It's funny how google pretends the music on YouTube isn't straight up piracy and everyone just goes along with it

Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not piracy either. Torrenting an album is piracy, but listening to a bootleg on YouTube isn’t.

YouTube noticed this at some point and is now happy to let everyone know how much pirated music is available on their site. One of their main points for shilling YouTube premium is how their music catalogue is way better than Spotify. Of course the piracy site has more. That’s always how it works. Spotify actually has to license the music on their platform and is subject to copyright law. They can’t just get the Neil Young discography from soulseek one day and wait until his estate notices, facing no repercussions whatsoever aside from agreeing to a takedown request. Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.

Not that I’m complaining especially when a lot of the music on youtube isn’t publicly accessible anywhere else. It’s just been extremely strange to see this go from an “open secret” to something they’re shouting from the rooftops and face no repercussions for. In the future I want everything to be like that and I’d rather keep youtube how it is than see them get the punishment that by all rights they should be getting. It’s just so strange that this is the position things have ended up in.

Note: The following text is intentional abuse of the tagginator bot. Fuck you.

veniasilente,

What’s your beef with the tagginator bot? It’s certainly better than the reddit repost bots, right?

dangblingus,

As long as they get to profit from it and not you, then it’s not piracy for them. If a record label wanted to sue Google, they would have a hell of a time.

drunkensailor, (edited )
@drunkensailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

lol good points and so true. reading this just makes me think of the old quote If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes. When I think of record labels and big film companies, let’s just say that the first thing that comes to mind isn’t starving artists but coastal elitists getting pissy bc they can’t charge people even more.

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

they have a deal with Vevo i think

mindbleach,

Paying money is technically bootlegging, which I would argue is massively worse than piracy. But only because piracy is whatever.

GreyFalcon,

I like your style! Keep it up! We live in a world where people are increasingly choosing to live in delusion.

amio,

Well, this is certainly one of the takes of all time.

Scrollone,

I can’t speak for other countries, but in Italy YouTube pays a lot of money to the Italian copyright holders company for all the potentially pirated videos uploaded by its users.

BolexForSoup, (edited )
@BolexForSoup@kbin.social avatar

Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy

Literally never seen this argument, not even once. Guarantee you it’s a very small minority just assuaging some vague guilt (which is BS anyway because it’s still not your ROMs).

People do it primarily because it’s convenient. Downloading and testing hundreds if not thousand of roms - not to mention replacing all the bad ones - would take potentially days of work. Or you can spend like $10-$50 and be done with it.

bionicjoey,

I believe their copyright claim system is set up so that any ad revenue for a song goes to the copyright holder, and they can have the video taken down if that isn’t enough. It’s why YouTubers are so careful not to use too much of a copyrighted song in their videos.

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