's their ball and their game. What rule that does not exist today could exist tomorrow.
The explicit goal of copyright is to promote art work. Copyright intends to accomplish this by promising each artist a profitable monopoly over the result of their work. The thinking is that even though an artist isn't paid directly for their labor, they can compel society to pretend their art is a singular object and sell it over and over again as a good. This is why pretentious gallery people refer to paintings and sculptures as individual "works", as if labor itself can be counted with integers. It isn't the instance of art (the copy) they are referring to as "a work": it is the abstract unit of labor and the copyright monopoly (the exclusive right to make another copy) that defines its domain.
Because copyright redefines art as a good, each artist must invest their labor to create "a work". Only then can they leverage copyright to (hopefully) profit from their investment. This is already counterproductive, because the only prospective artists who are free to work are those who can afford the upfront investment of their own labor. Profit from this investment is nowhere near guaranteed, particularly today when the overwhelming majority of publishing goes through a tiny number of corporations.
The most significant problem, though, is the monopoly itself. For copyright to function, an artist must be able to monopolize their "work": not the original copy they made, but the labor itself. In order to do so, the copyright holder must be able to prevent any work that intersects with their own. What this means is that copyright is made of incompatibility. Anyone who wants to collaborate with a work must have explicit permission; otherwise their own labor is illegal by virtue of the presence of someone else's existing work. Copyright demands that the labor of one individual be incompatible with the other.
This incompatibility is what copyright is truly used for. We use copyright to destroy fraudulent copy. We use copyright to fill moats of incompatibility; and drown competition from those who seek to collaborate competitively.
Copyright has been a bad idea from its very inception, but in today's world - where copy itself is practically free, and collaboration requires nearly zero coordination - copyright has become the foundation of the most significant and damaging parts of our society. It's time to start over.
I wish Youtube etc would blacklist requests by these companies, but am not optimistic. Curation seems like the path here, but it seems difficult. (See also the recent Kagi thread here, highlighting how being able to curate which sites appear on your search results is a big deal)
I agree, but the economics currently don't favor YouTube caring enough to solve this sort of problem
In fact, everything aligns to incentivize them not to care: making the barrier to make a successful claim higher and the larger rights-holders start to cause problems; the cost of seriously adjudicating claims is substantial and may well be unsustainable.
The consequences of bad policy are also quite low for them: most channels that will get hit unjustly have too small an audience to be heard; fixing problems for the larger creators is one-off enough that it's simply cost efficient to squash those when they happen; any bad publicity doesn't seem to be sufficient enough to cause a siginficant drop in either viewers or content creators willing to stick with the platform.... in fact I expect most content creators so unjustly hit this way would simply swallow the indignity and loss and continue p YouTube.
I don't know the laws or agreements at play here, but it seems like some sort of class action suit, if feasible, would be the only way to scale these complaints into something that YouTube management might take seriously.
YouTube doesn't have to adjudicate anything. They just have to demote the known bad actors to using the real DMCA process rather than their own system. They can still make a claim under penalty of perjury with a takedown but that won't count as a strike.
There's actually a lot of history (going back at least as far as 2007) that led to the current situation where the DMCA is not the process. In fairness to YouTube, they had significant legal pressure back in the day, including suits and credible threats thereof to go beyond the DMCA... which is exactly what they did.
We can speculate to if the current situation is the natural conclusion of those agreements with major IP holders, or if they simply got religion and now embrace those practices... but at least historically, it wasn't simply management discretion which started them on this path.
I don't dispute there are things they can, and should do, nor do I dispute that their current management of the problem sucks.... but it's not quite as simple as just taking a decision to abide by the DMCA as-is.
Yes, YouTube was sold to Google essentially at gunpoint. But since then the balance of power shifted from Hollywood to Google. So they they would benefit from relaxing this policy.
I would think Youtube would care enough about content creators with large number of subscribers (3blue1brown has 6.8M) to have a human review takedown notices against those channels.
The problem is not YouTube, but the law. The DMCA requires that online service providers (YouTube, Reddit, etc.) comply immediately with any takedown request and without question, so long as it meets sufficient conditions.
YouTube's copyright system has little to do with DMCA. Music right holders managed forced YouTube to implement a copyright claim system that explicitly didn't involve DMCA takedown requests. As a result any protection that DMCA provides to recipients of takedown requests don't apply to YouTube copyright claims.
In effect, the YouTube copyright system is a purely "voluntary" system for taking down copyright content, that goes way beyond the DMCA. It's basically designed to ensure theres no possible repercussions for issuers of copyright claims, even claims clearly made in bad faith.
You’re conflating the two systems. YouTube does have the Content ID system, which does automatic detection and is mostly used to monetize (not take down) copyrighted content. But this case is a copyright strike, which means there was a DMCA takedown filed.
YouTube’s “three strikes” policy is their implementation of the DMCA’s “repeat infringers” requirement:
> has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the *termination* in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are *repeat infringers*
The system is broken; if youtube (etc) do not respond to DMCA takedown requests on time, their service may be taken down - and back when YT was new and people were uploading movies and whatnot left right and center, they were very close to that. The consequences for YT for not taking something down vs invalid takedowns are much worse and more direct.
I wouldn't have issue if this were simply running the DMCA process. But the YouTube process goes well beyond that. DMCA also allows for the content creator to issue a counter-notice and, as I understand it, that starts a clock and the party filling the takedown has 14 days to file a suit or the original takedown is reversed.
Naturally, that's not the process YouTube follows including, again as I understand it, the assignment of revenues, etc. with only their internal dispute process mattering.
I agree with the gp. If we want a change we shouldn’t play by the rules. Also flagging our comments doesn’t do anything cause we don’t earn money here, and that is our leverage - you can’t do anything with us.
We should create a community-driven abusive botnet that slaps projects like this back, and slaps hard. Because there’s no laws here. No one cares. No order, everything by the word of someone large enough. People should not be afraid of taking law in their hands when there is no law for all practical purposes. And using methods that are available and effective.
I do not claim this is a general, or perfect solution. I don't think there is one. I'm doing what I can, which is a good enough move, given the details of the situation.
Contrary to this, I'd like to see 3blue1brown actually get two more strikes and get deleted per YouTube "3 strikes" policy.
Imagine the furor and outrage of that. One of the most popular, meaningful, and impactful channels done in by YouTube's (and the DMCA's) ridiculous policy [1].
The public outcry from this might motivate real policy changes both within Google and other FANNG companies as well as with lawmakers.
Until a big channel gets stricken, this will continue to plague smaller creators with no recourse. We need a symbolic gesture of this magnitude to effectuate real change.
[1] And it's not like YouTube would actually delete their data or we wouldn't have a way to restore it. This is such an important channel that there's no way it wouldn't be restored by Google or archivists.
I love 3blue1brown and have followed the channel for years. One of my absolute favorite content creators.
But I think you're vastly overestimate how popular he is compared to other channels that have gotten copyright strikes, or how much YouTube/Google care.
I also don't love YouTube's policy, but are you so confident there's a better policy out there?
On the other hand, 3B1B's audience tends to heavily bias towards the tech crowd. I'm at a FAANG, and a decent number of our senior engineers know the channel.
I agree it's not enough to directly push policy, but the impact is certainly larger than what the subscriber count might otherwise suggest.
Out of curiosity I checked, and he's at 6.83M subscribers. According to https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/3blue1brown (not sure how trustworthy the site is, but I believe it should give a general idea) it's 706th channel by subscribers.
> Contrary to this, I'd like to see 3blue1brown actually get two more strikes and get deleted per YouTube "3 strikes" policy.
> Imagine the furor and outrage of that.
Nothing will happen. Nobody cares about relatively small groups of geeks. People will write angry posts at Youtube, but there's nothing anybody can do.
For example, RZX Archive channel (that hosted replays of ZX Spectrum games) was taken down by fake copyright strikes. Its author died several years ago, so nobody could fix that.
You have to think of YouTube and other platforms as a mechanism for distribution, not a source of truth.
If you're a creator it's essential to have your own place on the web were you can host and publish anything without fear that it will be taken down for any reason — even accidentally.
As it becomes cheap to automate both creating takedown requests and processing requests, the volume of spam requests is going to skyrocket and it seems likely there will be more false positives.
I agree in principle with diversifying your online presence, but as a practical solution it doesn’t solve the problem. It would be like if someone came to you about a termite problem in their house and you told them the solution was to have multiple houses. At best that is a defense mechanism not a solution.
Your analogy doesn't match my statement. I am saying there should be a canonical location for what you create that is on a URL that you own. Everything else is distribution.
You built a house on someone else's land, and then they tore it down. Build a house on your own land, as small as that land may be. From there you can create roads, bridges, tunnels to other people's land. On the web land is infinite. You can make your own land.
Again, I am not against backups but that doesn’t solve the actual problem. The problem isn’t losing the files, it is losing a reliable source of income. Putting the videos on Vimeo/S3 bucket/some random website doesn’t solve that problem. People create videos as a full-time job, which is only possible because of the traffic YouTube brings.
Also I think the analogy is pretty solid because it clearly illustrates the emergent benefits of being on a large centralized platform rather than a random URL. Land might be infinite but attention and clicks are not.
It is certainly helpful to hang up a shingle where all the people are — the mall, the town square, the marketplace — but your patrons should know that a bridge exists to your flagship, your headquarters, your farm, your factory of ideas.
If a farmer stops showing up to a farmers market, no one is going to go to their farm for their specific carrots when there are other carrot farmers at the market. Even if they have the best carrots, that doesn't mean their carrots are sufficiently better to justify the added hassle. If their livelihood comes from the customers at the farmer's market, they need to keep their stall at the market.
Sure. This aligns with my original point. A farmer owns their land (mostly). The farm is the farmer's canonical source for their product.
Farmers don't typically rely on a single farmer's market to sell their product, they participate in many markets, sell wholesale, sell from their farm, and might also have a direct-to-consumer option where they can ship beyond their locality.
Create once, publish everywhere — your land is the canonical source. Markets are for distribution.
A business doesn’t stop being viable only once every source of income is stamped out. It stops being viable when enough of it is gone, because people weigh continuing the business against the opportunity cost of doing anything else.
Also, many creators already are publishing “everywhere”. YouTube is simply the most profitable. If YouTube income goes away, that ends the business, whether or not it can technically be found elsewhere.
No, it goes directly against your original point. A farmer owning their own land is no protection against losing access to its customers.
In this analogy, there is only one farmer's market that anyone shows up to. In the real world many farmers may have alternatives, but that is a product of an entire industry spending centuries collectively cultivating those multiple distribution channels.
If a content creator hosts their own videos and then Youtube nukes their channel, they're still going to be hurt by it since Youtube is often the bulk of their audience. The other sharing platforms (even if they aren't video focused) are also going to be able to nuke your distribution channel, so the creator is no better that way. Maybe an email list? Heh.
I don't know the last time I actually went to someone's website for video content. Maybe a business, for instructional videos? But those are either inset Youtube videos or are actually annoying to watch.
If the advice is for people to not depend on revenue from their content creation, that might be a fair point. But I feel like the effort of saying that might be better aimed at telling the hosting platforms to not be asses.
(Then again, I don't believe that large social media platforms can be effectively moderated -- so I'm not much help here either. I have no clue how the content creation industry would fit into that world.)
This is not just an information preservation problem. It's a problem with the creators who depend on YouTube ad revenue to fund to create content like this suddenly and unpredictably losing that revenue stream.
This makes it sound like this is an overt decision by YouTube to stop monetizing a 3B1B video rather than an abuse of automated systems. The difference is important.
Whether creators should depend on YouTube as a practical matter is different from whether they should be able to. As a practical matter, yes, diversifying is safer. But creators and YouTube probably agree that diversifying shouldn’t be necessary.
Of course creators do not know how much money any particular video will make, but the implied social contract has always been that good videos will do well, for some definition of “good”. And no part of that definition of good has anything to do with bots abusing copyright systems.
> This makes it sound like this is an overt decision by YouTube to stop monetizing a 3B1B video rather than an abuse of automated systems. The difference is important.
There is no difference. Google's overt decision to continue operating automated systems that enable this abuse is the cause, and that is unlikely to change because Google does not care. It is cheaper to allow abuse than to change their system (more human intervention and effort). "The purpose of the system is what it does."
If you as a creator decide to operate on a platform where the owner has no intention of changing their automated systems, and therefore this is a potential outcome, you are playing Russian roulette with your income stream (if any). That is a choice. Your income could disappear at any time with no recourse. There is no social contract at play between creators and Google, only Google optimizing for its shareholders.
This is the way. Channels are channels, you must have a robust web of mechanisms to reach out to your network to maintain it, with no single points of failure.
It only makes it slightly more difficult. People will just ask cloudflare (et al.) to take it down, and they will obey. Keeping anything online in the face of opposition is very very difficult.
And if you're a reader/listener/viewer you need to have somewhere to save things you enjoy or find useful. Make a habit of saving everything you want to keep to hardware you own.
can we start permanently banning companies that submit false-positive takedown requests?
3 strikes for them should result in not being able to submit any strikes anymore and all their content being removed
if the content creator can get their channel removed, same thing must apply to the opposite side as well
When I first saw this I was reminded of the Mend it Mark copyright takedown event where he fixed and documented a phono preamp and the maker of that preamp filed a copyright take down against the video.
You can just create a new company. There is an asymmetry there which your tit for tat approach does not take into consideration. And no, creating a new channel requires far more work.
I don't mean banning the company which does the takedown submission, I mean the company that actually owns the copyright. That would result in companies being a lot more vary in terms of whom to trust with such job.
So if I make 3 bogus takedown requests based on stairway to heaven's copyright being violated, no one can make copyright strikes based on stairway to heaven?
I know that it's rather opaque, but I'm pretty certain Google does basic reputation tracking. When they manually revert this, the ChainPatrol account won't have as much power.
> Surely YouTube making a knowingly false allegation of tortfeasance against someone is libel.
It's hardly libel for YouTube to state that they've received a copyright claim, and taken the video down as a consequence. They're just stating facts, they're not making any assertions regarding the accuracy or correctness of the copyright claim, simply stating that it exists.
> Continued libel that inhibits the democratic exercise of free speech seems like something the government should act on?
You seem to misunderstand what free speech means. Free speech means protection from the government from having your speech prevented, or compelled. That same protection extends to companies. To have the government punish YouTube for failing to distribute a video, would itself be violating YouTube's own free speech, and in the US, and clear and obvious violation of the 1st ammendment.
It feels like the org issuing the copyright claims would be at fault for any lost revenue.
If the org hadn't issued the false claim, the channel wouldn't've had the video taken down. If a channel hits three strikes for it and is nuked in entirety, the lost revenue is even larger.
I think this misunderstands the sense in which 230 is at issue. It's not that 230 itself requires anything --- it's that its a law in place at the whim of lawmakers who granted it expecting a certain sort of behaviour. The relevant claim is, "if youtube doesn't behave more neutrally, expect one side of the political divide to elect people who will make it". This is how the intention of the law is currently read: that it will persist so long as platforms do, in effect, treat user content without editorial bias.
Perhaps my phrasing wasn't that clear. By "deem" I mean, unless the gov starts regulating youtube like a utility.
It seems fairly likely that this intention behind 230 will be codified soon, and an explicit notion of a "platform" (as in the DMA) will be introduced.
The idea that utilities, "platforms", and the like function in a way which requires 'equal treatment' is common across the law -- since they function much like states in the provision of universal services, or public spaces.
Thus the "well, actually!" objection to a narrow reading of the principle of free speech is really the one which misunderstand the principles at play and the evolving legal and social understanding of mass-participation online platforms.
> if youtube doesn't behave more neutrally, expect one side of the political divide to elect people who will make it
There have been plenty of threats by various politicians already, to enforce “neutrality” on entities like YouTube. But a couple of persistent issues keep rearing their ugly heads.
1. How do you determine “political neutrality”? The only way to be truly neutral is to do zero moderation of any content, and nobody is seriously suggesting that’s a good idea.
2. On what basis could YouTube be ruled a utility? If even ISPs aren’t considered utilities, then how on earth can YouTube be a utility? Utilities are services that generally considered as a basic requirement for participating in civil society. It not clear how anyone could consider YouTube such an essential service.
> Thus the "well, actually!" objection to a narrow reading of the principle of free speech is really the one which misunderstand the principles at play and the evolving legal and social understanding of mass-participation online platforms.
In the U.S. such a reading of the first amendment, and the principle of free speech, has been consistently and repeatedly upheld by U.S. courts. Law makers can’t legislate their way around that, they would need to literally change the U.S. constitution. Something that requires a 2/3 majority in both congress and the senate, plus 3/4 of all state legislatures need to ratify it as well. For better or worse, the U.S. constitution provides no flexibility for the “evolving legal and social understanding of mass-participation online platforms.”
An environment where the U.S. government (and specifically the U.S. government) starts engaging in such aggressive regulation of entities like YouTube, is so distant from current state of free speech in the US, that’s it’s a practically useless argument to consider. So much of the political, legal and social framework of the U.S. will have changed, that it would effectively be an entirely different country and culture to what exists today.
When the copyright strike is issued a video is taken offline from the publishers channel.
In general, the racketeers will ask for a fee whether they have rights to the IP or not. They play the numbers counting on people not calling their bluff, and googles limited 3 strikes policy on channel publishers.
It is a problem only slightly less nasty than channel hijacking. =3
Content ID is just as bad... if not worse... given no one checks for fair-use cases. A lot of old public-domain stock-footage was re-uploaded under dubious conditions, and will get your content auto flagged.
A policy I think would be interesting: copyright violation stops being about who is able to post what, and starts being about who is profiting from what. Content takedowns are impossible, but affected artists are directly and nontransferrably allowed to legally assert rights to the profits directly derived from their content and can legally reclaim lost funds. Preferably there would be a similar mechanism for false claims. No one loses money they aren’t entitled to, the rightsholder doesn’t need to play whack-a-mole to enforce an artificial monopoly, and no disruption for viewers in any case.
We need something that frees us from this prison. I still remember when it was normal for youtube videos to play mainstream music in the background. Now draconian enforcement has created this artificial power that people beyond music labels can abuse, and it affects our art adversely. Feels clear to me we need something new that operates in 2024, not from the era where individual movie pirates faced 6-7 figure fines and jail time.
CinemaStix has also been fighting these lately. In their case, YouTube seems to have zero regard for Fair Use, and short-sighted film rights holders are striking every video containing any amount of their film, even though the publicity CinemaStix gives them likely increases sales.
The year is 2030. After the AI bot wars, FaceBook and Google have been crippled. They let AI automation control their content and it was deleted after OpenAI GPT10 discovered vulnerabilities in automated copyright strikes.
Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
> Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
When I saw that movie when I was small, I thought that was literally Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Burger King, et al fighting with tanks, etc. Taco Bell emerged victorious after a bloody struggle.
> It is the year 2040, all environmental disasters and the economic Resource Wars from the early 21st century have decimated the fragile ecosystem balance of an Earth once teeming with life.
The first part of this episode is near identical to my mental picture of the "franchise wars:"
Imagination is an umbrella term that includes headcanon, but headcanon has a much more narrow and communicative meaning to do specifically with interpreting missing or ambiguous details in established fictional universes by fans or other people who aren't part of the creative team for that universe. Using the word that best fits the idea you're trying to communicate is good, actually. Also, while English does have real words what makes a word real is nothing more than whether when one English speaker uses is can they reasonably expect other English speakers to understand it. Given that everyone who read this thread had no problem understanding the word "headcanon" (including you, despite your protestations, as you were able to define a synonym) that means it's a Real English Word(tm)(c)(r).
'headcanon' is jargon within general fandom. The term refers to the application of imagination against the established canon of a body of fiction, to expand upon that body of work.
Example:
- Superman being from Krypton is canon.
- Superman not truly being the son of Jor-El, because his mom slept around, might be one fan's headcanon.
It's from Old French all right, but probably not because there was no existing word. Old English Translator[1] suggests geþanc (a bit similar to the modern German Gedanke) or the verb wénan, both of which can be confirmed by Bosworth & Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary[2].
The Normans introduced French as the prestige language of England when they invaded, but Anglo-Saxons would have wanted to express the concept of imagination way earlier. If they had wanted to, they could have borrowed the word from Classical Latin imāginor without the 'help' of the Normans.
We all got a$$holes and opinions and most of them stink.
You give me your stinky opinion saying mine stinks.
Well, you're wrong of course.
A claim to "evolution" meaning "change" is simply an excuse for anything. Evolution is about selection and I'm the big bad wolf eating your baby children: you go extinct. That's evolution, not some cheesy anything goes resignation.
"Other people can do what they want" is not an opinion, it's a fact of life. You can deal with it, or you can get so upset that you try to physically stop them. Is that something you want to do over the use of language?
Evolution is not about "selection", you're referring to a biological concept known as natural selection. I'm sorry to tell you, the evolution of a system simply means the development of the system over time. Feel free to check a dictionary. You should look up "homonym" while you're at it.
For someone so bent on controlling the English language, you should put more time into understanding it.
No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.
> No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.
Also, Joe seemed genuinely interested in helping everyone, and didn't seem to neglect the needs of significant portions of the population to achieve some ideological goal or another.
Maybe there's such a thing as being too smart to have power.
To be fair Camacho was setting up Not Sure to be the fall guy. I don't think he really thought Not Sure could fix things.
That being said, it is a society who elected the smartest guy in the world president, and then when a smarter guy came along elected him as the successor.
When I watched the movie I laughed and thought it all ridiculous. I've since been shown that having well-intentioned, self-aware, cooperative people in government is probably more important than their intelligence.
In Idiocracy the masses are aware that things are not as good as they once were, they recognize and value competent people, and then voluntarily agree to put them in power so that things may be fixed.
IMO that is a depiction of some kind of meritocratic utopia - exactly the opposite of what we have, on all accounts mentioned above.
There is something subtly wrong with the world as presented in that "documentary" in general it is that somebody has to keep the lights on, the machines running, that is, there is too much working infrastructure for the citizens ability level. I suspect the big corporations maintain a hidden educated population and are happy to run the world from the shadows.
Now honestly it is just a goofy movie premise, and we should not look too far into it, but sometimes it is fun to go full nerd.
It could be that many people just died in between and there's a lot of remaining operational equipment that past smart people built. Costco is massive.
"America's funniest home videos" got dumbed down to "AFV" and the content was mostly "ow, my balls!". They even added a warning to the viewers to submit "wows, not ows".
Although to be fair,some of that happened before Idiocracy came out.
With the public money used for sports stadiums, that element of the movie to have government sports teams is slowly coming true also.
that's a good point. They are tightly integrated into the college whose charter is to educate. whereas a pro team will take anyone for the express purpose of the performing the sport well.
Further, colleges receive public money but are not free to attend for most students. And I am not talking about "free" from the students perspective, I mean most would not be permitted to enroll if significant tuition dollars were not deposited (unlike public schools, for instance). Also, plenty of colleges are private but have NCAA teams.
If you search YouTube for "fail army" there is clearly a whole ad supported business model for revenue from something that is about the same as "ow, my balls!"
The movie was based on the (indisputable?) fact that intelligence is heritable- but not Eugenics, which takes that a step further and advocates for people deciding which other people are inferior and superior and organizing society around that. One could argue that the movie tries to make a case for eugenics, but it didn’t directly do so. I think the movie could also be seen as looking at culture instead of genetics, and also assuming that is passed down from parents.
I agree that it does wrongly depict poverty as a major indicator of intelligence.
For better or worse, "eugenics" at this point is basically a cultural repulsion field surrounding most of practical aspects of genetics. You dare to even suggest there are measurable genetic differences between people, and someone will shout "eugenics", rounding any conversation down to "yeah nazis said the same thing".
I suspect your idea of “practical aspects of genetics” includes ideas about how people different from you shouldn’t be allowed reproduce, and very little about things like researching the function of a newly discovered microbial enzyme.
Not really. It does, however, include ideas such as "perhaps we should learn to correct genetic diseases directly in the reproductive cells", which is a rounding error away from someone saying something like you just did.
The intro of the movie makes it pretty clear that their premise is "IQ is heritable, and stupid people have more kids." It's not a coincidence that the "high IQ" couple is portrayed as wealthy and the "low IQ" people are shown as poor.
Thank you. It's astonishing to me how few people remember the text of this movie -- it is so clearly saying dumb people are breeding, smart people are not.
There’s a payday loan biz that has taken over a former Taco Bell site in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s a bizarre look as the detached building still features all the weird faux-Mexican motifs of the former tenant. It’s also one of the first things seen when entering the city via the most significant gateway from Toronto.
Demolition Man (movie) joke... but the AI bot wars stuff makes it still relevant to the conversation so this is both funny and cautionary / discussion worthy material.
but don't forget that even after the fall of civilisation, there will still be hope in the form of the probe bearing a vial of Elon Musk's semen to Alpha Centari
I'd like to think no one knows how the seashells work and the real joke is everyone just makes fun of people for not knowing (the writer didn't even know what they did and refuses to say anything other than how they came into the story)
No they played that one pretty straight. You were supposed to be just as confused as MC. If they wanted you to think anything else, they would have given a knowing wink.
It truly protected web3 from the "normies" that could have learned about crypto from this video. AI moderation is such a joke, every reupload (or a completely different video on the same subject) can take a video down because they look "similar" enough for the AI and no person would bother checking it. I expected a different treatment of their bigger creators, but that's what it is.
I wonder if it makes sense for someone to do a huge IP troll bot network to make copyright claims on all the big YouTubers in such an egregious and in-your-face wrong way that youtube would be forced to redesign or remove the system. It'd suck for a bit but I think this slow burn affecting people that can't defend themselves (3blue1brown can) is worse.
Here's my guess what would happen: Youtube will have a word with their contacts in government and in short order you'd end up in a court room for some nebulous federal crime about malicious use of computers and hacking and they'd have no concerns about locking you up for decades. Oh and absolutely nothing about Youtube's attitude to copyright would change.
Take a look at Aaron Swartz's case for example, people may be sympathetic to his motives but he still got pursued for a 50 year federal sentence and ended up killing himself.
You’re probably assuming youtube doesn’t know about the scale of this problem and all it takes is to show it. It absolutely does know it and “be big enough to get human assistance” is their conscious mode of operation. They couldn’t care less about what’s right, because it’s not money.
Of course youtube knows, the point is to make all the users and creators pissed with them in a critical moment, vs slowly burning with mild annoyance forever.
I apologize in advance for not offering something constructive to say. I just wish anyone here who is younger could see the difference between what the promise of the web was in ‘95 and what it has become. Such a burning pile of trash, it’s heartbreaking.
After looking at the websites for ChainPatrol and Arbitrum, I still have no idea what's going on here. How do these two things combine to result in a YouTube copyright claim? What sort of videos are they supposed to be issuing takedowns for?
The crypto YouTube scams are incredibly sophisticated. Bitcoin is the best currency for scammers bar none, so millions from nation states like North Korea will pour into this to decimate lowly pensioners scared for their future.
3b1b is basically a causality in this war of greed.
With AI exponentially accelerating effects of Dead Internet, I think any social or content-sharing platforms will require some form of Digital ID that can't be easily created/mass-generated (e.g. maybe tie bank account to it?).
That would put real consequences on users misusing platforms. Even a small fee for misbehavior would likely curtail vast swathes of bad actors. It would also make companies be less trigger-happy with their bots if such are allowed to operate in that ID framework (i.e. an identifiable bot being punished would be a fee subtracted from the company that uses it).
I pretty much expect that kind of system in the future, otherwise we will just return back to private networks and private communities.
Companies bread much faster than humans can. So in that new internet where we ID every participant we should not equate company and human. And fines are not the solution as some actors can buy their way out with unlimited funds (compared to regular human)
Are there any other copies of this video out there? Since it's a bogus claim, the video should be able to be posted elsewhere --- YouTube can't be the only source of record.
They don't but if it is a popular video the likelyhood of it being archived increases. It is possible to submit URLs to archive.org manually too. Also the youtube videos downloaded by archiveteam volunteers[0] possibly end up in wayback machine though I'm not sure if it happens automatically anymore.
In the future we will maybe need a physical ID (or other sufficiently costly proof) to post a video or file a complaint or do stuff other than consume.
I don't know though, maybe that will prove to be too hard and the bot filled platforms will win. In which case maybe the only way to be safe from the bot armies is to hire a bigger bot army yourself. Fun!
That's not quite what I mean. Being a llc doesn't help you within the Youtube Content ID system. What I'm wondering is could you have a second entity you control make claims against your own videos - or do claims stack. i.e.: Would you still be vulnerable to vexatious claims from a third party.
> The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies"
Tech built on copyright abuse used for copyright trolling? Too early for peak irony of 2025!
I understand this isn't a DMCA request, so quite a few legal remedies are unavailable for abusing the Youtube reporting system. But it seems like "tortious interference" would still apply here. Is there some reason it wouldn't?
Tortious Interference might apply, but how much money was actually lost? 2 days of ad revenue on a video from 2017 is not much, certainly not enough to pay the lawyers for a lawsuit.
Isn't this very strong evidence in favor of a thesis that HN hates? That the most important networks (like YouTube) ought to be decentralized? Unfortunately, a strike in favor of the blockchain people — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).
A genuine question: can you clarify what you mean by temporarily decentralized? Seeing SMTP lumped in the same category as Bluesky made me realize I don't know what you mean.
The best argument in your favor is that Gmail captured 80% market share. Or that hosting your own mail server is a full-time job. However, this doesn't mean email isn't decentralized.
> Or that hosting your own mail server is a full-time job.
Many others have said so in the past, but I think it's worth saying again: this isn't true. With a good foundation in system administration, hosting an email server is not a full-time job; it's barely part-time.
I self-host an email server for myself; it has reasonable spam protection plus calendar and contacts synchronization. Gmail, Fastmail, GMX etc. accepts my outgoing emails. It took me around three days full-time to learn everything and set it up (from starting the virtual machine to fully working) and then an hour or two each month after that to keep it maintained. Please feel welcome to say hello with it :)
Email is ostensibly a decentralized system. But in its real-world use, it is centralized both at the application layer and at the protocol layer.
At the application layer, email clients (like the Gmail or iOS email app) are typically bundled with a reliance on centralized email hosting (running the mail server) and relying on their centrally-controlled name (@gmail.com, @icloud.com, etc.). This in turn gives the app developers significant leverage against the protocol layer, since they completely control how their users (through their app) interact with the protocol layer.
At the protocol layer, email relies heavily on a de facto reputation system, since any valuable and truly decentralized and permissionless system will have an abundance of spam. The reputation system is used to filter spam and isolate bad actors. This is why running a home email server is not really what this is about: it's about who you need to rely on to have your emails delivered.
The challenge isn't designing a protocol without reliance on any single actor. What's difficult is designing a protocol that can avoid becoming de facto centralized when critical features (like spam prevention, registration, etc.) need to be filled in by agents outside of the protocol.
The crypto people recognize this and that's why they want to build the economics explicitly into their protocols (a critically important part of any protocol; all protocols without exception have economic components whether one recognizes this or not). This is also why they emphasize global consensus and more.
Hacker News and others hate blockchains because they see the scams (which happen in all permissionless systems, and they are even more obvious when the financial components nakedly visible). Yet HN laments when the properties of decentralization that they love and value are lost for seemingly mysterious reasons ("dead internet theory", "enshittification"). The truth is that the reasons are right in front of us.
I mean, it's good they are doing the right thing here, even if it were only damage control. But doesn't give a lot of confidence they won't harm creators who don't yet have 3b1b's reach.
I hope YouTube can make this a better experience extremely soon.
With YouTube video being used as a proxy for credible content on search results..
3 relatively anonymous complaints, in bad faithc can end so much learning and work… without evidence or reply kind of is deterring from having great content on YouTube.
The deterrent to creating good content on YouTube lets the bad content win, except it might not keep the eyeballs for advertising as well or broadly.
I’m not sure if the complainant must be required to contact the channel prior to accepting a dmca complaint? EBay has a built in messaging system, maybe YouTube can too.
Further if there’s ways creators can be protecting their creations before posting they should be built into the workflow, whether it’s registering custom music, etc.
Otherwise the price of success is targetable in an automated fashion to take down a channel if they don’t comply or pay out.
A channel inbox might force behaviour into first creator to creator before escalating straight to too easily triggering things.
Maybe new complainants found to have too many complaints in short order or some other pattern could possibly have to pass much higher kyc requirements to help each other communicate more effectively.
Are there any nations that have laws that require investigation before takedowns, or at least have financial punishment for issuing incorrect takedowns?
Why don't we build a video hosting service served from there, if such a place exists?
from https://x.com/ChainPatrol/status/1876300596182983151
" Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at @ChainPatrol . We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again.
We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.
We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it's never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We're very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction. "
This seems like a huge abuse of the copyright system to me. It sounds to me like ChainPatrol doesn't actually have any IP to protect, but they are instead deputizing YouTube's copyright system to fight what they deem to be crypto scams. Absolutely wild if true.
There are lots of “companies” like this. Don’t think about buying this apologetic do-gooder tone, it’s an id claim troll trying to cover his ass after touching something they can get face punched for by the whole internet. Which the internet should do anyway. Imagine what it did and continues to do to channels no one cares about that much. These parasites don’t deserve to exist, regardless of the official stance.
Big tech companies are not complaint with copyright, only with its interpretation made up by themselves.
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Anything bitcoin related is wild today. Big and free money make people lose their damn minds.
This is not just a bitcoin issue.
See: Sports gambling, prediction markets, pay-later apps. Gamified finance in general encourages risky behavior.
I'll offer a slight adjustment; "Finance in general encourages risky behavior". It is an industry explicitly dealing in moving and dealing in risk.
We periodically become very aware of this. See financial news in 1893, 1901, 1907, 1910, 1914, 1920, 1937, 1949, 1953, 1961, 1970, 1973, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2011, and so on and so on.
It's almost as if a zero-sum, value neutral industry controlling the bulk of world finance is inherently a very very bad idea.
What part is zero-sum?
Speculative assets are by definition are zero-sum.
If they go to infinite or to zero, they still produce zero.
You're confusing things that you value in life with things with economic value.
Also you don't seem to see that something that stores your economic value better than anything else (the "infinite" outcome) would be of great value to your life.
You could also see it as economic value is commonly extremely divorced from any useful human measure of value. Enough money to feed the world is "made" and "lost" though market oscillations that aren't really based in any practical reality. Like Tesla being worth more than the rest of the next 35 car companies, say. Or just one of the several apps that calls a cab being worth the GDP of Kenya. Or the value of Bitcoin.
The fiction is that the market is an infinitely rational representation of value, denominated in the same units humans buy food and shelter with, and generally correlated with their ability to do so. But it seems "the economy" has less and less to do with life on the ground.
Economic value is entirely rooted in life on the ground, but it is simply the demand part of the equation.
Its equal to demand (in £) divided by supply (kg/gallon/BTC etc).
Market oscillations are all based in practical reality, but if they don't make sense, you're just not aware of their cause. For example, multiple traders around the world simultaneously buying /selling with high leverage according to obscure technical analysis of the price chart.
What distorts everything is that the value of what we measure economic value in is itself devalued by 50% every decade through supply inflation. Economic value over time != price over time.
https://imgur.com/a/1ljSLgA
I mean this is what all the textbooks say, but it's cold comfort to people who want bread, clean water, a roof and a warm bed rather than some economist-approved funny money on a graph somewhere.
Everyone's been told to trust the system, the market knows best. At this rate, I don't think they will continue to do indefinitely.
Now we're on a completely different subject, but that's fine.
Trust what system exactly?
If there was no poverty, there would be no motivation to work and build a roof over your head or grow crops to make bread. Unfortunately, the funny money that I show in the graph means that it's not a fair playing field.
If you want to fix the world, fix the money. The world is desperately in need of a digital money that can't be created with no effort, and by just a few select people (i.e. banks). The money we're using is toxic.
Sorry to butt in, but
>If there was no poverty, there would be no motivation to work and build a roof over your head or grow crops to make bread.
The motivation would be to maintain one’s station, whether that station were impoverished or rich. Most of America isn’t in poverty, yet still works hard to try and achieve higher status, greater luxury, etc.
>the money we’re using is toxic
Is this the root cause behind productivity gains not going to workers for the last five decades? Genuine question, cause that’s the main issue I see.
> The motivation would be to maintain one’s station, whether that station were impoverished or rich. Most of America isn’t in poverty, yet still works hard to try and achieve higher status, greater luxury, etc.
Poverty is relative, but I do recognise the distinction between needs (survival) and wants.
> Is this the root cause behind productivity gains not going to workers for the last five decades? Genuine question, cause that’s the main issue I see.
Yes! Absolutely. I believe it's the primary mechanism that's behind the enormous gains in efficiency going to the rich rather than the general population.
It's a deep subject, but to try and summarise as best I can: Every decade in the USA the banking system and government combined creates double the currency out of thin air (in the form of loans) and charge interest on it [https://imgur.com/a/1ljSLgA]. The deal is that they must destroy the money when it's repaid. By keeping interest rates below the natural free market rate, they both monopolise lending and incentivise borrowing and so the total borrowed just keeps increasing over time. They can still profit enormously because the money they lend is not really theirs and was created out of nothing as the "loan" was made.
This has been going on for decades and sped up in 1971 (wtfhappenedin1971.com) when the dollar was "temporarily" non-redeemable for gold (because of all the money printing they had already done)
Each time the money supply doubles, the value of the monetary unit halves. It works out at about 7% a year over the last 100 years.
It's no coincidence that that's the approximate rate of increase in real-estate prices over the decades. It's not real-estate going up in value - it's that the dollar is falling in value.
Consummables are falling in value at around 5% a year (due to the productivity gains), giving a net price increase of 7-5 = 2%. So if you are getting an annual nominal pay rise of say 2%, you're actually getting a pay cut of 7-2=5%, but "luckily" consumables are falling in value at the same rate, so you can still afford food, a car etc. What you can no longer afford are the things that haven't gone down in value - hard assets like real estate, gold etc. - things that have a relatively constant supply/demand and therefore, value. These are the things that the bankers and their friends buy with all the interest they are collecting.
By giving the entire world a stealth 5% pay cut each year, the banks and those closest to the money printers are stealing away all the productivity gains. Look up the Cantillon Effect. It's a kind of pyramid scheme where the bankers take the main gains, but then reward those who support the system by taking out loans with a cut. Once you realise that the money is devalued at a faster rate than the interest, you can see that you're paying back less economic value than you borrowed, even with interest. The people who really suffer are the savers who have their savings stolen essentially at a rate of 7% minus whatever interest rate they are getting. Obviously pensions are affected too. Anything that's denominated in dollars, pounds, euros etc.
It all started with banks lending out the gold you'd given them to look after, behind your back. A fraud that has grown to monumental proportions. They are now collecting interest on all the money in the world, and they printed it all out of thin air.
What job is going to send you home if you finish a days work in an hour instead of going you more stuff to do? it's as simple as that.
Sure. But what they are really doing is giving you a pay cut each year without you realising, and the bankers and their friends closest to the money printers are pocketing it.
Compounding even 3% annual cut in real value adds up to an 80% pay cut over 50 years.
Even worse the people nearest the money printers are largely engaged in the business of starting (and most frequently losing) foreign wars of choice. The human suffering created by the system is immense.
Yes. As they're incentivised to "lend" (print) as much money as they can, to obtain the interest, the outcome is that they're encouraged to start wars and fund both sides, because war generates the highest demand for loans. The longer the war lasts, the better.
Inflation makes the problem worse, but even if inflation were zero percent, no company is going to tell its employees they can work 1 hour per week because the company is paying for the employees time.
On top of that, the fundamental competition inherent to a free market says that a company with employees that only worked 1 hour per week would be out competed by a company full of employees that worked more than that. (Up to a point, obviously.), so the company can't let it's employees take advantage of increased productivity with a shorter work weeks in order to stay competitive.
Getting rid of fractional reserve banking and inflation isn't going to change those underlying facts of capitalism.
Its not about working less, it's about not having your wages stolen. If people understood they were getting a pay cut each year, they likely wouldn't stand for it. Instead they celebrate it as a pay rise but wonder why they can't afford nice things like a traditional family with an average-sized house and 2 kids, holidays etc, all paid for only by the husband who has an average job while the wife stays at home.
> You're confusing things that you value in life with things with economic value.
If you think about it, the "economic" value is just the market trying to discover what everyone value in life.
> Also you don't seem to see that something that stores your economic value better than anything else (the "infinite" outcome) would be of great value to your life.
Finding a cure for cancer will be infinite value and most people will give anything for it - including all Bitcoins in the world. This - finding the cure of cancer - is the way better store of value than anything. The reverse is not true.
That's only demand.
Economic value = supply / demand.
Do you value air?
It's worthless. I wouldn't buy a litre of air for even a penny. But put me at the bottom of the sea, out of oxygen (i.e. no supply), and I'd give you everything I have for it.
The part of the world economy that moves value from one person to another, without creating any value, is zero-sum.
There's no such thing.
You can definitely use your IP to take down scams.
If someone is using your name or your company's name to scam people, it is in your interest to save your name and provide people assurance that they can do business with your name.
>You can definitely use your IP to take down scams.
Key point being, that you have IP to use in the first place. But the parents' contention is that ChainPatrol and/or their clients don't have such IP, and are merely weaponizing the copyright/trademark takedown process to take down scams, which isn't the same thing.
My understanding is that arbitrum has an IP, but this video was not using their IP, that it was a false positive in terms of identifying the IP, in addition to a false positive of malicious intent.
What you are saying is that these claims never relate to IP and it was only a false positive of malicious intent?
>What you are saying is that these claims never relate to IP and it was only a false positive of malicious intent?
I'm not sure how you got that impression. If you read my previous comment it's pretty clear I only objected on the basis they don't have relevant IP, not on the principle of being able to use IP to issue take down scams.
That's a use of a trademark claim, not a copyright claim. And a good example of why trademark protection is valuable.
It's true that trademarks are the best tool for that kind of protection, and that it is distinct from copyright. Note that I used the term IP though, which is a yet third distinct term.
Scammers often use more than just your name. They often take content from your site too to try to make theirs look like yours.
The claim was they have no IP.
There aren't that many channels with over 5M subscribers. 3Blue1Brown is 706th in the world. It's insane to me that YouTube still doesn't have a manual sanity check for claims against their top ~1000 channels or so. That couldn't possibly cost much, and it would fix a PR problem that hits so often you can use it as a calendar.
The reason they don't is because they've made their own version of the DMCA takedown system but my understanding is that that system/law gives the strongest liability safe harbor if the platform just takes things down in response to takedown requests without taking any steps to validate them. The weaselly lawyer approved version is to just let the claimant and the poster duke it out with counter responses etc and just be passive.
At the very least they could trigger a real qualified human review of it immediately.
Costs money. (Probably not a lot, but you know the drill: to a large company, any expense is treated as a threat, no matter how small.)
> We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.
So did ChainPatrol have the video taken down for copyright infringement or for "attempting to steal user funds"? Did ChainPatrol have to file an actual DMCA takedown notice to take down 3Blue1Brown's video? If so, would this not be perjury?
> Did ChainPatrol have to file an actual DMCA takedown notice to take down 3Blue1Brown's video?
Probably not. Youtube has their own system which is not DMCA claim based.
Sounds like he got a copyright strike, which means a DMCA takedown, not a Content ID claim.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7002106
> not a Content ID claim.
That is my understanding too. We do not have a disagreement on that.
> he got a copyright strike, which means a DMCA takedown
Here is where we disagree. A youtube copyright notice / copyright strike is not the same as a DMCA takedown.
The DMCA takedown process as described in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Title II. Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act provides more rights for the content owner whose work got maliciously or mistakenly taken down. They have access to a counter notification process and §512(f) makes those who knowingly materially misrepresent content as infringing liable for damages. You don't have the same rights and affordances with the youtube copyright notification system.
It is similar. If you squint it looks the same. But it is not the same.
> A youtube copyright notice / copyright strike is not the same as a DMCA takedown.
Yes it is. YouTube doesn’t magically get to ignore the DMCA, so their process is built around that (along with layering Content ID on top to allow for a middle ground where videos can stay up but redirect some or all monetization to the copyright holder).
If you click through the link I posted above, you’ll get to this page which shows the complete process, including the counter-notification step: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13823830 Do you have reason to believe 3blue1brown can’t file a counter-notification in this case?
Does YouTube's system also make a malicious complainer liable for damages? The DMCA does. Here's the relevant section of the law mentioned by krisoft:
(f) Misrepresentations.—Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing, or (2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer [...]
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf
The "knowingly" makes it useless.
Hmmm. I see what you say. You convinced me! Thank you.
DMCA’s perjury provision is completely toothless; it might as well not be there. It doesn’t even require you affirm a copyright violation, just that you act on behalf of the rightsholder.
This is a perfect example of how ineffective it is.
Barratry law does cover this. I eagerly wait for the day a lawyer is censured for violating their oath with this BS.
misdemeanor. up to 1k fine. if even exists in your state.
so toothless also.
The point is to besmirch their record with the bar association.
> The point is to besmirch their record with the bar association.
That effectively means nothing if every copyright lawyer eventually gets one.
In fact, I personally bet that it would be treated as a dividing mark between a newbie copyright lawyer & a professional copyright lawyer.
> If so, would this not be perjury?
IIRC the only perjury penalty to DMCA filers is if they are acting on behalf of some copyright they know they don't own or aren't authorized to protect.
Haha, they see themselves as ‘good cops,’ deciding what content is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s not even about copyright—it’s about what they think is good for users and what isn’t.
And in the process of playing ‘police’ they end up taking down one of the best videos explaining how Bitcoin works.
They probably should've consulted with a lawyer before making that statement. It sounds like a footgun that would help any prospective litigant build a case against you.
I’m sure that “corrupt cop looking away” is their core business model.
This is par for the course in crypto communities. There are multiple competing Bitcoin subreddits, mainly because each one decides which info to censor because they don't like a particular coin/fork/tech.
It took three people on Reddit to start a rumor that Anne Hathaway was a bad person. Probably due to they thought her as Catwoman was going to be like Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern. And they were still seething over Katie Holmes.
Shakespeare’s wife?
> It took three people on Reddit to start a rumor that Anne Hathaway was a bad person
Start a rumor amongst a couple hundred crypto bros that no one else pays attention to.
Phishing scam videos are not good for anyone, why would you want people impersonating your brand stealing your users funds?
So the big-name channel gets a personal response. What about the many non-famous channels that ChainPatrol must have made false claims against? How many strikes or false claims does ChainPatrol get before they are permanently booted off YouTube and all their revenue streams get taken from them?
This seems to be a new shakedown racket of a business. "Subscribe for our services, or be victim to our shoddy automated takedown notices". Not too dissimilar to online ID protection services, that simultaneously sell your information
That doesn't make much sense, at least in this particular case. ChainPartrol's website describes themselves as "Real-time Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies", so it's unlikely that youtube creators would subscribe to such a service. Maybe if they were issuing takedown request for other "Web3 Companies" this allegation would have some merit, but that's not what happened here.
Taken at face value, this implies their copyright infringement claim was fraudulent, but in pursuit of a higher good.
But according to many replies to that tweet, they were actually working on behalf of actual copyright infringers.
Not sure what to believe.
It's common for one set of scammers to target another, to take their competitors out. So it's quite possible for them to be abusing the copyright system to take-out scamming competitors.
Heh, PirateSoftware, he talks about this, being both sec ops and having worked at blizzard. Apparently it's really common for the big coin farmers (which blizzard doesn't like, and would ban if they could identify all the players) to tell blizzard about zero day exploits to prevent their competitors from using them and crashing the market for gold.
Either way, someone needs to sue them.
Unless they're compensating the entirety of the Youtuber's lost revenue, this is worth as much as a granny tech support scammer claiming they were really planning to help out granny fix her computer.
Pure evil.
As always, this is only possible when a post like this appears in a site like HN and the community outrage forces YouTube/Google to take action.
This will continue happening to smaller channels and creators, and they will continue to have their content stolen.
They're only doing this because 3blue1brown named and shamed. Remember, kids, always name and shame malevolent actions.
You need to name and shame… and also have enough influence to have your post rise against the sea of garbage out there.
Most people’s post wouldn’t get looked at at all, 3blue1brown is fortunate to have such a large audience so that his complaint gets looked at by a human.
i don't understand how this connects to copyright claims. who is the user whos funds is being stolen?
A common thing scammers do is copy material from other sites that the scammer's victims are familiar with and trust. The scammers put that material in their own sites to try to trick the victims into thinking that are on the site they trust.
Yeah so I imagine how this would work to steal people’s funds in this case is to take copyrightable brand assets from someweb3company.xyz. Use them to make a youtube video saying something like “someweb3company.xyz is doing a limited time offer of a free thing. Log in with your wallet details at someweb3company.totallylegitoffer.xyz to claim!” Or some variant on that. Logging in with your wallet gives them permission to steal all your stuff. Because “logging in with a web3 wallet” is actually signing something with your private key. That something can be a json token thing for logging in, but it can also be a transaction and the UX is so god-awful that people often don’t pay much attention to which they are doing and get ripped off.
It doesn't, but that's the only way to get blatant scam videos removed from YouTube.
I think https://chainpatrol.io/ is fake. Look at things like the "legal terms." To make a DCMA (US Law) counterclaim, they want "a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Province of Ontario." [0]
If you are unsatisfied with our services, please email us at [EMAIL ADDRESS] and we will address your concerns in a prompt and timely manner. [0]
0. https://chainpatrol.io/legal/terms
See also "Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/fake-ai-law-firms-ar...
They did not even update the "legal terms" page to include a real email address :-(
(I first thought that you redacted in your post)
Ontario is not part of the US.
I think that is the point that the poster was making.
Thank you! BTW, loved you in Goodfellas.
A random company is able to claim copyright infringement for one of the most beloved YouTube channels. WTF is going on at Google and Youtube?
Good morning, isn’t it? This goes for years, happens to every youtuber from time to time. And if they are tiny and have no creators community, they often just swallow the “demonetization” fact.
Demonetisation isn't so bad (i.e. copyright claims). Copyright strikes kill the channel after 3 in a row within a month or so.
This company is basically an extreme nobody and has like 1-3 likes on their posts. It is absurd how imbalanced the power is with regard to automation and copyright strikes.
There's nothing absurd about it, our society is not built about making people with a lot of likes comfortable, it's built around making people who own stuff comfortable.
You don't really need to own much to initiate a bogus copyright strike, so I don't know how that's relevant.
Filing a take down requires a sworn statement of good faith belief the claim is false, so this would appear to be perjury.
And hopefully is punished as such. Too many false claims and YouTube should just block them.
would be nice to see some punishment or compensation. apologizing and retracting the claim doesn't make the victim whole again.
I’m very interested how they think any of their copyright takedown claims pass scrutiny.
From their home page, it looks like their stated goal is to remove brand impersonation materials. Lookalike websites, social media compromises, malicious links, etc. They allege to work with registrars, contribute to blocklists and take down scam content. True brand impersonation of this ilk almost always includes copyright infringement.
Sure it's possible that the company is a truly malicious actor that has a fake website and does not actually submit any valid claims, while working alongside the top brands in the industry to tear down that same industry. Personally though, I think it's more likely the company is a startup rushing to grab profits, has bad algorithms that come up with a lot of false positives, and is generally a bull in a china shop. Not that that's excusable, but being sloppy and taking shortcuts that hurt people is a bit different from being a "copyright hit company" where hurting people is the company's entire raison d'etre. The former calls for better regulation; the latter calls for being stamped out.
I don't know if you've tried to consume any crypto-related content on YouTube recently, but YouTube has a major problem with fake "live streams" from "Elon Musk" and other prominent crypto figures who promise they'll "double your crypto for a limited time" if you just send it to them within the next ten minutes. Someone's gotta fight that, on behalf of both the scam victims and the impersonated brands, because YouTube themselves don't give a shit.
And copyright doesn’t give the ability to fight any of that is the point. This all sounds like abuse of DMCA process.
Pretty sure if someone is misusing your company logo, they’re violating both copyright and trademark, among other things. I’m not a lawyer though.
Depends on the logo. If it's just text or a simple shape, it can't be copyrighted.
3Blue1Brown's logo is (probably) copyrightable, but the TED or Veritasium channel logos are (probably) not. If it could be claimed to be derivative of some other work, public domain or not, you may not fully own the copyright either. In general, it can be a big fuzzy grey area that needs a court to decide fully. Meanwhile, a trademark infringement would be easy to show.
The system intentionally does not require scrutiny.
Youtube implemented this system as part of a lawsuit with Viacom who was going to take them to the cleaners. Putting all the power in the hands of the people making the claim was intentional.
If someone's video gets taken down incorrectly and then later put back up, Google does not care, someone else's video got the ad slots anyway. There's more content on Youtube uploaded every second than can be watched.
is that web3 speak for "we wouldn't want you stealing from the people we are stealing"
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From https://x.com/ChainPatrol/status/1876456092164653328 "We found that this video was never reported in our system, and our system did not flag it. This false positive was due to human error, not bots or AI. One of our analysts, responsible for submitting takedowns, accidentally copied the wrong link while reporting a malicious video."
I think a good baseline might be that you need to deposit say $1M and then when oops, you accidentally made a bogus claim it's OK that $1M is split between the victim of your oopsy and Youtube for their trouble - you just pay $1M to get back into the game. Outfits like this could explain to their investors that while their technology does sometimes have little goofs that cost a few billion dollars per year, once they invent perfect AI they can scale infinitely and make that back easily, so if you invest $10Bn of your fiat currency today, in 18 months they can 100% guarantee nothing in particular, wow.
This works for actual creators, who are occasionally slightly inconvenienced but handsomely rewarded when that occurs, for Youtube, who get paid each time these "rare" mistakes happen, and for the companies "innovating" by making up nonsense and taking people's money. Just as well the "investment" goes to a Youtuber as to some random office park or an ad firm.
> a good baseline might be that you need to deposit say $1M
This is a license to rip off the copyrights of anyone without a million dollars in cash.
I don't think so, since YouTube is operating their extrajudicial "go the extra mile for copyright holders" copyright claim system. It isn't required by law and this is what's being abused, not plain DMCA claims. For regular claimants, the regular (and free) DMCA system would still be in effect.
The bonus is that filing fraudulent DMCA claims has real legal repercussions under the law. I don't know if there's any real consequence for lying about copyright ownership to Google under their made-up claim system.
It isn't required by law, it's required by people who would sue the pants off it if it didn't kowtow to them.
Which is way scarier than something required by law. Law can be lobbied about and changed. Law has limits. Law can be ignored when you are rich and powerful.
Lawsuits from megacorps, on the other hand, cannot.
I smell IANAL
Nah, I'd expect under this model insurance would become readily available. Insurers live on the margins, so even though it would cost a lot of money if you crash that boring mid-range car into somebody's house, the insurer doesn't charge you a lot of money to insure you against that risk, they're betting that on average you're not going to do that. As a safeguard they probably don't insure kids who just got bought a Ferrari as their first car, or anybody who has just done time for crashing their car into a house on purpose, but mostly they're just playing the numbers.
Insurance would only work if the funds didn't have to be provided upfront, just in response to a failure.
Nah, you can subcontract a provider who bonds the 1M and puts their reputation on the line. If they deem your claim fit they can charge 500$ or 1k
That's already the status quo, random nobodies with their art ripped off by OpenAI or some content mill on YouTube don't have the benefit of hiring companies to perform takedowns.
Wouldn't this mean that the only people able to make claims in the first place are people with $1M to spare? It might deter aggressive claims, but also prevent individuals from making claims on violations of their copyrights.
I think it's Finland where if the punishment for a crime is a fine, the fine scales with the income of the perpetrator.
I like that system.
You remember correctly. Nokia CEO got a speeding ticket for 116K euro 20 years ago was in the news.
Used in a number of countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine
So you're saying that if I'm rich and I want to speed I hire a driver with no money and quietly cover the fine for him?
I've always wondered about this loophole in that system.
How often are you getting speeding tickets that having a driver on payroll is cheaper than fines?
Me? Never. Someone really rich? Well, that's my question.
That's a ridiculous loophole to wonder about... but if it happens at scale and becomes a problem, then they could write another clause into the law.
Really? If I were rich, and in a hurry (as opposed to speeding for the thrill) it's exactly what I would do.
How would you word this clause without people saying "I just hired him, I didn't tell him to speed"?
If you hire someone to so a job for you, you are accountable. Unless they bring their own car and accept liability.
Perhaps it could start low, $2, and then for every fraudulent claim you make it goes up exponentially?
It would be accessible to the common person, but for a mega company making bulk fraudulent claims, it becomes expensive.
They would use sock puppet accounts run by an LLC for each claim.
Unless the mega company just keeps violating it, knowing that the more times they do it, the more they'll win in the end.
Or 1k to subcontract a 3rd party who bonds 1m and reviews your claim.
Insurance companies could front the money, in exchange for a premium based on how legitimate the claim seems.
That's a poor people tax. Not a deterrent.
That's basically Proof of Stake btw, on which Arbitrum, an Ethereum l2 chain, is based.
Wouldn't this keep anyone without a spare million from making copyright claims, and incentivise YouTube to encourage these "mistakes" since they get paid for them?
Good aligned to crypto! Chainpatrol was in the name of Arbitrum <https://arbitrum.io/>.
Just a friendly heads up. Anyone who wants to avoid Twitter, since it has become so toxic, can use the domain xcancel.com in place of twitter.com or x.com. like so:
https://xcancel.com/3blue1brown/status/1876291319955398799
This links to independent Nitter to provide a full thread.
That doesn't have the reply from ChainPatrol:
Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at @ChainPatrol . We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again.
We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through.
We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it's never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We're very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction.
Completely ignoring the release dates for the videos is simply amazing.
The database they are comparing to is probably not only youtube videos. So the freebooted or matching video, in their database, has a creation data which is earlier than the 3blue1brown video.
The database they are comparing to does not exist. They are making shit up and spam reporting high view count videos to get the revenue from them.
Why would they trust that date?
Abusing the DMCA to take down videos stealing user funds seems... questionable.
Completely agree. It should be on YouTube to do that and not a 3rd party.
Nice that they are admitting to perjury on twitter like that.
As other threads have pointed out, Google's copyright violation system is a process that's private. It's before the DMCA laws get involved.
So maybe it's a ToS violation?
(This isn't defending the person issuing copyright strikes. Their behavior, right or wrong, just isn't perjury. I think. Good thing I'm not anyone's lawyer.)
The original Twitter link doesn't show any replies either. Maybe it does if you're signed in, but I no longer have a Twitter account (and nor do most people).
How is this failing the most fundamental check: upload date?
Generally a good idea, but there are edge cases that need to be handled for this to work.
A copyrighted video might not be uploaded to YouTube, in which case you'd have to fall back on the video creation date, which would have to be manually added in their DB (e.g. Hollywood produced movies).
You can also have leaks of videos before their official release. Admittedly a rare scenario that should can be accounted for in other ways (i.e. skip this check if before upload).
Neither does the x.com link if you connect via well-known VPNs.
Great to see a resurgence of a genuinely working Nitter instance. Appreciate this.
A Firefox Add-on to redirect Twitter links to X Cancelled automatically: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter/
(Disclosure: I published this Add-on)
Installed immediately and enabled to run on private windows. Good self-plug :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/libredirect/ Might interest you as well
I was surprised to see this here, because I remembered I recently added 3blue1brown on bsky:
https://bsky.app/profile/3blue1brown.bsky.social
...but he only posted this to Twitter. Not his own blog, nor bsky, not to his Patreon, or to Reddit - only Twitter. Nitter is always just going to be an echo of Twitter. Discord and Reddit and HN and a personal blog serve different purposes. Bsky and Mastodon and the rest (including Threads) are doomed to never become the next Twitter unless we can get people to start changing their habits.
I think just not engaging with content on Twitter is far more likely to produce that outcome than consuming the content on Nitter.
> Nitter is always just going to be an echo of Twitter.
Nitter is not going to be an echo of twitter, it was a proxy for twitter, and it's already dead.
> Bsky and Mastodon and the rest (including Threads) are doomed to never become the next Twitter unless we can get people to start changing their habits.
Why should anyone be concerned about that? None of the above have shown themselves to be any better stewards of anything than twitter has. They're all objectively mediocre options, (including twitter) and personally identifying with any of them is silly.
"For anyone who wants to avoid Twitter's toxicity, here is how you get some Twitter content" :)
Unfortunately some companies and content creators still post there. It's a good way to find what the subject is about to identify external sources. So you can participate in less toxic discussions like on HN.
Infringe copyright to read about false infringement.
Not a great idea to post nitter links any more in public forums. The (very few) instances that are left are using small pools of private accounts, and get saturated to uselessness quickly. And especially to big forums like this, that have been known to take down fairly robust sites.
Don't kill what's left of nitter in order to make a pointless statement about twitter being "toxic."
Thank you!
I don't think using the service alternately is a good idea. Just don't use it. Twitter has always been known for being toxic. Now the baby troll leads it .. I could never sell my soul like that.
Just don't use any social media. You'll be more healthy and secure.
[flagged]
It's deeply haunting to think about how badly AI is going to mess up the world over the next few years. Today, it's YouTube videos. Later, it will be a rejection of the insurance claim for a kid's life-saving surgery.
If you're in a position of influence in an organization that's losing its marbles over AI, please, at the very least encourage others to pump the brakes and think.
If there was ever a time to speak up when you know implementing something will lead to a likely disaster, it's now.
> Later, it will be a rejection of the insurance claim for a kid's life-saving surgery.
According to this article, it's been happening for a while now: https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/13/medicare-advantage-plans...
If only this had to do with AI. This has been going on for many years, long before LLMs. These are simple scammers. Many a good article has been written about the way these scams work. With or without AI, their claims are entirely bogus, they have never needed AI to pretend to have a claim, and nothing has changed in that regard.
Sugggest search query: Youtube copyright fake claim revenue scam.
UnitedHealthcare is already using AI to deny claims, and reportedly I've heard that 90% of the AI denials that are appealed end up approved when it gets to a human.
One of the reasons that copyright processes are so biased towards traditional rightsholders and against individual creators is that the latter group is simultaneously captive to the platform and unorganized/decentralized; YouTube needs licenses and goodwill from, say, Universal, far more than it needs 3blue1brown individually.
And the incentives for rectifying this are skewed: video platforms simply need to address individual cases with influential creators just reactively enough so that collective action isn't incentivized; that's far cheaper, and far easier to not need to coordinate with traditional rightsholders, than addressing the problem systematically.
If we believe that the vision of being an independent content creator is important to humanity - and I think it's becoming vital as "a way to distinguish myself" that folks are able to dream about from an early age - then we need to seriously work to protect it. Not everybody will get their "big break" but we can at the very least start having conversations about protecting creators from an AI-driven DMCA bot arbitrarily destroying their career through automated channel-disabling rules.
The state of content producers (including app developers) on the internet today is the same as that of factory workers in the industrial revolution. Everyone's work is immediately replaceable with that of someone else, who is more than willing to step in to take the spot. Workers solved that with unions that can coordinate the workers' actions.
In concrete terms, a content-creators union might act as a middleman who is able to make all the contents from all its members simultaneously and immediately unavailable on the targeted platforms until some agreement is met or either side gives up.
While the presence of an algorithm that "auto-scabs" makes a full-fledged strike fundamentally difficult, a threat of a coordinated campaign where large creators encourage users to install ad blockers and go off-site for donations, rather than buying superchats/subscriptions on platform, might be meaningful enough to compel achievable asks like copyright strike reform.
The clear-headed perspective would be to assume that a YouTube channel could disappear at any minute and there is little recourse unless an attorney is hired. It's their ball and their game. What rule that does not exist today could exist tomorrow.
Copyright's failure lies at its very foundations.
The explicit goal of copyright is to promote art work. Copyright intends to accomplish this by promising each artist a profitable monopoly over the result of their work. The thinking is that even though an artist isn't paid directly for their labor, they can compel society to pretend their art is a singular object and sell it over and over again as a good. This is why pretentious gallery people refer to paintings and sculptures as individual "works", as if labor itself can be counted with integers. It isn't the instance of art (the copy) they are referring to as "a work": it is the abstract unit of labor and the copyright monopoly (the exclusive right to make another copy) that defines its domain.
Because copyright redefines art as a good, each artist must invest their labor to create "a work". Only then can they leverage copyright to (hopefully) profit from their investment. This is already counterproductive, because the only prospective artists who are free to work are those who can afford the upfront investment of their own labor. Profit from this investment is nowhere near guaranteed, particularly today when the overwhelming majority of publishing goes through a tiny number of corporations.
The most significant problem, though, is the monopoly itself. For copyright to function, an artist must be able to monopolize their "work": not the original copy they made, but the labor itself. In order to do so, the copyright holder must be able to prevent any work that intersects with their own. What this means is that copyright is made of incompatibility. Anyone who wants to collaborate with a work must have explicit permission; otherwise their own labor is illegal by virtue of the presence of someone else's existing work. Copyright demands that the labor of one individual be incompatible with the other.
This incompatibility is what copyright is truly used for. We use copyright to destroy fraudulent copy. We use copyright to fill moats of incompatibility; and drown competition from those who seek to collaborate competitively.
Copyright has been a bad idea from its very inception, but in today's world - where copy itself is practically free, and collaboration requires nearly zero coordination - copyright has become the foundation of the most significant and damaging parts of our society. It's time to start over.
I wish Youtube etc would blacklist requests by these companies, but am not optimistic. Curation seems like the path here, but it seems difficult. (See also the recent Kagi thread here, highlighting how being able to curate which sites appear on your search results is a big deal)
I agree, but the economics currently don't favor YouTube caring enough to solve this sort of problem
In fact, everything aligns to incentivize them not to care: making the barrier to make a successful claim higher and the larger rights-holders start to cause problems; the cost of seriously adjudicating claims is substantial and may well be unsustainable.
The consequences of bad policy are also quite low for them: most channels that will get hit unjustly have too small an audience to be heard; fixing problems for the larger creators is one-off enough that it's simply cost efficient to squash those when they happen; any bad publicity doesn't seem to be sufficient enough to cause a siginficant drop in either viewers or content creators willing to stick with the platform.... in fact I expect most content creators so unjustly hit this way would simply swallow the indignity and loss and continue p YouTube.
I don't know the laws or agreements at play here, but it seems like some sort of class action suit, if feasible, would be the only way to scale these complaints into something that YouTube management might take seriously.
YouTube doesn't have to adjudicate anything. They just have to demote the known bad actors to using the real DMCA process rather than their own system. They can still make a claim under penalty of perjury with a takedown but that won't count as a strike.
There's actually a lot of history (going back at least as far as 2007) that led to the current situation where the DMCA is not the process. In fairness to YouTube, they had significant legal pressure back in the day, including suits and credible threats thereof to go beyond the DMCA... which is exactly what they did.
We can speculate to if the current situation is the natural conclusion of those agreements with major IP holders, or if they simply got religion and now embrace those practices... but at least historically, it wasn't simply management discretion which started them on this path.
I don't dispute there are things they can, and should do, nor do I dispute that their current management of the problem sucks.... but it's not quite as simple as just taking a decision to abide by the DMCA as-is.
Yes, YouTube was sold to Google essentially at gunpoint. But since then the balance of power shifted from Hollywood to Google. So they they would benefit from relaxing this policy.
I would think Youtube would care enough about content creators with large number of subscribers (3blue1brown has 6.8M) to have a human review takedown notices against those channels.
The problem is not YouTube, but the law. The DMCA requires that online service providers (YouTube, Reddit, etc.) comply immediately with any takedown request and without question, so long as it meets sufficient conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
YouTube's copyright system has little to do with DMCA. Music right holders managed forced YouTube to implement a copyright claim system that explicitly didn't involve DMCA takedown requests. As a result any protection that DMCA provides to recipients of takedown requests don't apply to YouTube copyright claims.
In effect, the YouTube copyright system is a purely "voluntary" system for taking down copyright content, that goes way beyond the DMCA. It's basically designed to ensure theres no possible repercussions for issuers of copyright claims, even claims clearly made in bad faith.
You’re conflating the two systems. YouTube does have the Content ID system, which does automatic detection and is mostly used to monetize (not take down) copyrighted content. But this case is a copyright strike, which means there was a DMCA takedown filed.
The differences between these two systems are explained here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7002106
YouTube's system goes well beyond what is required by the DMCA. Notice no mention of "copyright strike" in the DMCA.
YouTube’s “three strikes” policy is their implementation of the DMCA’s “repeat infringers” requirement:
> has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network of, a policy that provides for the *termination* in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider's system or network who are *repeat infringers*
https://www.aclu.org/documents/text-digital-millennium-copyr...
The system is broken; if youtube (etc) do not respond to DMCA takedown requests on time, their service may be taken down - and back when YT was new and people were uploading movies and whatnot left right and center, they were very close to that. The consequences for YT for not taking something down vs invalid takedowns are much worse and more direct.
I wouldn't have issue if this were simply running the DMCA process. But the YouTube process goes well beyond that. DMCA also allows for the content creator to issue a counter-notice and, as I understand it, that starts a clock and the party filling the takedown has 14 days to file a suit or the original takedown is reversed.
Naturally, that's not the process YouTube follows including, again as I understand it, the assignment of revenues, etc. with only their internal dispute process mattering.
That is incorrect. You can appeal a Content ID claim. Doing so forces the claimant to either retract their claim or file a DMCA takedown.
Not always...
"Videos removed or blocked due to YouTube's contractual obligations
(...)
Sometimes, this may mean the Content ID appeals and counter notification processes won't be available."
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3045545
I wonder if that is currently legal under DMCA Safeharbor. Might need legal changes to punish abusers.
I noticed `ChainPatrol` has a Github: https://github.com/chainpatrol
There's a `report abuse` button on the right of that page. I used it. (Category: Bullying and Harassment)
The bullying didn’t happen on GH, so I'm not sure this is a good strategy.
It's childish.
Taking down their github isn't even impactful, and forcing github to be a court is playing games instead of using real courts.
we should make a bot to do this for us
I'm flagging this comment for bullying. OK, I'm not but you get the point, right?
I agree with the gp. If we want a change we shouldn’t play by the rules. Also flagging our comments doesn’t do anything cause we don’t earn money here, and that is our leverage - you can’t do anything with us.
We should create a community-driven abusive botnet that slaps projects like this back, and slaps hard. Because there’s no laws here. No one cares. No order, everything by the word of someone large enough. People should not be afraid of taking law in their hands when there is no law for all practical purposes. And using methods that are available and effective.
I do not claim this is a general, or perfect solution. I don't think there is one. I'm doing what I can, which is a good enough move, given the details of the situation.
Contrary to this, I'd like to see 3blue1brown actually get two more strikes and get deleted per YouTube "3 strikes" policy.
Imagine the furor and outrage of that. One of the most popular, meaningful, and impactful channels done in by YouTube's (and the DMCA's) ridiculous policy [1].
The public outcry from this might motivate real policy changes both within Google and other FANNG companies as well as with lawmakers.
Until a big channel gets stricken, this will continue to plague smaller creators with no recourse. We need a symbolic gesture of this magnitude to effectuate real change.
[1] And it's not like YouTube would actually delete their data or we wouldn't have a way to restore it. This is such an important channel that there's no way it wouldn't be restored by Google or archivists.
I love 3blue1brown and have followed the channel for years. One of my absolute favorite content creators.
But I think you're vastly overestimate how popular he is compared to other channels that have gotten copyright strikes, or how much YouTube/Google care.
I also don't love YouTube's policy, but are you so confident there's a better policy out there?
On the other hand, 3B1B's audience tends to heavily bias towards the tech crowd. I'm at a FAANG, and a decent number of our senior engineers know the channel.
I agree it's not enough to directly push policy, but the impact is certainly larger than what the subscriber count might otherwise suggest.
Out of curiosity I checked, and he's at 6.83M subscribers. According to https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/3blue1brown (not sure how trustworthy the site is, but I believe it should give a general idea) it's 706th channel by subscribers.
> Contrary to this, I'd like to see 3blue1brown actually get two more strikes and get deleted per YouTube "3 strikes" policy.
Does the "3 strikes" policy apply to large channels that bring in a lot of views and ad revenue?
I don't think it does. Keep in mind though that 3blue1brown is peanuts compared to Mr. Beast.
I would not be surprised if Youtube has a team dedicated to keep Mr. Beast happy.
> Keep in mind though that 3blue1brown is peanuts compared to Mr. Beast.
Well, there is a thought which is not helping keep the January blues at bay.
Imagine being on that team, and going home every day and reflecting on your career choices.
But the free sushi...
Until you piss off the whale, and the whale says you should be fired...
I would assume so, until proven otherwise.
> Contrary to this, I'd like to see 3blue1brown actually get two more strikes and get deleted per YouTube "3 strikes" policy. > Imagine the furor and outrage of that.
Nothing will happen. Nobody cares about relatively small groups of geeks. People will write angry posts at Youtube, but there's nothing anybody can do.
For example, RZX Archive channel (that hosted replays of ZX Spectrum games) was taken down by fake copyright strikes. Its author died several years ago, so nobody could fix that.
You have to think of YouTube and other platforms as a mechanism for distribution, not a source of truth.
If you're a creator it's essential to have your own place on the web were you can host and publish anything without fear that it will be taken down for any reason — even accidentally.
As it becomes cheap to automate both creating takedown requests and processing requests, the volume of spam requests is going to skyrocket and it seems likely there will be more false positives.
I agree in principle with diversifying your online presence, but as a practical solution it doesn’t solve the problem. It would be like if someone came to you about a termite problem in their house and you told them the solution was to have multiple houses. At best that is a defense mechanism not a solution.
Your analogy doesn't match my statement. I am saying there should be a canonical location for what you create that is on a URL that you own. Everything else is distribution.
You built a house on someone else's land, and then they tore it down. Build a house on your own land, as small as that land may be. From there you can create roads, bridges, tunnels to other people's land. On the web land is infinite. You can make your own land.
Again, I am not against backups but that doesn’t solve the actual problem. The problem isn’t losing the files, it is losing a reliable source of income. Putting the videos on Vimeo/S3 bucket/some random website doesn’t solve that problem. People create videos as a full-time job, which is only possible because of the traffic YouTube brings.
Also I think the analogy is pretty solid because it clearly illustrates the emergent benefits of being on a large centralized platform rather than a random URL. Land might be infinite but attention and clicks are not.
It is certainly helpful to hang up a shingle where all the people are — the mall, the town square, the marketplace — but your patrons should know that a bridge exists to your flagship, your headquarters, your farm, your factory of ideas.
If a farmer stops showing up to a farmers market, no one is going to go to their farm for their specific carrots when there are other carrot farmers at the market. Even if they have the best carrots, that doesn't mean their carrots are sufficiently better to justify the added hassle. If their livelihood comes from the customers at the farmer's market, they need to keep their stall at the market.
Sure. This aligns with my original point. A farmer owns their land (mostly). The farm is the farmer's canonical source for their product.
Farmers don't typically rely on a single farmer's market to sell their product, they participate in many markets, sell wholesale, sell from their farm, and might also have a direct-to-consumer option where they can ship beyond their locality.
Create once, publish everywhere — your land is the canonical source. Markets are for distribution.
A business doesn’t stop being viable only once every source of income is stamped out. It stops being viable when enough of it is gone, because people weigh continuing the business against the opportunity cost of doing anything else.
Also, many creators already are publishing “everywhere”. YouTube is simply the most profitable. If YouTube income goes away, that ends the business, whether or not it can technically be found elsewhere.
No, it goes directly against your original point. A farmer owning their own land is no protection against losing access to its customers.
In this analogy, there is only one farmer's market that anyone shows up to. In the real world many farmers may have alternatives, but that is a product of an entire industry spending centuries collectively cultivating those multiple distribution channels.
If a content creator hosts their own videos and then Youtube nukes their channel, they're still going to be hurt by it since Youtube is often the bulk of their audience. The other sharing platforms (even if they aren't video focused) are also going to be able to nuke your distribution channel, so the creator is no better that way. Maybe an email list? Heh.
I don't know the last time I actually went to someone's website for video content. Maybe a business, for instructional videos? But those are either inset Youtube videos or are actually annoying to watch.
If the advice is for people to not depend on revenue from their content creation, that might be a fair point. But I feel like the effort of saying that might be better aimed at telling the hosting platforms to not be asses.
(Then again, I don't believe that large social media platforms can be effectively moderated -- so I'm not much help here either. I have no clue how the content creation industry would fit into that world.)
This is not just an information preservation problem. It's a problem with the creators who depend on YouTube ad revenue to fund to create content like this suddenly and unpredictably losing that revenue stream.
You cannot depend on Youtube ad revenue to survive, as it can be taken away at any time.
Restating that the arrangement is crap doesn't make it not crap.
You can’t depend on any particular job to survive either. Does that imply OSHA is useless?
Are you comparing a federal labor regulatory agency to ad payments that exist at the whim of a commercial entity?
This makes it sound like this is an overt decision by YouTube to stop monetizing a 3B1B video rather than an abuse of automated systems. The difference is important.
Whether creators should depend on YouTube as a practical matter is different from whether they should be able to. As a practical matter, yes, diversifying is safer. But creators and YouTube probably agree that diversifying shouldn’t be necessary.
Of course creators do not know how much money any particular video will make, but the implied social contract has always been that good videos will do well, for some definition of “good”. And no part of that definition of good has anything to do with bots abusing copyright systems.
> This makes it sound like this is an overt decision by YouTube to stop monetizing a 3B1B video rather than an abuse of automated systems. The difference is important.
There is no difference. Google's overt decision to continue operating automated systems that enable this abuse is the cause, and that is unlikely to change because Google does not care. It is cheaper to allow abuse than to change their system (more human intervention and effort). "The purpose of the system is what it does."
If you as a creator decide to operate on a platform where the owner has no intention of changing their automated systems, and therefore this is a potential outcome, you are playing Russian roulette with your income stream (if any). That is a choice. Your income could disappear at any time with no recourse. There is no social contract at play between creators and Google, only Google optimizing for its shareholders.
This is the way. Channels are channels, you must have a robust web of mechanisms to reach out to your network to maintain it, with no single points of failure.
"You have to think of publishers and other platforms as a mechanism for distribution, not a source of truth."
Replace publisher with newspaper, encyclopedias, etc...
They clearly have responsibility for the content they distribute.
You have to think of YouTube and other platforms as a mechanism for distribution, not a source of truth.
So the source of truth is just some guy’s long tail GoDaddy-hosted blog?
The URL is what should persist, not the host.
It only makes it slightly more difficult. People will just ask cloudflare (et al.) to take it down, and they will obey. Keeping anything online in the face of opposition is very very difficult.
And if you're a reader/listener/viewer you need to have somewhere to save things you enjoy or find useful. Make a habit of saving everything you want to keep to hardware you own.
can we start permanently banning companies that submit false-positive takedown requests? 3 strikes for them should result in not being able to submit any strikes anymore and all their content being removed
if the content creator can get their channel removed, same thing must apply to the opposite side as well
When I first saw this I was reminded of the Mend it Mark copyright takedown event where he fixed and documented a phono preamp and the maker of that preamp filed a copyright take down against the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIrCaeVtvI
You can just create a new company. There is an asymmetry there which your tit for tat approach does not take into consideration. And no, creating a new channel requires far more work.
I don't mean banning the company which does the takedown submission, I mean the company that actually owns the copyright. That would result in companies being a lot more vary in terms of whom to trust with such job.
So if I make 3 bogus takedown requests based on stairway to heaven's copyright being violated, no one can make copyright strikes based on stairway to heaven?
I know that it's rather opaque, but I'm pretty certain Google does basic reputation tracking. When they manually revert this, the ChainPatrol account won't have as much power.
Surely YouTube making a knowingly false allegation of tortfeasance against someone is libel. That should be actionable, possibly in a group action?
Continued libel that inhibits the democratic exercise of free speech seems like something the government should act on?
> Surely YouTube making a knowingly false allegation of tortfeasance against someone is libel.
It's hardly libel for YouTube to state that they've received a copyright claim, and taken the video down as a consequence. They're just stating facts, they're not making any assertions regarding the accuracy or correctness of the copyright claim, simply stating that it exists.
> Continued libel that inhibits the democratic exercise of free speech seems like something the government should act on?
You seem to misunderstand what free speech means. Free speech means protection from the government from having your speech prevented, or compelled. That same protection extends to companies. To have the government punish YouTube for failing to distribute a video, would itself be violating YouTube's own free speech, and in the US, and clear and obvious violation of the 1st ammendment.
It feels like the org issuing the copyright claims would be at fault for any lost revenue.
If the org hadn't issued the false claim, the channel wouldn't've had the video taken down. If a channel hits three strikes for it and is nuked in entirety, the lost revenue is even larger.
Unless the government deems youtube a provider of a neutral platform for user content -- as it does in section 230.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Section 230 does not require that a plaform be neutral.
I think this misunderstands the sense in which 230 is at issue. It's not that 230 itself requires anything --- it's that its a law in place at the whim of lawmakers who granted it expecting a certain sort of behaviour. The relevant claim is, "if youtube doesn't behave more neutrally, expect one side of the political divide to elect people who will make it". This is how the intention of the law is currently read: that it will persist so long as platforms do, in effect, treat user content without editorial bias.
Perhaps my phrasing wasn't that clear. By "deem" I mean, unless the gov starts regulating youtube like a utility.
It seems fairly likely that this intention behind 230 will be codified soon, and an explicit notion of a "platform" (as in the DMA) will be introduced.
The idea that utilities, "platforms", and the like function in a way which requires 'equal treatment' is common across the law -- since they function much like states in the provision of universal services, or public spaces.
Thus the "well, actually!" objection to a narrow reading of the principle of free speech is really the one which misunderstand the principles at play and the evolving legal and social understanding of mass-participation online platforms.
> if youtube doesn't behave more neutrally, expect one side of the political divide to elect people who will make it
There have been plenty of threats by various politicians already, to enforce “neutrality” on entities like YouTube. But a couple of persistent issues keep rearing their ugly heads.
1. How do you determine “political neutrality”? The only way to be truly neutral is to do zero moderation of any content, and nobody is seriously suggesting that’s a good idea.
2. On what basis could YouTube be ruled a utility? If even ISPs aren’t considered utilities, then how on earth can YouTube be a utility? Utilities are services that generally considered as a basic requirement for participating in civil society. It not clear how anyone could consider YouTube such an essential service.
> Thus the "well, actually!" objection to a narrow reading of the principle of free speech is really the one which misunderstand the principles at play and the evolving legal and social understanding of mass-participation online platforms.
In the U.S. such a reading of the first amendment, and the principle of free speech, has been consistently and repeatedly upheld by U.S. courts. Law makers can’t legislate their way around that, they would need to literally change the U.S. constitution. Something that requires a 2/3 majority in both congress and the senate, plus 3/4 of all state legislatures need to ratify it as well. For better or worse, the U.S. constitution provides no flexibility for the “evolving legal and social understanding of mass-participation online platforms.”
An environment where the U.S. government (and specifically the U.S. government) starts engaging in such aggressive regulation of entities like YouTube, is so distant from current state of free speech in the US, that’s it’s a practically useless argument to consider. So much of the political, legal and social framework of the U.S. will have changed, that it would effectively be an entirely different country and culture to what exists today.
Here, you dropped this >>>> IANAL
It is common for racketeers to steal revenue from a popular video until YT sorts out the legal ownership a few weeks later.
It is a known con... one often not worth the $50k to extradite and haul them in front of a judge to recover your losses. =3
its crazy that those funds arent held in escrow until the video publisher gets to respond/the dispute is resolved
The funds are held in escrow. GP is wrong.
When the copyright strike is issued a video is taken offline from the publishers channel.
In general, the racketeers will ask for a fee whether they have rights to the IP or not. They play the numbers counting on people not calling their bluff, and googles limited 3 strikes policy on channel publishers.
It is a problem only slightly less nasty than channel hijacking. =3
Fair enough. I was referring to the Content ID system.
>In general, the racketeers will ask for a fee whether they have rights to the IP or not.
I make my living from YouTube and I have never heard of this. Can you point me to evidence of what you are referring to?
There are quite a few cases, but probably using a different search engine will help with citations:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/youtubes-new-lawsuit-s...
https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-settles-lawsuit-with-allege...
https://videogamelaw.allard.ubc.ca/2019/10/18/settlement-bet...
Content ID is just as bad... if not worse... given no one checks for fair-use cases. A lot of old public-domain stock-footage was re-uploaded under dubious conditions, and will get your content auto flagged.
Best of luck =3
A policy I think would be interesting: copyright violation stops being about who is able to post what, and starts being about who is profiting from what. Content takedowns are impossible, but affected artists are directly and nontransferrably allowed to legally assert rights to the profits directly derived from their content and can legally reclaim lost funds. Preferably there would be a similar mechanism for false claims. No one loses money they aren’t entitled to, the rightsholder doesn’t need to play whack-a-mole to enforce an artificial monopoly, and no disruption for viewers in any case.
We need something that frees us from this prison. I still remember when it was normal for youtube videos to play mainstream music in the background. Now draconian enforcement has created this artificial power that people beyond music labels can abuse, and it affects our art adversely. Feels clear to me we need something new that operates in 2024, not from the era where individual movie pirates faced 6-7 figure fines and jail time.
This reminds me of that time CGP Grey's channel got in trouble for.... impersonating the famous youtube channel CGP Grey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIssymQvrbU
CinemaStix has also been fighting these lately. In their case, YouTube seems to have zero regard for Fair Use, and short-sighted film rights holders are striking every video containing any amount of their film, even though the publicity CinemaStix gives them likely increases sales.
The year is 2030. After the AI bot wars, FaceBook and Google have been crippled. They let AI automation control their content and it was deleted after OpenAI GPT10 discovered vulnerabilities in automated copyright strikes.
Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
> Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
When I saw that movie when I was small, I thought that was literally Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Burger King, et al fighting with tanks, etc. Taco Bell emerged victorious after a bloody struggle.
For those that need more context
From the movie Demolition Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY
This is the first time I have considered that it wasn’t them blowing up each other’s franchises.
I will believe ehat i want to believe
This is where headcanon [1] can be a lot of fun. Just accept that they really did fight a war. It's not like it doesn't particularly fit the milieu...
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/words-were-watching...
I'm pretty sure my idea was literally a mash-up of Phantom 2040 "resource wars" with Demolition man "franchise wars."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_2040
> It is the year 2040, all environmental disasters and the economic Resource Wars from the early 21st century have decimated the fragile ecosystem balance of an Earth once teeming with life.
The first part of this episode is near identical to my mental picture of the "franchise wars:"
https://youtu.be/Kg8bPDGmhnU?si=MhzsBy83h8yTi6Ux&t=59
I'm surprised how easy it was for me to figure this out and find confirmation.
[flagged]
Imagination is an umbrella term that includes headcanon, but headcanon has a much more narrow and communicative meaning to do specifically with interpreting missing or ambiguous details in established fictional universes by fans or other people who aren't part of the creative team for that universe. Using the word that best fits the idea you're trying to communicate is good, actually. Also, while English does have real words what makes a word real is nothing more than whether when one English speaker uses is can they reasonably expect other English speakers to understand it. Given that everyone who read this thread had no problem understanding the word "headcanon" (including you, despite your protestations, as you were able to define a synonym) that means it's a Real English Word(tm)(c)(r).
Nonsense.
English is a beautiful language and adding junk words to it is unnecessary.
Keep your headcannon and use your imagination.
'headcanon' is jargon within general fandom. The term refers to the application of imagination against the established canon of a body of fiction, to expand upon that body of work.
Example:
- Superman being from Krypton is canon.
- Superman not truly being the son of Jor-El, because his mom slept around, might be one fan's headcanon.
Imagination is not an English word. It’s a borrow word from Old French, because there was no existing English word for that meaning.
Your move.
It's from Old French all right, but probably not because there was no existing word. Old English Translator[1] suggests geþanc (a bit similar to the modern German Gedanke) or the verb wénan, both of which can be confirmed by Bosworth & Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary[2].
The Normans introduced French as the prestige language of England when they invaded, but Anglo-Saxons would have wanted to express the concept of imagination way earlier. If they had wanted to, they could have borrowed the word from Classical Latin imāginor without the 'help' of the Normans.
[1]: https://www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk/index.htm
[2]: https://bosworthtoller.com/
Imagination is an English word, because it obviously is. Common man's definition. The sky is blue, I don't need to prove it or define blue.
My bacon came from a pig. It doesn't mean the bacon is a pig. It's breakfast. An English breakfast. And the French are pigs. See?
Devil’s advocate: all words are made up and languages evolve over time
Devils advocate devils advocate: don't waste your time arguing nonsense.
Unlike (say) French, English has no central authority determining correct or incorrect usage.
Anything literally goes.
Including, unfortunately, this usage of "literally."
You're literally being a like, linguistic pervert rn
I read this in a Moon Unit Zappa voice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song)
What other use of literally is there?
Were you not aware what hapoened to the word several years ago?
Malort implied butlersean’s use of literally is incorrect, which it doesn’t appear to be.
I am aware that groaning about incorrect usage of literally is a meme but that seems to also require being wrong about the usage being incorrect.
People can use whatever words they please. Never mistake yourself to be the arbiter of language, which is ever evolving.
We all got a$$holes and opinions and most of them stink.
You give me your stinky opinion saying mine stinks.
Well, you're wrong of course.
A claim to "evolution" meaning "change" is simply an excuse for anything. Evolution is about selection and I'm the big bad wolf eating your baby children: you go extinct. That's evolution, not some cheesy anything goes resignation.
"Other people can do what they want" is not an opinion, it's a fact of life. You can deal with it, or you can get so upset that you try to physically stop them. Is that something you want to do over the use of language?
Evolution is not about "selection", you're referring to a biological concept known as natural selection. I'm sorry to tell you, the evolution of a system simply means the development of the system over time. Feel free to check a dictionary. You should look up "homonym" while you're at it.
For someone so bent on controlling the English language, you should put more time into understanding it.
Never mistake yourself to be the arbiter of language
Isn't that exactly what you just did?
"you're not the boss of me" does not mean "i am the boss"!
If I am not the boss of you, and you aren't the boss, then someone else is the boss of you.
Did I miss something?
yeah - the need for a boss in the first place. there simply isn't one.
nope
The only thing worse than being a pedantic asshole is being a wrong pedantic asshole.
There are two kinds of people in the world, and you're one of them.
I am okay with this timeline. At least it has better conversation topics than most of our current timeline.
I would much rather live in Sir Humphrey Appleby's dystopia than whatever this is.
Talk to trust and safety teams, should never run out of topics that make you question reality.
That's the thing, the fake reality makes more sense than even the real unreal things.
Life imitates art, but it sucks at it.
Could be.
In SnowCrash, I think there were some subplots talking about the fighting was somewhat real between franchises.
And you could become a citizen of a franchise state.
I could see being a citizen of CosaNostra Pizza.
I’d make a pretty good deliverator.
Because it was
Taco Bell and Johnny Silverhand won after nuking ~~Arasaka~~ KFC Tower.
It's been along time since I read it, but IIRC Jennifer Government has that. Fast food chains lobbing missiles at each other.
Every year it becomes clearer that Idiocracy was indeed a documentary.
No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.
> No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.
Also, Joe seemed genuinely interested in helping everyone, and didn't seem to neglect the needs of significant portions of the population to achieve some ideological goal or another.
Maybe there's such a thing as being too smart to have power.
To be fair Camacho was setting up Not Sure to be the fall guy. I don't think he really thought Not Sure could fix things.
That being said, it is a society who elected the smartest guy in the world president, and then when a smarter guy came along elected him as the successor.
We need a leader like President Camacho!
I find myself surprised that I agree.
When I watched the movie I laughed and thought it all ridiculous. I've since been shown that having well-intentioned, self-aware, cooperative people in government is probably more important than their intelligence.
Maybe he was stupid to the point of just being naive.
In Idiocracy the masses are aware that things are not as good as they once were, they recognize and value competent people, and then voluntarily agree to put them in power so that things may be fixed.
IMO that is a depiction of some kind of meritocratic utopia - exactly the opposite of what we have, on all accounts mentioned above.
There is something subtly wrong with the world as presented in that "documentary" in general it is that somebody has to keep the lights on, the machines running, that is, there is too much working infrastructure for the citizens ability level. I suspect the big corporations maintain a hidden educated population and are happy to run the world from the shadows.
Now honestly it is just a goofy movie premise, and we should not look too far into it, but sometimes it is fun to go full nerd.
It could be that many people just died in between and there's a lot of remaining operational equipment that past smart people built. Costco is massive.
Sure, but this is a Demolition Man reference
Except that it has a happy ending, which is so rare in real world situations involving politics and power.
I mean, we already have YouTube channels and tiktok content that are about the same as the TV show "ass" shown in the movie.
"America's funniest home videos" got dumbed down to "AFV" and the content was mostly "ow, my balls!". They even added a warning to the viewers to submit "wows, not ows".
Although to be fair,some of that happened before Idiocracy came out.
With the public money used for sports stadiums, that element of the movie to have government sports teams is slowly coming true also.
How are college sports teams not government sports teams?
that's a good point. They are tightly integrated into the college whose charter is to educate. whereas a pro team will take anyone for the express purpose of the performing the sport well.
Further, colleges receive public money but are not free to attend for most students. And I am not talking about "free" from the students perspective, I mean most would not be permitted to enroll if significant tuition dollars were not deposited (unlike public schools, for instance). Also, plenty of colleges are private but have NCAA teams.
If you search YouTube for "fail army" there is clearly a whole ad supported business model for revenue from something that is about the same as "ow, my balls!"
This is basically https://chive.tv
in May 2021 the number 1 clip on twitch was just someone's ass
[dead]
Sort of. They got the outcomes pretty close, but the movie was based on a premise of eugenics and equating poverty with low intelligence.
The movie was based on the (indisputable?) fact that intelligence is heritable- but not Eugenics, which takes that a step further and advocates for people deciding which other people are inferior and superior and organizing society around that. One could argue that the movie tries to make a case for eugenics, but it didn’t directly do so. I think the movie could also be seen as looking at culture instead of genetics, and also assuming that is passed down from parents.
I agree that it does wrongly depict poverty as a major indicator of intelligence.
For better or worse, "eugenics" at this point is basically a cultural repulsion field surrounding most of practical aspects of genetics. You dare to even suggest there are measurable genetic differences between people, and someone will shout "eugenics", rounding any conversation down to "yeah nazis said the same thing".
I suspect your idea of “practical aspects of genetics” includes ideas about how people different from you shouldn’t be allowed reproduce, and very little about things like researching the function of a newly discovered microbial enzyme.
Not really. It does, however, include ideas such as "perhaps we should learn to correct genetic diseases directly in the reproductive cells", which is a rounding error away from someone saying something like you just did.
Weird, when I saw it, it was equating poverty with low access to education and corresponding outcomes.
The intro of the movie makes it pretty clear that their premise is "IQ is heritable, and stupid people have more kids." It's not a coincidence that the "high IQ" couple is portrayed as wealthy and the "low IQ" people are shown as poor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q
Thank you. It's astonishing to me how few people remember the text of this movie -- it is so clearly saying dumb people are breeding, smart people are not.
It seems the dumb interpretation of the movie is spreading faster than the correct and literal one.
More like high access to media and consumerism.
> Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
Foe those who don't know - which included myself until about 30 seconds ago - this is a reference to the 1993 film Demolition Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY
A Taco Bell can be constructed in one day (sans pouring the concrete pad). They know how to capitalize.
There’s a payday loan biz that has taken over a former Taco Bell site in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s a bizarre look as the detached building still features all the weird faux-Mexican motifs of the former tenant. It’s also one of the first things seen when entering the city via the most significant gateway from Toronto.
Like old pizza hut buildings. Everyone knows.
Pizza Hut outside the US
AKA, Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc.
Snow Crash was another take on this whole slide to <is there even a bottom?>.
Indeed, in the version I saw, they said "Pizza Hut" but you could see it was badly dubbed. Only much later I learned it was originally "Taco Bell".
Taco Bell in NZ. It was the first time I'd heard of it, though, and the movie is still probably the source of most of my knowledge of it.
There's at least 15 in London, UK.
I was there for the Pizza War in San Rafael.
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2011/02/04/pizza-war-leaves-mor...
Demolition Man (movie) joke... but the AI bot wars stuff makes it still relevant to the conversation so this is both funny and cautionary / discussion worthy material.
The President of the United States is a Tamagotchi.
Ok, how /do/ the three seashells work?
2 are bidets, 1 is a drier.
2029...2028...2027...
but don't forget that even after the fall of civilisation, there will still be hope in the form of the probe bearing a vial of Elon Musk's semen to Alpha Centari
Elon is so nuts I can’t decide of this is a joke or something he actually did.
Crazy times we live in.
...there are now three seashells on every toilet (for some reason).
I'd like to think no one knows how the seashells work and the real joke is everyone just makes fun of people for not knowing (the writer didn't even know what they did and refuses to say anything other than how they came into the story)
I've purposely put three seashells in many public restrooms
Huh? I thought that was canon. Was that actually just a head fiction?
No they played that one pretty straight. You were supposed to be just as confused as MC. If they wanted you to think anything else, they would have given a knowing wink.
You don't know about the seashells? (muffled laughter)
... and the only kind of music that exists are jingles and showtunes
You don’t know how to use the three seashells? lol
That’s hilarious, I just happened to watch Demolition Man yesterday.
We are indeed in an era where AI is "learning" from AI generated content fueling a positive feedback loop of shitty content.
The 10th remake of Demolition Man in 2090 is going to wild
As somebody in the Seattle area, I have to hope that Taco Time Northwest wins the franchise wars, not its sub par competition.
Taco bell has a wiki btw: https://tacobell.fandom.com/wiki/Taco_Bell_Wiki
Lmao cursing in public is arrestable.
It truly protected web3 from the "normies" that could have learned about crypto from this video. AI moderation is such a joke, every reupload (or a completely different video on the same subject) can take a video down because they look "similar" enough for the AI and no person would bother checking it. I expected a different treatment of their bigger creators, but that's what it is.
I wonder if it makes sense for someone to do a huge IP troll bot network to make copyright claims on all the big YouTubers in such an egregious and in-your-face wrong way that youtube would be forced to redesign or remove the system. It'd suck for a bit but I think this slow burn affecting people that can't defend themselves (3blue1brown can) is worse.
Here's my guess what would happen: Youtube will have a word with their contacts in government and in short order you'd end up in a court room for some nebulous federal crime about malicious use of computers and hacking and they'd have no concerns about locking you up for decades. Oh and absolutely nothing about Youtube's attitude to copyright would change.
Take a look at Aaron Swartz's case for example, people may be sympathetic to his motives but he still got pursued for a 50 year federal sentence and ended up killing himself.
You’re probably assuming youtube doesn’t know about the scale of this problem and all it takes is to show it. It absolutely does know it and “be big enough to get human assistance” is their conscious mode of operation. They couldn’t care less about what’s right, because it’s not money.
Of course youtube knows, the point is to make all the users and creators pissed with them in a critical moment, vs slowly burning with mild annoyance forever.
Preaching to the choir I know, but there needs to be consequences for issuing a bogus takedown request.
I apologize in advance for not offering something constructive to say. I just wish anyone here who is younger could see the difference between what the promise of the web was in ‘95 and what it has become. Such a burning pile of trash, it’s heartbreaking.
After looking at the websites for ChainPatrol and Arbitrum, I still have no idea what's going on here. How do these two things combine to result in a YouTube copyright claim? What sort of videos are they supposed to be issuing takedowns for?
The crypto YouTube scams are incredibly sophisticated. Bitcoin is the best currency for scammers bar none, so millions from nation states like North Korea will pour into this to decimate lowly pensioners scared for their future.
3b1b is basically a causality in this war of greed.
With AI exponentially accelerating effects of Dead Internet, I think any social or content-sharing platforms will require some form of Digital ID that can't be easily created/mass-generated (e.g. maybe tie bank account to it?).
That would put real consequences on users misusing platforms. Even a small fee for misbehavior would likely curtail vast swathes of bad actors. It would also make companies be less trigger-happy with their bots if such are allowed to operate in that ID framework (i.e. an identifiable bot being punished would be a fee subtracted from the company that uses it).
I pretty much expect that kind of system in the future, otherwise we will just return back to private networks and private communities.
Companies bread much faster than humans can. So in that new internet where we ID every participant we should not equate company and human. And fines are not the solution as some actors can buy their way out with unlimited funds (compared to regular human)
Are there any other copies of this video out there? Since it's a bogus claim, the video should be able to be posted elsewhere --- YouTube can't be the only source of record.
I know there's a text version: https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/bitcoin
And here the video: https://web.archive.org/web/20241116220152/https://www.youtu...
Wow, how does that work? Archive.org can't possibly archive every YouTube video, right?
They don't but if it is a popular video the likelyhood of it being archived increases. It is possible to submit URLs to archive.org manually too. Also the youtube videos downloaded by archiveteam volunteers[0] possibly end up in wayback machine though I'm not sure if it happens automatically anymore.
0:https://tracker.archiveteam.org/youtube/
Google's notoriously terrible customer service strikes again!
Weird how I hear the tweet in his voice as I read it.
In the future we will maybe need a physical ID (or other sufficiently costly proof) to post a video or file a complaint or do stuff other than consume.
I don't know though, maybe that will prove to be too hard and the bot filled platforms will win. In which case maybe the only way to be safe from the bot armies is to hire a bigger bot army yourself. Fun!
Hypothetically, would it be possible to create a legal entity to make claims against ones own videos, as a shell protection against bogus claims?
That's the purpose of limited liability companies.
That's not quite what I mean. Being a llc doesn't help you within the Youtube Content ID system. What I'm wondering is could you have a second entity you control make claims against your own videos - or do claims stack. i.e.: Would you still be vulnerable to vexatious claims from a third party.
> The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies"
Tech built on copyright abuse used for copyright trolling? Too early for peak irony of 2025!
I understand this isn't a DMCA request, so quite a few legal remedies are unavailable for abusing the Youtube reporting system. But it seems like "tortious interference" would still apply here. Is there some reason it wouldn't?
Tortious Interference might apply, but how much money was actually lost? 2 days of ad revenue on a video from 2017 is not much, certainly not enough to pay the lawyers for a lawsuit.
Using "LLM scanning" for "Web3" companies sounds like tortious interference already.
this has been a known problem with YouTube for ever and they seem to have no interest in fixing it.
Isn't this very strong evidence in favor of a thesis that HN hates? That the most important networks (like YouTube) ought to be decentralized? Unfortunately, a strike in favor of the blockchain people — the best of which have been working to find ways to keep systems permanently decentralized (and not just temporarily decentralized, like Bluesky/Nostr/Mastodon/SMTP/etc.).
A genuine question: can you clarify what you mean by temporarily decentralized? Seeing SMTP lumped in the same category as Bluesky made me realize I don't know what you mean.
The best argument in your favor is that Gmail captured 80% market share. Or that hosting your own mail server is a full-time job. However, this doesn't mean email isn't decentralized.
> Or that hosting your own mail server is a full-time job.
Many others have said so in the past, but I think it's worth saying again: this isn't true. With a good foundation in system administration, hosting an email server is not a full-time job; it's barely part-time.
I self-host an email server for myself; it has reasonable spam protection plus calendar and contacts synchronization. Gmail, Fastmail, GMX etc. accepts my outgoing emails. It took me around three days full-time to learn everything and set it up (from starting the virtual machine to fully working) and then an hour or two each month after that to keep it maintained. Please feel welcome to say hello with it :)
contact@seabass.systems
Email is ostensibly a decentralized system. But in its real-world use, it is centralized both at the application layer and at the protocol layer.
At the application layer, email clients (like the Gmail or iOS email app) are typically bundled with a reliance on centralized email hosting (running the mail server) and relying on their centrally-controlled name (@gmail.com, @icloud.com, etc.). This in turn gives the app developers significant leverage against the protocol layer, since they completely control how their users (through their app) interact with the protocol layer.
At the protocol layer, email relies heavily on a de facto reputation system, since any valuable and truly decentralized and permissionless system will have an abundance of spam. The reputation system is used to filter spam and isolate bad actors. This is why running a home email server is not really what this is about: it's about who you need to rely on to have your emails delivered.
The challenge isn't designing a protocol without reliance on any single actor. What's difficult is designing a protocol that can avoid becoming de facto centralized when critical features (like spam prevention, registration, etc.) need to be filled in by agents outside of the protocol.
The crypto people recognize this and that's why they want to build the economics explicitly into their protocols (a critically important part of any protocol; all protocols without exception have economic components whether one recognizes this or not). This is also why they emphasize global consensus and more.
Hacker News and others hate blockchains because they see the scams (which happen in all permissionless systems, and they are even more obvious when the financial components nakedly visible). Yet HN laments when the properties of decentralization that they love and value are lost for seemingly mysterious reasons ("dead internet theory", "enshittification"). The truth is that the reasons are right in front of us.
This is a good example of a sensationalist post title.
Lost in all this... can someone ELI5?
I'd like a couple of laws whereby if you charge or make money through something, you need to have some human monitoring.
Surely there's precedent is it not illegal to operate an unmonitored industrial factory
There are humans that work at google (or so I am told), just not enough.
It is not illegal to operate an unmonitored (nonetheless an under-monitored) factory.
I mean, it's good they are doing the right thing here, even if it were only damage control. But doesn't give a lot of confidence they won't harm creators who don't yet have 3b1b's reach.
Dead internet moves forward one step
I hope YouTube can make this a better experience extremely soon.
With YouTube video being used as a proxy for credible content on search results..
3 relatively anonymous complaints, in bad faithc can end so much learning and work… without evidence or reply kind of is deterring from having great content on YouTube.
The deterrent to creating good content on YouTube lets the bad content win, except it might not keep the eyeballs for advertising as well or broadly.
I’m not sure if the complainant must be required to contact the channel prior to accepting a dmca complaint? EBay has a built in messaging system, maybe YouTube can too.
Further if there’s ways creators can be protecting their creations before posting they should be built into the workflow, whether it’s registering custom music, etc.
Otherwise the price of success is targetable in an automated fashion to take down a channel if they don’t comply or pay out.
A channel inbox might force behaviour into first creator to creator before escalating straight to too easily triggering things.
Maybe new complainants found to have too many complaints in short order or some other pattern could possibly have to pass much higher kyc requirements to help each other communicate more effectively.
Luckily there are copies on other video platforms. e.g.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1yJ41117we/?spm_id_from=333...
Are there any nations that have laws that require investigation before takedowns, or at least have financial punishment for issuing incorrect takedowns?
Why don't we build a video hosting service served from there, if such a place exists?
"Be a property owner and not a renter on the Internet"
<https://den.dev/blog/be-a-property-owner-not-a-renter-on-the...>
HN discussion: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY>
If you keep working on Maggie's Farm, you'll keep encountering Maggie's rules.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie%27s_Farm>
Rely on YouTube for distribution, for now, but build a home base (or bases) elsewhere which you can fall back on.
Why do we tolerate centralized censorship platforms when we know their catastrophic failure modes?
This is just a mistaken corporate interest. What about when the state wants very much to hide something?
Ben's channel is visually stunning, and should be sponsored as public access educational content.
Best of luck suing the IP racketeers =3
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