This feels significant: Disney has officially retracted a copyright claim on a third-party's Steamboat Willie video on YouTube.
It's not significant, that's how it works. It went into the public domain and the copyright strike process took time to adjust. Disney was never going to fight this.
Just as significant (and I suppose still pending) is whether YouTube has re-monetized the video. Systems fail and shit happens, and I'm glad to see that this was quickly un-struck, but it's not all the way corrected until he's making his $.0003 per view or whatever the payout is.
The thing about public domain is that anyone can do whatever they want. Youtube is still providing a service by providing storage, cpu and network to be able to stream the video and they are within their rights to charge for that service one way or another. Of course anyone can also offer that same service for free as it's public domain.
You can't argue with some of these anti-corporation people. I dislike greedy CEOs and shareholders as much as the next guy but a company hosting and streaming videos need some sort of revenue to keep those servers running.
This is significant because this is the first time in the history of copyright bots that they've ever had to remove a work from the bot's registry. Given how rarely it happens, the code to do that probably won't even be worth the cost of writing for another decade or two: some guy at YouTube will just add a manual exception for that video. (And that's assuming the best of intention and action from the copy-vio-bot sellers which is unlikely, given their existing behavior.)
Every year there is plenty of stuff, like movies which end in the public domain. Certainly not the first time. Just the first time you thought/heard of it
The title/article isn't about the damage its doing to people using it. It's implying that Disney is going to actively give trouble to people using it, when it was nothing other than a mistake that was bound to happen anyway.
I'm not saying it didn't significantly impact the creator, I'm saying Disney backing off the bad claim is not significant. It's what Disney was always going to do, it's just that "Disney and youtube accidentally flag Steamboat Willie stuff" isn't as clickbaity. .
Rather than making money, the deprioritization of a copyright claimed video can cost a channel a significant amount of views and potential subscribers, so even if you’re not making money off that specific video, it’s still a significant impact.
Well, one problem is that YouTube's whole "Content ID" process happens specifically outside of copyright law. Google will gladly take down videos without actual copyright problems and they actively shield trolls (normally, a wrong copyright claim is a crime), because it means they won't have to go to court.
So, it would theoretically be possible for Disney to continue the Content ID claims, even if they'd lose a copyright claim in court.
Google would eventually tell them to fuck off, i.e. to take it to court, but only if the case is clear enough.