YouTube's Ban-Bot and Why it Has to Die

YouTube has a little automated gizmo that scans a submitted work and flags it according to whether or not it contains previously copyrighted material.

It does not evaluate whether the work is Fair Use.

Thus, every time I submit a video these days, I get a nice, automated email saying my submission has been flagged as containing someone else’s stuff and I have to go file a protest to get it unbanzored.

Theoretically, the ban-bot should be flagging outright copyright breaches - like someone posting straight audio of a song with the album cover as a picture. That’s flagrant and obvious copyright infringement. I don’t mind them doing that.

It’s when the ban-bot goes and flags a Fair Use work without one human looking at the dang thing that I get tetchy.

Whatever happened to “better to let ten criminals go free than one innocent man go to jail”?

Oh, wait. The spirit of freedom died shortly after her life partner, democracy, was murdered by the corpratocracy. Nobody is investigating either death.

If you’ve posted a fan video at any time - use the automatic process claim thing they send you via email to file objections as fast as they can ban you.

If they have more paperwork to process because of the ban-bot, then they might just kill it for us.

Just remember - a work is fair use if (a) It is transformative - it gives another meaning to the material used (b) It is non-competitive - you posted it with no intention of competing with the owner of the original material, OR © It is non-commercial - you are not making one red cent from distributing your work. Having more than one of these qualifications is great. Having all three is gold.

This is why I didn’t even look at the “earn money from YouTube” thing they sent me a while back. I want to make fan vids and give them away for free.

I want to share the love.

Why can’t YouTube or the corpratocracy understand that?