TechDayLife

By Sarah Perez on Oct 22 YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki   published   her quarterly letter to creators today, which included very strong language regarding the EU’s   controversial   copyright reform directive . Specifically, her letter focused on Article 13, the so-called “meme ban” that states that any site with a large amount of user-generated content — like Facebook or YouTube, for example — will be responsible for taking down content that infringes on copyright. Wojcicki says the way this legislation is written could “shut down the ability” of millions of people to upload to  YouTube. The legislation she’s referring to is Article 13 of the European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which the EU Parliament just recently voted to back. The Directive contains several parts, including another concerning “link tax,” which gives publishers the right to ask for paid licenses when online platforms share their articles and st...

By Bijan Stephen on Oct 12 YouTube’s relationship with its creators has always been asymmetric; the platform necessarily has all of the power, and it’s not super transparent about the changes it makes that affect people who rely on the site for revenue. This January, for example,  YouTube announced  that it would now require creators who wanted to enter its Partner Program — which allows creators to earn money from the ads that run on their videos and from the YouTube Premium subscribers who watch their content — to have at least 4,000 hours of views in the last year and at least 1,000 subscribers. Now, YouTube has changed its Partner Program policies again — this time around video duplication, which, as is typical of YouTube, seems inconsistent in its enforcement. A few days ago, in a post on its help forum, YouTube gave an explanation to people who may have been removed from its Partner Program for “duplicative content,” which appears to have less to do with fair use an...