This is not the story you might first think it is. This is coming from a CAGW promoting site.~ctm
We created two YouTube channels for science. This was back in 2011, a time when the video platform was dominated by videos from climate change deniers, and only few Universities had a channel at all, let alone subscribers in the four digits. It was perplexing, you could find all these videos about Al Gore`s An Inconvenient Truth, and how all was a big deliberate hoax, but not the actual documentary. That’s when we uploaded his film (we tried to reach out to him and Paramount asking for permission, but got no answer). The YouTube AI did a great job in flagging this carbon copy within minutes, blocking it worldwide and resulted in our first copyright strike. But we thought it was worth trying.
Then we tried to upload content which was already out there, but only a few seconds, for instance to illustrate the Greenhouse Effect, though this took the AI a bit longer to block. We had videos by NASA Ad blocked, we had Copyright Strikes by climate deniers on videos which trended, and then we decided to focus on a second channel, focusing on content we created. This was around 2016, and around that time YouTube begun to seriously crack down on channels, they or others have been flagged in the the past, resulting in the termination of both our channels.
YouTube email: After review, we determined that activity in your account violated our Community Guidelines, which prohibit spam, scams or commercially deceptive content.
Following a petition with over 3000 signatures, without explaining, at least one of our channels came back. But YouTube didn’t stop there. They refused to let us contest a copyright strike. Continuously we receive false copyright claims on the same content, as if YouTube completely ignores public domain content, content we usually use these days. It shouldn’t be too hard to update the existing system with that content, but no.
Then came February 2019, a balmy morning a few days earlier YouTube updated their terms & conditions. This time they came for our ad revenue, demonetizing our channel. No more income for us. This time there was not even an email, just out of the blue, though a notice in our channel backend informed us, we were allowed to reapply within a month for monetization.
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“This was back in 2011, a time when the video platform was dominated by videos from climate change deniers”
8 years ago?…..Elizabeth please
Running off conservatives will come back to bite them.
As Youtube deplatforms and demonetizes popular web casters, they are migrating to non-censored platforms like gab and patreon, and their fans are following them in droves.
Eventually, Google execs will wake up and realize, “We’ve lost 70% of our audience over the past three years, and that number is rising,” so they may come to their senses, or else watch their business go belly-up. Ideology-driven decisions that ignore business realities have consequences.
Did you read the same post as I did? It wasn’t a “conservative” group, it was a CAGW group. It wasn’t an “ideology-based decision,” but one based on the rules of content reuse, i.e. create your OWN content, don’t repost others’ and claim that as your own.
Yes, I think ilftpm did. The comment appeared to be a general one.
The political preferences of youtube/Google are already well known to be anti-Conservative and even moderate Conservatives have been complaining about it for some time.
What is newer is that those who thought they would be safe because they held the “correct” views are finding out that censorship is not quite the bed of roses they expected.
However, this one appears to be more of a copyright issue, and every one is learning that Google’s AI is not quite as smart as they would have you believe. And the situation may well get worse.
Sorry to disagree – Google’s AI is EXACTLY as smart as they want it to be. It IS their idea of what AI should be, after all (of course we have to take into account that Google does work with China on AI but refuses to work with the US military).
Google sucked all the ad money away from newspapers, tv, and radio. link As well, some websites I used to visit found they were no longer viable.
If you want to make money on line, the big companies are, more or less, the gatekeepers. I suspect that WUWT is a bit of an outlier.
Another problem is bogus DMCA take down notices. link
I’m pretty sure some people will disagree, but IMHO big companies are every bit as evil as big government.
Morality for people capable of self-moderating, responsible behavior, and competing interests to mitigate the progress of others running amuck.
We will get somewhere when people finally figure out that Big companies and Big government aoe the SAME THING. Big corps buy the regulators.
Big Corps HAVE to “buy” regulators because Politicians sell regulation/laws to the highest bidders. A corp either gets in the “buy influence” business or lose out to competitors who outbid them.
The ONLY answer is a complete separation of government and the economy in the same manner and for the same reason as the separation of church and state.
Ken, let’s achieve ” separation of church and state ” then we can move on. There are two countries where unelected clerics sit in government – Iran and the United Kingdom. A ridiculous anachronism in the UK where more than two thirds of the population declare themselves to be disbelievers, unbelievers, disinterested or of a different religion altogether. Yet their lordships sit in sombre contemplation of how the rest of us should live our lives – very dangerous now the Church of England has become a strong advocate for “measures to combat CAGW”.
Peter GB:
You are forgetting the Vatican and their 1.5 Billion lemmings.
Lets “move on” is followed by not moving on, a common subversive inkling. It gets tiresome to repeat, but there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. There is a protection from the government’s interference in personal beliefs. The left has redefined this to mean what best serves a collectivists’ control – by eliminating the intrusion of morality (religion) into the system control of the “masses.” The bible banning cases had a logic in that the state was promoting Christianity and the founders would agree.
Back to science.
You have it backwards. It’s more like the mob running a protection racket. The mob tells the business “that is a nice business you have there, would be a shame if something bad happened to it”.
No, he had it the right way around.
Certainly in the UK, we see the “ Revolving Door” where people move from positions in government to work as lobbyists & “advisors” in industry.
Large companies can afford to comply with beurocracy, small companies struggle.
That’s how it works in all countries.
Big Business == Big Government and visa versa. Can’t have one with out the other.
With big companies, you always have a choice. Big government gives you no choice.
For most people, that makes all the difference.
BTW, you seem to be taking it for granted that the site managers are actually innocent of the charges.
More likely they didn’t know and didn’t care how copyright works and repeatedly violated youTubes terms of use rules.
Their guilt is irrelevant.
We have giant corporations who take it upon themselves to enforce the copyright of others. So, they aren’t the copyright owners. They also aren’t the government with the right to enforce the law.
Normally it is the job of the copyright owner to enforce their copyright, possibly by suing the guilty party. So, in the end, whatever happens is mediated by a court decision. As the story illustrates, when corporations enforce the copyright of others, the defendant has no way to defend herself.
Ever since the Magna Carta, we have developed a set of legal rights where plaintiffs and defendants both had their rights protected. You can find out what happens otherwise by asking anyone who survived behind the Iron Curtain.
Once again, you are too eager to blame business that you don’t actually investigate the facts of the case.
If they don’t enforce the copyright of others, they can and will be sued by the copyright holders.
Doesn’t mean they would lose.
1 – They should have embraced their status as common carriers.
2 – The mechanism for copyright holders is the DMCA takedown notice. If a social media company ignores that, then they can be sued.
And, bob, you are complaining about Number 2 here. This is a case of the platform *not* ignoring DMCA.
david, with the American legal system as it is, even when a company wins such a suit, they still lose. They are out big bucks in legal fees, and the jury system is biased against big companies.
Way to many jurors have no problem taking money from a big company and giving it to a sympathetic looking plaintiff, regardless of whether the company is guilty or not.
The way it works under the DMCA is that Youtube is immune from copyright violations that it does on behalf of it’s users. However in exchange for this immunity it is obligated to respond to ‘DMCA letters’ that are used to inform Youtube/Google of said violations. They are required to remove content flagged in this manner. Under the law then users have the opportunity to write a counter letter to get their content put back online. After that Youtube/Google is out of the loop and it becomes a issue for the courts to resolve if the first company decides to sue the user.
If youtube/google tries to fight this then chances are they will lose their immunity, which would destroy them financially.
I am sure that all of this sounded very reasonable to politicians whose experience with computers was limited to having their assistants enter in appointment dates on their blackberry phones, but obviously it’s a stupid system.
Big everything is bad. Big business, big labor, big medicine, big government and now even big science. They all operate at scales that don’t allow for humans to be meaningful aspects or considerations.
Ironically, it is the prophets of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that deny climate change, and are desperately seeking sources to explain climate change, and reap the profits through misinformation and mischaracterization.
Sounds like a University that does not have even basic understanding of copyright law.
Oh dear!
What a Pity!
Never Mind!!
Excellent Dodgy,
I’d forgotten all about It ain’t half hot mum 😁
Oh, boo-hoo-hoo. Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin is playing.
There were no “climate change deniers” in 2011. That slur came into use more recently, as the propagandists grew more desperate.
abc radio is Aus was calling us deniers and blocking phone comment an online posts to comments back in 2009
They never realized that nether Big Al or the people behind YouTube wanted An Inconvenient Truth to be posted somewhere that it can be commented on.
~¿~
So they admit to an egregious and flagrant violation of copyright. I don’t know their site or their practices, but not understanding why this was wrong is a decided point against them. In fact, reading through much of the article, it seems that they were repeatedly posting illegal content, and it was not “evil climate deniers”, but the lawful owners of the videos that they were outright pirating.
Maybe they did have some good videos in their channels, but when your own defense is that much against you, I’m very skeptical of anything else they have to say.
“There should a test for prognosticators, forecasters, futurist, predictors,and visionaries: They should have to disclose their past record for predicting the future.”
Anonymous Heins
Apparently those people don’t know how YouTube works vis-a-vis monetization. You have to create YOUR OWN CONTENT to do it. You can’t copy content from other sites and claim it as your own, even if it is in the public domain. Putting up “An Inconvenient Truth” without permission is like putting up the latest Marvel Universe offering, and then wondering why you got a copyright strike.
A solution to their problem is to quit trying to monetize stolen content. Well, YouTube just took care of that for them.
But, they’re the good guys.
The rules were never supposed to apply to people like them.
If that is the standard think of all the people who make money off of musicians’ work. If Youtube got sued by every musician whose art was stolen by someone else, they would be out of business tomorrow.
Mind providing examples of what you’re talking about?
In the meantime, let me explain how YouTube works. I have a YouTube channel. It’s mostly highlights from the 1960s-1990s of my university football team, made from the VHS tapes that were sold back in the day. They were never converted to DVD, so people sent me their tapes, and I digitized them and put them on my channel. I currently have 560 subscribers and 1,163,526 views — puny numbers.
I have copyright hits, too, mostly because of the background music in the videos. The difference between me getting dinged and them getting strikes is that I’m not trying to monetize my content. So I just get notes attached to my videos saying so-and-so owns the copyright on some of the content, and that’s it.
So, it’s not just a matter of using another’s content; it’s the attempt to make money off it that really draws their attention. All that being said, I don’t think I’d try to get away with posting an entire movie, even non-monetized.
might be coming soon the new EU copyright laws are going to kill a lot of present media.
and while someone using a bit of music might annoy the creators? it means its heard(seen for artists) by many who would never hear/ see their work otherwise and who may well go buy after.
More to the point – as I understood it- Gore would not allow free viewing of his lies.
A local church group planned to screen the film for information, but could NOT get permission as Al would not get a take of it.
I am shocked I tell you, shocked!
I read the title two ways: “de-monetize” and “demon-etize”. I think it works both ways.
The link to The World’s Largest Climate Change Video Channel does not even have one comment about the demonetization by Google.
Maybe no one cares?
AGW was always about the money
Their twitter account is the typical smorgasbord of doom and gloom.
These days YouTube demonitizes or closes down sites for *the content of the comments*. Perfectly innocent pictures had comments from pedophiles making rude interpretations. The posters of these pictures of children were the ones shut down.
Perhaps their postings led to many adverse comments by climate skeptics and thus were shut down.
I remember YouTube way back when as a platform for sharing everything including R-rated material as long as it was declared unsuitable for under 13. That was before the time when feelings were more important than freedom to say what you wanted. Before there were advertisers.
Climate zealots complain on the lack of advertisement revenue ? The same who preach the virtues of anti-capital action and prevailing socialism ?
Now that’s quite a paradox.
When they get what they ask for, they are confused.
They’re confused long before they ask for anything; or do anything.
That they’re confused about having monetization revoked for posting unoriginal content says it all, really.
Finally it’ s all about easy money, nothing new under the sun.
Maybe the well-established alarmist Monbiot is being heeded. He calls for the end of “capitalism”. Well, advertising is part and parcel of capitalism as I understand it. It is part of the reward system for an investment of effort and savings. Monbiot wants that sort of behaviour ended.
If YouTube first starts dismantling “capitalism” for those who most loudly promote the call, what’s the beef?
Is this a case of, “Do unto them what we say, not unto us?”
“With subscribers in the four digits”? After 8 years? No way were they “monetized”. B.s. all the way.
Meh, they don’t even have a silver play button
“you could find all these videos about Al Gore`s An Inconvenient Truth, and how all was a big deliberate hoax”
They say that as if they still don’t know.
It seems that they didn’t watch any of them either.
Can I say ‘catastrophic’ and ‘EU’ in the same sentence? Yes, like this:
“Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market”
The measure was approved by on 26 March 2019. If approved on 15 April 2019, member states would have two years to pass appropriate legislation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market
https://diem25.org/against-the-eu-directive-on-copyright-in-the-digital-single-market/
“Article 13, also known as the “upload filter”, requiring websites who primarily host user-generated content to take “effective and proportionate” measures …”
This “who” wording is defective. A website is not a legal person any more than an email is, or a text message.
It is quite possibly using PHP to create a frame that is populated by links to articles, images and sites creating for the person viewing the page, a composite of licensed or public sources. In short it is providing a viewing method, not “reposting” by hosting a copy.
This is fundamentally different from creating a copy and serving it (like a so-called file sharing site). When I paste a link into a WhatsApp message the source file is retrieved and an image displayed to the recipient, but I did not copy and paste the content.
The source site owner can complain about losing views that would also see ads on the source site, but that is like a newspaper complaining about people discussing what is in the paper over coffee at Timmy”s while passing around a clipping from the paper. The clipping requires someone to buy a newspaper and there is nothing to prevent me placing it on the side of my refrigerator with a magnet for “anyone to read”.
If I write the source and date on the clipping with a pencil, and more people see my fridge than buy newspapers, I am in a position to charge for advertising their product.
The Legal point is I am not making photocopies of the article and selling them. If I have a newsletter made entirely of clippings from newspapers I purchase and show it, or post it on a bulletin board, I have purchased the right to do that by buying the newspapers in the first place. Newspaper producers keep careful track of how many people read each copy they print. So do magazine publishers. Think of the dentist’s office. Should each reader have to pay to read it? Each time? Forever?
No.
An obvious target of this “Directive” is Google and YouTube. Whatever else this does, it changes the laws in Europe. With world-wide effects probably. Laws can override rationality and even throw it out the window. I have no idea what the implications are, but I fear the worst.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cd364ba8-749a-4038-b73a-0e8dad915515
Your android phone (made by Google) can determine the name of a song, the singer, and even the album in as little as 3 seconds. Yet the same google can’t figure out that a video, film clip, etc is public domain?? B/S, there is a reason this is being done.
No they can’t, for obvious reasons.
No computer, including Android, can succesfully detect EVERY copyrighted song, simply because they can only compare to a given library of songs from a limited set of publishers. That library can never be complete.
You can’t detect that something is public domain, unless you first build a library, by having people donate stuff to a PD library and then have human beings check it… Which may be what Google or Wiki foundation may start next, it does not exist yet.
And that obviously will only tell you a very very small set is PD or copyrighted. It is worse for videos, as partial reuse can be difficult or even impossible to detect. Even when using human checkers. So when any EU country decides to interprete that new law as 100 precent immediate detection than Youtube will have no choice but to simply completely block that country.
Your android phone (made by Google) can determine the name of a song, the singer, and even the album in as little as 3 seconds. Yet the same google can’t figure out that a video, film clip, etc is public domain?? B/S, there is a reason this is being done.
The “reason” is that you clearly don’t know much about how computers (smart phones are a type of computer) work. It determines that information because it has access to a database that contains that information. But that database is limited to the copyrighted works that have been added to it. Not every copyrighted work is in that database. (and no one has created a database of PD works, and such a database would be even more incomplete than the one of copyrighted works as copyright holders have an incentive to get their works into the database, there’s no equivalent entity in regards to ensuring PD works are added to a database).
While it might have a near 100% hit rate on hit songs, popular material from the last few decades and the newest and latest releases by the major labels, there are still plenty of really old, obscure tracks (and songs from individuals who aren’t part of any label) that are still under copyright that your phone can’t identify because it’s not (yet) in the database. And just because it’s not in the database does not automatically mean it’s not copyrighted. If you wrote a song today, you’d have the copyright on that song. But because you are not a major record label, just an unknown individual, your copyrighted song won’t automatically appear in that database. If I upload your song, android phones won’t be able to identify it as being copyrighted (it’s not in the database). Should you not be able to enforce your copyright just because your song didn’t appear in a database?
Maybe Youtube just concluded that a change to the atmosphere of 0.013% over 2 centuries really is insignificant. One can only hope.
I believe YouTube monetization would be the same as an “at will” employee, fireable at any time. I wouldn’t bother to use such a platform.
This is great news…a little less climate change for profit propaganda.
they can monetize by buying shares of Alphabet.
or More appropriately, they can create a (dot)porn host server and upload their Pro-CAGW videos there.
Put teasers videos up for free and put the Happy Endings of drowning cities, choking dust storms, endless heatwaves behind a paywall like the other porn sites.
They can give there Climate Porn creative titles without fear of take-down:
Hurricane CAGW porn titles:
-Katrina Does the Big Easy
-Sandy Swallows the Big Apple.
Dust Storm CAGW porn titles:
– Dusty Blows
– Ms Habu Blew and Blew
Heat Wave CAGW porn titles:
– Friday Hot Nights
– Bummer Summers Forever
– Step Climate Change with Step-Sister
Lol youve got a career in advertising waiting;-)