"I spent about a week doing brute force trial-and-error. I would privately upload several different essay clips, then see which got flagged and which didn’t. This gave me a rough idea what the system could detect, and I edited the videos to avoid those potholes."
It is amazing the hoops people have to go through to enjoy the rights provided by law.
Those hops aren't legal, they're economic. It's cheaper to run automated systems that flag content automatically without human review than to pay people who can think across multiple domains and say 'this is ok'. Of course, one simple solution would be give people a formal way to assert fair use and put any monies in an escrow account pending challenge from rightsholders, but any challenge would have to be lodged in a timely fashion (like 2 weeks).
I'm fairly sure people have been through similar experiences trying to get films through manual censorship processes.
It would be interesting to know what they found about where the boundaries lie and how this compares to the "traditional" approach - sample clearance. I'm fairly sure that if you tried to get approval for using lots of micro-clips it would be incredibly time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, or both.
> I'm fairly sure that if you tried to get approval for using lots of micro-clips it would be incredibly time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, or both.
But approval is not needed. These videos are pretty much textbook examples of legally-protected fair use of the content they discuss. The labor necessary to get such content through the gates at YouTube is stifling others who can’t dedicate the kind of time needed to skirt their overzealous copyright protections.
Well, that's the point - if you use youtube's hosting, they're taking care of that for you. In return, you agree to their methods of dealing with copyright issues - which may not be ideal in theory, but are most rational at that scale.
"I spent about a week doing brute force trial-and-error. I would privately upload several different essay clips, then see which got flagged and which didn’t. This gave me a rough idea what the system could detect, and I edited the videos to avoid those potholes."
It is amazing the hoops people have to go through to enjoy the rights provided by law.