I watched your video on Tuesday, which is good because you included a bunch of clips of hockey and soccer and football games that you did not own.

And one of the companies that owned some of those clips decided to block the video from being viewed on YouTube.

So it feels like this might be a good time for an educational video on the very weird state of copyright and online media.

In 2019 19 before the Internet, piracy was excruciatingly slow.

We did it, of course.

We recorded mixed tapes from the radio and traded FANSUB.

VHS is of Anna Mae.

Yes, that's actually something I did.

But the Internet, first through Napster, made it very easy to instantly distribute other people's property.

It was so easy and it didn't feel wrong.

Songs were already free on the radio, and everyone I knew was doing it.

And YouTube, in its early days, was part of this system.

It would not be the platform it is today.

If it weren't for Pirated Family guy and Daily Show clips.

Viacom sued them about it for years.

So in order to keep existing YouTube had to create a ludicrously complicated piece of technology that checks every moment of every video uploaded to its platform against a vast library of conduct that includes, like everything that has ever been made.

But you, too, doesn't actually want to stop copyright violation, and neither do the rights holders who own that content here on the Blogger.

This channel, we by which I mean mostly me, have uploaded copyrighted content to the channel lots of times before, and we've never had a video blocked or taken down.

I've blatantly stolen, like when I basically made a music video for a Willie Nelson song.

And then there are more questionable cases, like when I released a song called The Subway where I used to go, which I would argue is parity.

In all of those cases, those videos were not blocked or taken down.

They were claimed, which means that the money that they earned through Google's AdSense product went to the record labels of Go D A and Willie Nelson, respectively.

When YouTube's fancy Dancy content I D System finds someone's property in someone else's video, they give the rights holder the option to do one of four things one they can basically do nothing and just track the video to.

They can claim the video and make money from it.

Three.

Bacon block the video In certain countries or in all countries or four, they can take the video down off of YouTube and issue a copyright strike.

Inside YouTube's dashboard, a rights holder can set up rules.

Simple ones like everyone who uses anything, gets a global block or complicated rules like claim any view from Croatia that contains more than 30 seconds of my property.

But this is almost never done manually.

It's just done with these filters.

Only this last thing.

The takedown, is a legal step.

It's the only step that is not automated, and it's the only step that requires an electronic signature.

It is also the step that's most impactful.

A copyright strike effects the channels ability to monetize and channels that get three of them can be deleted from the platform along with all of the content.

From that chance, you only get a copyright strike, which is the big deal.

If the rights holder decides to give you a copyright strike, which is from a creators perspective uncommon and completely random this policy and the way that rights holders interact with it actually encourages creators to take these kinds of risks.

And I would argue that this is actually a good thing.

I think it frees up creators to doom or interesting things that allows for everyone to interact with intellectual property in a more malleable and less strict way.

And it allows rights holders to allow uses that actually benefit the losing monetization on a single video, which is the most common thing that happens.

Isn't that big of a deal for most Creator?

And the claiming system is actually pretty genius because it allows these big giant companies who would otherwise be yelling at Congress about how they need to shut you tube down to get, ah, whole new income stream.

So they stop yelling so much so L Mills can use.

I'm walking on sunshine in a video, and she might lose her YouTube revenue.

But she might also grow her audience and make money selling shirts or doing a brand deal.

And I can use elves footage in my video without asking her, because I know that the worst that's gonna happen is that I'm gonna lose monetization, which sucks but isn't the end of the world.

Of course, this is not a perfect system.

It has two very big flaws on only large rights holders have access to this system.

If you're an independent filmmaker or musician or photographer, it's very difficult to get your content into the content.

I d system YouTube does not and will never let everybody into the system, in part because it's very easy to abuse.

Which leads us to the second problem.

It's very easy to abuse, even sometimes accidentally.

Here's a hypothetical situation for you, say the Daily Show includes some footage from NASA that's in the public domain in a clip that they upload to YouTube.

They then claim that clip as their property.

But then other people also upload videos that have this same public domain clip from NASA.

In their video.

The Content I D System doesn't know the difference between the part of the Daily Show clip that's their property and the part that's in the public domain.

So all of those people suddenly have their content claimed they might not know how to dispute that claim, or they might be afraid to dispute that claim because they might end up with a strike on their account.

False claims have been a huge issue since the beginning of content I D.

And they remain a really big issue, especially for small and medium sized creators who basically have no recourse if they hit that third strike.

So it's a system with problems, but it's not not working.

There's lots of interesting creative things being done on the platform.

So far, YouTube has allowed that stuff to continue happening without being sued out of existence, with the creative and economic ecosystem built on policies and individual choices.

Not on the law.

Hartley.

This is all possible because of what's called safe harbor laws, and we have a really good big one here in the U.

S.

That basically says rights holders cannot sue YouTube for the laws that have been broken by the users of the platform.

And that turns out to a little bit weaken intellectual property because that means that we can use video from the English Football Association or whatever it's called, and they can block our video that can take down the video.

They could even issue us a copyright strike, but they can't really sue us because the amount of money it would cost to pay lawyers to sue us is literally more money than our company has in its bank account.

Doing this individually for tons and tons of small creators.

It's just not logistically possible, but doing it all at once for all content that had English Football Association stuff inside of it that was uploaded to YouTube if they could sue YouTube for that, YouTube has tons of money and has had lots of English Football Association stuff illegally uploaded to its sight.

That would be a great lawsuit waiting to happen.

But safe harbor laws make it so that YouTube isn't responsible for the dumb decisions of creators like me.

Which is good because John and I are like among the Maur trustable YouTube creators, and you still can't trust us to not break the law.

So the system is kind of set up in a way where YouTube has figured out how to satisfy the requirements of the law.

And from there the law doesn't matter any more business, and now it's supposed to work like if you break the law, you're supposed to get fined or arrested.

You are not supposed to get claimed or taken down copyright law, or even the modern idea of what copyright is was not designed for a world in which literally everyone is a distributor, much less for a world in which everyone is a rights hold.

It's not law.

It's YouTube policy informed by the law.

But it's consequences are just a significant, like having your channel de monetized or removed to the platform.

Isn't that different from a fine?

Now you can challenge a takedown or a block, but if you do that, in my opinion, at least you're much more likely to get a strike.

For example, the Football Association didn't issue a strike to our channel.

But if we challenged their block, that would annoy them because a human being would have to deal with.

And most of these arguments come down to what's called the fair use doctrine.

Though it is often claimed to be simple by creators like myself, fair use is not simple, and in fact we have pretty much an entire episode of crash course intellectual property dedicated to explaining how once simple it is, and it outlines some other ways in which copyright law does not work great in today's society, you should watch it, but there are literally not enough lawyers alive in the world today.

Toe argue.

All of the fair use cases that YouTube has created for us and courts have not been consistent at all in how they determine what is and is not fair use, even within individual countries.

And there are also hundreds of different countries, all with different laws, So you could see how this could get complicated really fast.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't dispute claims if a claim has been made on your content and error, or if there's a good case for fair use dispute that claim.

That's the only way the system works.

But if you just Hank Green style used to Willie Nelson the song because it made the video better, don't dispute that claim.

That's how you get a strike.

So John was your video last week?

Fair use?

Probably not, But was it on excellent promotion off the F A Cup?

Was it great content for the rights holder?

Was it better for them to have the content on YouTube than toe have it removed.

I think everyone, even the English Football Association, if they actually watched the video, would agree.

That is probably better for that video to be out there than to be blocked.

So that brings up another Harry question.

Is it okay for rights holders to take down content when they don't like it?

But leave up content that they do like?

And we have, in fact seeing this explicitly among independent creators, where creators air commenting on each other's content in ongoing drama feuds?

And then they escalate that by issuing takedown notices and copyright strikes on a channel that they're feuding with.

So would it be okay for the Football Association toe?

Leave your video up if they like it, but take it down.

If it's really mean about football and talks about how it's the dumb sport, it's very slow, and no one ever scores goals.

My personal opinion, I'm just saying that's a video people could make again.

It doesn't matter.

This isn't about law anymore.

No one has the time or money or inclination to take any of this stuff to court.

The current state of copyright is kind of only peripherally related to the law.

It's much more related to the policies of the platforms on which we operate our businesses and our lives, which is a strange situation to be in as we realize that we are kind of citizens of corporation.

When YouTube changes policy in ways that benefit creators, which it has done, for example, when it stopped sending money to rights holders who claimed videos immediately and instead held that money while waiting to see if there was a dispute, it doesn't do that for legal reasons.

It doesn't because its creators yelled at it enough that they listened almost like a government.

And changes in YouTube policy have Rhea world legitimate effects on intellectual property and how creative people interface with it.

That's what I mean when I say that we've moved beyond the law.

For me, YouTube policy matters far more than the courts when it comes to copyright.

And we didn't really have another option because copyright as written is fundamentally broken.

We know that because we are all constantly breaking the law and no one cares.

Here's an example.

This JJ, if I don't own this Jif, it was absolutely stolen.

Everybody agrees that gifts are okay, because culture blew past the law and also apparently standardized pronunciation of the word give.

But somewhere between gifts and soccer highlights, there's a line, and no one knows where that line is.

But it is not being defined by governments, at least not at the moment.

Seriously, if you're in the you look into Article 13 it's pretty scary and makes intellectual property much stronger, which in my opinion, probably makes creativity a lot weaker.

If you examine this for long enough, it becomes very clear that all of this is much more about, like how we feel, what seems right and also existing tears of power than what, Like the law says, It's a mess.

And John, if you look closely, there might be a way for you to watch the video that you uploaded last Tuesday, though slightly modified for people who might have missed it.