Why Copyright Is Bad

Copyright seems like a simple thing to understand and respect. You don’t go and use someone else’s work and claim it is yours. However, with the rise of Youtube came people who would break copyright rules and upload others work or even upload entire movies and shows. The solution for taking down or de-monetizing any videos found guilty of doing this was for Youtube to put a bot in their algorithm and let it deem which videos where guilty of copyright. Now in the first few years this actually wasn’t a bad thing as only videos that where committing plagiarism where getting taken down. Sadly though around mid-2010 Youtube decided to crack down on copyright and made the bot more aggressive.

This led to some false copyright strikes and videos

being pulled but nothing too serious or life breaking. All that came from content creators on these matters where occasional rant videos and asking Youtube what was going on. Overall everything was still tolerable and no one thought Youtube was broken.
Skip ahead to early 2013 and a rather large review channel titled IHE (I Hate Everything) did a review on a otherwise unknown film.

His review wasn’t really positive but he managed to find a reason or two for why people would want to check it out. It was all going normal until two days after when everybody who was subscribed to IHE went to his channel only to find it gone. In place of his channel’s home page was a small text box saying that the channel had been removed from Youtube.

People immediately started making videos and talking about what had happened. The story was that the guy who made the movie IHE had reviewed had mass flagged his video with copyright strikes from fake accounts. Now Youtube’s copyright bot saw this and proceeded to determine that IHE’s channel had to be taken

down.
Now you couldn’t take two steps on Youtube without finding someone talking about this and it was thanks to all the attention from content creators that helped get IHE’s channel back up.

This whole situation exposed how easy it is to abuse Youtube’s copyright policies. Luckily ever since this situation no one has fallen into similar problems but another one popped up. When IHE’s channel was down he made no money for about a week and for a channel of his size that’s a pretty decent chunk of money. As it turns out when a video is hit with a copyright strike from someone all money that the video makes goes to the owner of the copyright strike even if the content creator manages to successfully dispute the copyright strike. So now people who don’t agree with content creators views or opinions of their products can flag their videos and make any money that the content creator should get. It’s even worse when it’s a false company that makes the strike when they in fact have no connection to the content.

Now the solutions I have heard mainly consist of Youtube to fix their copyright policies. Now that would be nice and at one point they may have it down. However, the way Youtube works makes copyright difficult to manage as you have thousands of videos uploaded every hour and some content is very borderline in regards to copyright. Another solution I have heard is for Youtube to hire people to monitor what the bot flags and verify if it truly does break copyright. I don’t see the second

one happening soon as right now Youtube barely breaks even for Google.
My solution falls more into the area of after a video is copyrighted and a content creator attempts to fight the flagging. Fighting or disputing a flagging can take weeks and that’s if it doesn’t go to court. During the entire ordeal all money that the video makes is put in the pocket of the person doing the flagging. Instead I believe that the money should be put in a side account and given to the victor of the dispute. I’ve told other content creators and I know this idea has spread but I’m not sure if it has been implemented yet.
I do know that in 2015 a petition was made to bring this to the Supreme Court. I believe the petition got enough signatures (mine included) and while I’m not sure what became of it entirely I am happy that this issue is getting attention.