Folk musician Murphy Campbell found herself at the center of a major ordeal when an entity called Timeless Sounds IR uploaded AI-generated imitations of her music to every major music platform, then used her recordings to strip her of her own income. According to sources, the scheme worked like this: someone fed YouTube videos of ... Read more
Given the current media, copyright, and business environment, why haven’t we seen this kind of reverse-piracy pursued as a deliberate business model? Buy some IP rights cheap from YouTube “content creators” who have given up, use your AI-powered robot to find vaguely similar stuff from creators who are still working, and copyright-claim it all?
It’s pretty evident there would be no downside.
Maybe small YouTubers should get together and create such a business, just to force the system to change. Make copyright claims against Paramount, CBS, etc. Make them barely plausible. Make thousands of them, from behind a rotating cast of shell companies. Make AI-powered, trust-the-claimant style copyright claims unworkable. Hey, it’s just the free market regulating itself.
Filing lots of legal cases for harassment is an established tactic (see SLAPP).
Using copyright claims to fleece people is also an established method, or rather several methods. People make fraudulent claims eg on youtube to get the ad money. Or they go a legal route and put a lot of copyrighted material out there, and sue anyone they can (“copyright trolls”).
It would rarely work against the likes of Paramount. Such companies have big bureaucracies to clear the rights. And legal departments to fight in court. Usually, this is about fleecing small companies or individuals, for whom it is cheaper to pay you off, than to go to court.
Anyway, mind that the OP contains legal disinformation. Better get your info from somewhere else.
Copyright claims are under penalty of perjury - you can go to prison for making them in bad faith.
What Patamount/CBS/etc are doing is not a copyright claim, it is a backdoor google has given them - but not you - that lets them bypass the legal process and get things taken down - but if they are wrong there is no legal issue for them. From the outside it looks exactly like a copyright claim, and in spirit it is - by legally it is not a copyright claim in important ways.
If “Vydia” can get access to this mechanism, it can’t be that hard, can it?
They are just making it up. It’s just nonsense.
These copyright claims are governed by the DMCA in the US. Platforms like Youtube that allow User Generated Content have a safe harbor provision. They are usually not liable for content that users post. Without that, the internet as we know it would be hard to imagine. But when someone reports a copyright violation, the platform must take it down, or else becomes liable. Then it could be sued for damages, as if the platform had pirated the content.
Posters can submit a DMCA counter-notice. At that point, the copyright owner must either sue the poster, or the content goes back up (within 14 days). It is quite suspicious, that there is no mention of that in the OP.
However, copyright owners have sued Youtube, alleging that they did not do enough to take down pirated content. This did not go so well for Youtube. Eventually they were forced to create “Content ID”. Owners register and upload their content. Youtube continuously scans for that content in videos posted by users. What happens when there is a match depends on the assumed owner. They can choose to have it taken down, or to get the ad money, for example. SNAFUs are pretty common, especially with classical music. It also has no regard for Fair Use, but content owners hate that anyway.
I do not know how hard it is to get access to this. That is a good question to ask - but also read the fine print if you get access as it may not be any better than the legal process for you.
It is a business model: patent trolls’.