Does You Tube Violate the RICO Laws?

[Bruce Wrenn]

The RICO laws were designed to fight organized crime. The basic idea is if someone profits from a crime, then they just as guilty as the person committing the crime. Much content on You Tuber is copyrighted, and thus illegal to play unless permission is given. Music is the first thing that pops to mind. With You Tube selling ads, and getting a profit from these activities, are they guilty of RICO violations? Please don't degenerate this thread to a current case in Georgia, or thread will be closed by OP, or moderators! Just give your thoughts.

[roger wiegand]

Youtube has a lot of agreements in place with the large content creators to license their property-- I posted a video of my daughter and her friends doing thier version of Lord of the Rings (it was pretty hilarious), they had the movie soundtrack playing in the background of their play. I got a copyright violation notice from YouTube for the music and a notice that the copyright holder would permit my use as long as I didn't try to monetize the video (not much chance of that!). All very civilized, and everyone's interest seemed to be protected in a reasonable way. In another case someone used images taken from my web site of my fairground organ to promote CD sales for a different organ. I complained and the video was taken down almost immediately. In another case I got a copyright strike for posting a video of a 1915 version of a currently popular song played from an original paper roll on an antique machine. I contested the strike on the basis that the material in question was no longer subject to copyright and they reversed the strike.

I have the impression that they work fairly hard to stay on the right side of copyright, at least for material where anyone is actively protecting their rights. Theres a lot of content, eg from defunct record labels from the 30s and 40s with no obvious subsequent owner, that is allowed to pass in the absence of objection. Is that a crime? I'm not a copyright lawyer so I won't say. In any event I suspect it's a civil not a criminal violation, so probably not under the RICO statute.

[Doug Garson]

Do you have any flagrant examples of Youtube allowing copyrighted music or other content to be misused. I don't have any first hand experience like Roger but I often hear Youtubers say they can't include a soundtrack with a video due to copyright restrictions imposed by Youtube.

[Andrew More]

No, they don't. The modern internet is dependent on the "Safe Harbor" provision that states that just providing a venue to post things doesn't make the owner of that venue libel for what's posted. There have been a few rumblings over the years about changing it, but it's essentially an all or nothing situation. Either people are allowed to post whatever they want, including copyrighted works in their entirety, without the owner of the forum being libel OR the entire system needs to change such that all content is moderated, which would shutdown new content almost all modern platforms immediately. The crux of the problem is the massive fire hose that is allowing anybody to post, and the inability for the platform providers to "police" this content without a massive investment in moderation employees. I can't remember the numbers for how much content YouTube gets posted each day, but I think the moderation workforce would end up being something like everybody living in Florida or something.

So no, it's not illegal. That having been said, some of the rumbles of changing the Safe Harbor provision have been from IP owners who have noticed how much pirated material ends up on YouTube without Google doing much about it. Personally I find it _very_ interesting that they shutdown Google Music, and moved to YouTube Music, which also incorporates content from YouTube. Content like pirated music and playlists. Even more interesting is that often when I ask Google Assistant to play a specific album and artist that I KNOW they have in their library, it seems to end up on some random YouTube account version, and NOT the officially licensed version......

[Jim Koepke]

I do not recall which artist objected to music in one of my funky videos, as I recall it only applied to one European country.

If I do have music on it tends to be instrumental and very old, hopefully out of copyright.

jtk

[Ole Anderson]

Content creators are very careful to not record even if a song is playing in the background for fear of being demonetized. That being said, I don't understand how they can just repost entire copyrighted movies.

[Jim Becker]

The crux of the problem is the massive fire hose that is allowing anybody to post, and the inability for the platform providers to "police" this content without a massive investment in moderation employees. I can't remember the numbers for how much content YouTube gets posted each day, but I think the moderation workforce would end up being something like everybody living in Florida or something.

It's not really done by "people" other than when something is protested. It's all done automagically by software and it's a sure thing that AI is going to quickly come into play relative to this kind of content moderation

[Edward Weber]

It's not really done by "people" other than when something is protested. It's all done automagically by software and it's a sure thing that AI is going to quickly come into play relative to this kind of content moderation

Audio watermarking should go a long way to solve the problem of using content you're not entitled to. With AI and other algorithms, this type of content can be easily flagged.

[Bill Dufour]

Napster got put out of business for copyright violations years ago. They remind me of Uber and Lyft trying to say they are not employers and not responsible if the driver rapes and murders you. Those are just independent contractors.
Bill D

[Doug Garson]

It's not really done by "people" other than when something is protested. It's all done automagically by software and it's a sure thing that AI is going to quickly come into play relative to this kind of content moderation

Apps like Shazam can identify a song in a few notes.

[Ole Anderson]

We stream our services at church through Facebook and Livestream. We can get tagged even if our pianist plays something classical as a prelude and clearly in the public domain. The catch? Usually it is the bots in Russia that catch it months or even a year later and try to claim rights. We typically don't get tagged while it is running live.

[Ronald Blue]

Like roger said many regular content posters make sure they don't allow any music from the radio or other sources to play in the background to avoid copyright infringement.

Ole my church buys a license to be able to use the hymns. I don't recall if it's an annual license now or bi-annual. The cost isn't outrageous as I recall. We've never had any issues with the live stream on FB showing the music portion of the service as well.

[Brian Elfert]

Like roger said many regular content posters make sure they don't allow any music from the radio or other sources to play in the background to avoid copyright infringement.

This exactly. One mechanic on Youtube mentioned they usually have a radio playing in the shop, but it gets turned off when he is making a video. I also notice that the radio in customer cars gets turned off right away to avoid copyright strikes.

Youtube has a decent sized library of music that is free for content creators to use in their videos.

[mike stenson]

I know someone who has had their videos taken down (automatically), for using their own music.

[Andrew More]

It's not really done by "people" other than when something is protested. It's all done automagically by software and it's a sure thing that AI is going to quickly come into play relative to this kind of content moderation

Honestly, it depends on the platform. Youtube is all AI, Reddit not so much. Both rely on the Safe Harbor provision to avoid liability.

There are ways to determine if copyrighted material is used, and yet there also appears to be a lot of ways to get around it, since you can find almost anything you like on YouTube with a simple search.