On this episode of the Overly Sarcastic Podcast: Indigo has too many rings and Red has too many bad solutions (one, one is the too many). (The OSPodcast is available on all podcast platforms!) -B

The peril never ends for the Hunting Party, but the cast has a moment to breathe! Come join our post-season Q&A tonight at 7pm EST over on the Rolling with Difficulty YouTube. We'll take questions from chat, or you can email us ahead of time at [email protected]!

no spoilers because. of course he has one of those. it's literally half the fun of him -R

no spoilers but I think a big part of why the new wolverine game isn't hitting the way they want is it's impossible to convince an audience of wolverine fans that "he has a superpowerd berserker side that makes him kill people indiscriminately" is a scary bad thing instead of half the fun of him -R

I think if a game mandates that you're about to lose in a cutscene you shouldn't have to win the fight first -R

The system doesn't have to follow its own rules, or be fair, or even work. It just needs to appease the corporations that YouTube is actually afraid of. -R

I'm only now realizing how little awareness of this problem has escaped containment into the audience. But yeah, every youtuber you know has probably dealt with this at least once. The system has always been unfair, but man, when it tips over the edge into blatantly fraudulent. -R

In short, any video that uses any content that the creator didn't 100% craft themself has a chance to be copyright claimed in such a way that the creator has no recourse except legal action or an edited re-upload. This is an extremely widespread problem that every YouTuber I know has suffered from.

Corporation: This is mine. Give me money. Youtuber: This is critique and commentary. It's fair use. Corporation: Ok, argue it in court. Can you afford court? Youtuber: No. Because you're at this moment taking my money. Corporation: That's what I thought. Thanks for the advertising btw

The problem as I understand it is that fair use is a legal defense, not an actual precedent at the moment. So essentially:

Content ID can only automatically detect the presence of copyrighted content. It can't and won't detect context, which means it makes zero allowances for fair use. It then alerts the copyright holder that they can claim the content in the video, and many of them immediately do so. -R

There is no external indicator on the video itself that it has been claimed and ad revenue is no longer going to support the person who made it. But random jumps or a sudden drop in audio quality indicate that the creator has had to trim something that got claimed. -R

For those you don't know how this works, when a video gets copyright claimed, 100% of its revenue starts going to the claimant. The only way for a claim to be automatically removed is to trim out the claimed clip, obviously bad if the clip has original narration over it. Songs have to be muted. -R