 What? A copyright claim? Hey everybody, I wanted to deviate from the normal astro vlog content for just a minute. Permit me if you will to talk about something that's affecting me and lots of other people on YouTube, and that is bogus copyright claims. Here's the backstory. This evening I just hit the upload button on a new video that was supposed to come out tomorrow. This is the second in a series of videos I've made called Cosmic Jams, where I'm mashing up some of the free-to-use music that YouTube provides with old footage from NASA and like the Apollo missions. And this is just me making fun, silly art. I'm enjoying mashing up music that I like to study to or work to with some cool video. I don't know, it's fun. This is the second of these videos I've made, and both times I have had copyright claims on the video. I don't want to misuse people's content. I value my content. I value the hard work I'm putting into the things that I'm creating. I don't want to misuse people's stuff, so I'm being careful and only using audio that YouTube has assured me I have rights to use. Don't steal people's content. I think that's a good rule. And similarly, all the video I've been using is in the public domain. Now, my guess is the last time this happened, the creator used a piece of NASA footage in like a music video, and then my video used the same footage. And so an automated algorithm caught my video as trying to steal part of that music video. In this case, I'm not sure. The claim is really unclear about what the infringing material is sourced from. I can tell you exactly where the footage is from. This is 16 millimeter footage from Apollo 17. In fact, here's the behind the scenes. Here's my editor, DaVinci Resolve, trying to inspect the offending portion of my video. And yeah, this comes from the Apollo 17 flight journal, which you should totally check out and maybe even use in your creative and artistic endeavors. Now NASA makes it really clear on their media usage guidelines that you can't assert copyright over things that NASA has produced. Okay, I'm not a lawyer, but I read that as meaning in effect that these bogus claims are in themselves kind of unlawful. This video is almost an hour long and this claim was processed within minutes of it uploading. This was not malicious. This was not intentional. This is the consequence of a system or an algorithm that's running while. I'm having to work a lot harder to dispute this claim than the claimant had to run an algorithm to like catch my video and make my life a mess. And this is the point of the video I'm trying to make right now. The lesson or the thing that I want you to think about here is how this dispute mirrors a lot of things that happen in our justice and our enforcement of policies. Any arena of our world of technology and like law meet. When we build systems and by systems I mean computer systems, algorithms, software. These are not agnostic. These are not unbiased. When we write code, we are encoding our values in what we write. You make a decision. Do you evaluate x greater than y or x greater than or equal to y? Little logic statements that you write in your code translate into actual impact in the real world. The people that have to use your code, whether it's the YouTube content ID creation system, or it's your pipeline to reduce image from a telescope and produce a science plot. The people who have to use that will be subjected to the choices and therefore the judgments that you make. Code and math are not unbiased tools are not a magical lens that lets us view the world in some unbiased way. No, instead they are a mirror that reflects our values and encodes into them the choices that we make. So in my case here YouTube has clearly encoded its values. It gives a lot of power and a lot of automated tools to content owners and copyright claimants and many fewer options for creators especially small creators with small channels. So with any luck in a day or two this dispute will be resolved. Worst case scenario it might take up to a month or maybe my video will never come out. I don't know. You can go and watch volume one of Cosmic Chams right now. Link here or here below whatever. There's a link somewhere. And hopefully in my next video we'll be back to talking about outer space.