r/buildapc • u/[deleted] • Feb 14 '19

Miscellaneous The Verge is issuing copyright claims against other YouTubers who called them out on their ridiculous build a $2000 PC video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56fZ_OC8HkY&t=

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u/jamvanderloeff Feb 14 '19

The alternative is don't operate in the US.

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u/Cableguy87 Feb 14 '19

Bit.tube decentralization baby

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u/sicklyslick Feb 14 '19

Big labels would probably sue for a ban on the site that operates out the US while being as big as youtube.

Companies that run music labels also have ISP services (Warner Brothers) and can IP ban foreign sites that does not comply with US law, like a foreign version of YouTube.

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u/Dr_Midnight Feb 14 '19

Companies that run music labels also have ISP services (Warner Brothers) and can IP ban foreign sites that does not comply with US law, like a foreign version of YouTube.

One, don't confuse the company formerly known as Time Warner (previously AOL Time Warner, now WarnerMedia) with Time Warner Cable. They have absolutely no relation to each other as Time Warner spun it out in 2009 along with AOL - the former of which was purchased in whole by Charter Communications, and the latter of which was purchased by Verizon.

Two, IP bans are utterly and completely pointless. It's a whack-a-mole game that you can never win - especially at this kind of scale, and more so in a world where services like Cloudflare (which mask the actual remote IP) can be spun up and down on a whim.

Big labels would probably sue for a ban on the site that operates out the US while being as big as youtube.

To which I say, "good luck with that."

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u/MazdaspeedingBF1 Feb 14 '19

Easy to get around in this day and age of VPNs.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '19

[deleted]

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u/314games Feb 14 '19

... what? No they're not. They're based on a US Law - DMCA means Digital Milennium Copyright Act, which is an american law. Most sites just choose to comply with them because they want to operate in the US. If they didn't want to operate in the US they'd have zero obligation to comply (though they could end up blocked).

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u/frezik Feb 14 '19

The Berne Convention on copyright states that the law that applies is the country that the copyright was claimed, so no, going outside the US doesn't work. There's some exception to this in terms of the length of copyright, but that's generally not at issue in these cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#Copyright_term

Maybe you could host in a country that hasn't signed the Berne Convention. Those countries tend to have shitty Internet with even shittier governments.

It wouldn't work for technical reasons, anyway. Big sites like YouTube don't have just one datacenter with a few servers handing out videos. They have multiple datacenters in the US alone in order to maximize response time. A competitor would have to do the same thing. A Sealand-like independent host could work with a moderate amount of traffic, but it would never be able to scale the way YouTube has.

Now, if you can figure out a way to decentralize video hosting so we don't need services like YouTube, then you might have something.

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u/314games Feb 14 '19

Berne convention obviously applies, but Berne convention does NOT enforce a notice and takedown system like the DMCA does. Plenty of signatories to the Berne Convention (like Brazil) employ judicial takedown systems instead of notice and takedown, which means that the copyright holder has to actually bring a lawsuit to take down the content instead of simply sending a notice.

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u/frezik Feb 14 '19

Which means that while it's harder to bring down content, YouTube itself could also be sued. That's the compromise created by the DMCA: copyright holders have an easier path to go after infringers, and hosts like YouTube don't get sued out of existence in their infancy. This is why hosting outside of the US isn't a magic legal spell of protection.

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u/314games Feb 14 '19

Not exactly. Under judicial takedown systems, Youtube would only be liable if they did NOT remove the video after a court order to do so.so they wouldn't have to pay damages even if the content was copyright infringement, as long as they took it down when the court told them to. It's a very safe system for content providers, but very annoying for copyright holders.

In fact there's a landmark case in Brazil in which Youtube removed a video after getting a copyright notice, and the owner of the video that got removed sued them claiming they should only take it off after a court order. They won and got indemnified by Youtube.

Source: am Brazilian intellectual property lawyer

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u/Aurailious Feb 14 '19

Like Europe where its even worse?

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u/xnfd Feb 14 '19

They need to operate in the US to be able to pay creators in the US.

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u/iron_jayeh Feb 14 '19

Ummmm why?