2021-12-17

Youtube is a willing enabler of and profiteer from video piracy – Google Cloud hosts tons of pirated movies and sites faster than Youtube

Youtube can tell whether a video is a from a movie or one shot by a private individual. In addition to that, the movie owner would have provided content IDs of their copyright works to Youtube. If pirated copies of the movie are uploaded, Youtube will block the video or run ads on it depending on the option chosen by the movie owner. If a movie owner does not have a deal with Youtube, then Youtube displays ads and pockets the money. There are thousands of copyrighted works including movies on which no claim has yet been made. Youtube, which on-the-fly censors videos for words suggestive of conspiracy theories and ‘vaccine misinformation’, pretends this is kosher. Some bootleggers upload movies using special lookalike Unicode characters in the title that resemble ordinary text. The Youtube search is smart enough to identify these fraud attempts but does not seem to be notifying the movie owners. Another thing I found (as a fan of 80s movies) is that many movies are hosted on Google servers. In fact, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud seem to host a lot of video bootleg sites and their files. These video sites are very fast — faster than Youtube! Earlier, you could search a name of a 80s movie and find a VHS bootleg copy on Youtube. But there are several movies that are not available on Youtube. Yet, they are available on Google servers. In fact, there are sites that have a very comprehensive collection of movies, TV shows and cartoons than legitimate streaming servers. I say comprehensive because the home pages have the latest movies, which I do not watch, but the search yields hard-to-find 80s, 70s, 60s and even 50s movies. I do not know why so many people mess with torrents sites (I subscribe to TorrentFreak.coms’ RSS) when these bootleggers are streaming the latest movies from high-speed servers hosted on top cloud providers. (Tubi TV is a free legitimate streaming service I found recently. It is owned by Fox and occassionally displays ads. You do not have to register on ther site.) I guess the popup ads are very annoying. Google Ads run on these sites. From content ID system with Youtube, Google can remove these sites and their files but it does not. As long as movie makers are unaware of the scam, Google will be selling ads.