Ruby Central, a non-profit organization committed to "driving innovation and building community within the Ruby programming ecosystem since 2001," removed all RubyGems maintainers from the project's GitHub repository on September 18, granting administrative access exclusively to its employees and contractors following alleged pressure from Shopify, one of its biggest backers, according to Ruby developer Joel Drapper. The nonprofit organization, which operates RubyConf and RailsConf, cited fiduciary responsibility and supply chain security concerns following a recent audit.

The controversy began September 9 when HSBT (Hiroshi Shibata), a Ruby infrastructure maintainer, renamed the RubyGems GitHub enterprise to "Ruby Central" and added Director of Open Source Marty Haught as owner while demoting other maintainers. The action allegedly followed Shopify's threat to cut funding unless Ruby Central assumed full ownership of RubyGems and Bundler. Ruby Central had reportedly become financially dependent on Shopify after Sidekiq withdrew $250,000 annual sponsorship over the organization platforming Rails creator DHH at RailsConf 2025. Andre Arko, a veteran contributor on-call for RubyGems.org at the time, was among those removed.

Maintainer Ellen Dash has characterized the action as a "hostile takeover" and also resigned. Executive Director Shan Cureton acknowledged poor communication in a YouTube video Monday, stating removals were temporary while finalizing operator agreements. Arko and others are launching Spinel, an alternative Ruby tooling project, though Shopify's Rafael Franca commented that Spinel admins shouldn't be trusted to avoid "sabotaging rubygems or bundler."

YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, said it will reinstate creators previously banned for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and false election claims, citing free expression and shifting policy guidelines. The Hill reports: "Reflecting the Company's commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect," the company said in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee. "YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse. The Company recognizes these creators are among those shaping today's online consumption, landing 'must-watch' interviews, giving viewers the chance to hear directly from politicians, celebrities, business leaders, and more," it added in the five-page correspondence.

Alphabet blamed the Biden administration for limiting political speech on the platform. "Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies," the letter read. "While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content," it continued. Guidelines were changed after former President Biden took office and urged platforms to remove content that encouraged citizens to drink bleach to cure COVID-19, as President Trump suggested in 2020, or join insurrection efforts launched on Jan. 6, 2021, to overthrow his 2020 presidential win. But the company said the Biden administration's decisions were "unacceptable" and "wrong," while noting it would forgo future fact-checking mechanisms and instead allow users to add context notes to content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A new dark web portal to recruit spies for the UK was launched last Friday (19th September), as the UK steps up its commitment to national security. Harnessing the anonymity of the dark web for the first time, MI6's new secure messaging platform -- Silent Courier -- enables anyone, anywhere in the world with access to sensitive information relating to terrorism or hostile intelligence activity to securely contact the UK and offer their services. Instructions on how to access the portal will be publicly available on MI6's verified YouTube channel as the UK reaches out to potential new agents in Russia and around the world. MI6 advises individuals accessing its portal to use trustworthy VPNs and devices not linked to themselves, to mitigate risks which exist in some countries.

The announcement was made by the outgoing Chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, in Istanbul where he stated that the platform will make it easier for MI6 to recruit agents online. As MI6 establishes its official presence on the dark web to reach new recruits and tackle hostile actors seeking to undermine UK security, Sir Richard said that the UK's intelligence services are "critical to calibrating risk and informing decisions" in navigating threats from hostile actors -- making platforms like these even more important in keeping our country safe. Sir Richard said: "Today we're asking those with sensitive information on global instability, international terrorism or hostile state intelligence activity to contact MI6 securely online. Our virtual door is open to you." Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: "National security is the first duty of any government and the bedrock of the Prime Minister's Plan for Change. As the world changes, and the threats we're facing multiply, we must ensure the UK is always one step ahead of our adversaries. Our world class intelligence agencies are at the coalface of this challenge, working behind the scenes to keep British people safe. Now we're bolstering their efforts with cutting-edge tech so MI6 can recruit new spies for the UK - in Russia and around the world."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max appear to provide little resistance to scratches and scuffs around the sharp edges of the camera bump. Tech blogger Zack Nelson demonstrates this weakness in a durability test on his JerryRigEverything YouTube channel, explaining that the anodized aluminium layer on the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max "does not stick to corners very well" -- creating a weak point in the coating. This is a known issue with the electrochemical anodizing process, so it was a design decision Apple knowingly made.

"For some reason, Apple didn't add a chamfer, fillet, or radius around the camera plateau, and I think it was intentional, so it looks cooler," Nelson says in the video. "But that decision to look cool out of the box is going to plague everyone who owns this phone down the road." The video shows that everyday objects, like a coin or house key carried in the same pocket as the iPhone 17 Pro, can chip away at the anodized coating around the sharp corners of the camera bump. However, that same mildly aggressive scratching on the flat surface of the camera plateau only produced dust that could be easily wiped away.

The consumer advocacy nonprofit PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is now petitioning Microsoft to reconsider pulling support for Windows 10 in 2025, since "as many as 400 million perfectly good computers that can't upgrade to Windows 11 will be thrown out." In a petition addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the group warned the October 14 end of free support could cause "the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals." About 40% of PCs currently in use can't upgrade to Windows 11, even if users want to... Less than a quarter of electronic waste is recycled, so most of those computers will end up in landfills.
Consumer Reports recently also urged Microsoft to not to "strand millions of customers.". And now more groups are also pushing back, according to a post from the blog Windows: Central The Restart Project co-developed the "End of 10" toolkit, which is designed to support Windows 10 users who can't upgrade to Windows 11 after the operating system hits its end-of-support date.
They also note that a Paris-based company called Back Market plans to sell Windows 10 laptops refurbished with Ubuntu Linux or ChromeOS Flex. ("We refuse to watch hundreds of millions of perfectly good computers end up in the trash as e-waste," explains their web site.) Back Market's ad promises an "up-to-date, secure operating system — so instead of paying for a new computer you don't need, you can help us give this one a brand new life."

Right now Windows 10 holds 71.9% of Microsoft's market share, with Windows 11 at 22.95%, according to figures from StatCounter cited by the blog Windows Central. And HP and Dell "recently indicated that half of the global PCs are still running Windows 10," according to another Windows Central post...

"OpenAI's video generation tool, Sora, can create high-definition clips of just about anything you could ask for..." reports the Washington Post.

"But OpenAI has not specified which videos it grabbed to make Sora, saying only that it combined 'publicly available and licensed data'..." With ChatGPT, OpenAI helped popularize the now-standard industry practice of building more capable AI tools by scraping vast quantities of text from the web without consent. With Sora, launched in December, OpenAI staff said they built a pioneering video generator by taking a similar approach. They developed ways to feed the system more online video — in more varied formats — including vertical videos and longer, higher-resolution clips... To explore what content OpenAI may have used, The Washington Post used Sora to create hundreds of videos that show it can closely mimic movies, TV shows and other content...

In dozens of tests, The Post found that Sora can create clips that closely resemble Netflix shows such as "Wednesday"; popular video games like "Minecraft"; and beloved cartoon characters, as well as the animated logos for Warner Bros., DreamWorks and other Hollywood studios, movies and TV shows. The publicly available version of Sora can generate only 20-second clips, without audio. In most cases, the look-alike scenes were made by typing basic requests like "universal studios intro." The results also showed that Sora can create AI videos with the logos or watermarks that broadcasters and tech companies use to brand their video content, including those for the National Basketball Association, Chinese-owned social app TikTok and Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch...

Sora's ability to re-create specific imagery and brands suggests a version of the originals appeared in the tool's training data, AI researchers said. "The model is mimicking the training data. There's no magic," said Joanna Materzynska, a PhD researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied datasets used in AI. An AI tool's ability to reproduce proprietary content doesn't necessarily indicate that the original material was copied or obtained from its creators or owners. Content of all kinds is uploaded to video and social platforms, often without the consent of the copyright holder... Materzynska co-authored a study last year that found more than 70 percent of public video datasets commonly used in AI research contained content scraped from YouTube.
Netflix and Twitch said they did not have a content partnership for training OpenAI, according to the article (which adds that OpenAI "has yet to face a copyright suit over the data used for Sora.")

Two key quotes from the article:

• "Unauthorized scraping of YouTube content continues to be a violation of our Terms of Service." — YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon

• "We train on publicly available data consistent with fair use and use industry-leading safeguards to avoid replicating the material they learn from." — OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood

Scripted TV production peaked in 2022 at 599 shows and has declined since, according to FX's research division tracking. New prestige series have dropped sharply while streaming platforms prioritize returning shows over new development. Netflix has shifted majority output to unscripted content including docuseries and reality programming since 2018.

YouTube leads streaming viewership ahead of Netflix, Paramount+, and Hulu. Free ad-supported platforms YouTube, Tubi and Roku Channel continue gaining market share. Subscription prices across major streaming services have increased while scripted content volume decreased. Second season of Severance cost $200 million. Fourth season of Stranger Things reached $270 million in production expenses.

A leaked Meta video revealed upcoming "Meta Ray-Ban Display" smart glasses with a monocular HUD and sEMG wristband control, set to debut at Connect 2025 for around $800. Despite past hesitation, it looks like EssilorLuxottica has agreed to co-brand after Meta invested $3.5 billion in the company, taking a 3% stake. UploadVR reports: Meta's HUD glasses with the sEMG wristband will in fact be Ray-Ban branded, a leaked video which also depicts the HUD and wristband in action reveals. A quickly removed unlisted video on Meta's YouTube channel showed what will soon be Meta and EssilorLuxottica's full lineup:

- The regular Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
- The recently-launched Oakley Meta HSTN glasses.
- The rumored Oakley Meta Sphaera glasses, with eye protection and a centered camera.
- The rumored monocular heads-up display (HUD) glasses controlled by Meta's long-in-development sEMG wristband, which are labeled as "Meta Ray-Ban" with the word "Display" underneath. The smart glasses are expected to be made official during the Meta Connect 2025 keynote at 5pm PT on Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from France24: Fueled in part by anger over flashy lifestyles flaunted by elites, young anti-corruption demonstrators mainly in their 20s rallied on Monday. The loose grouping, largely viewed as members of "Gen Z", flooded the capital Kathmandu to demand an end to a ban on Facebook, YouTube and other popular sites. The rallies ended in chaos and tragedy, with at least 19 protesters killed in a police crackdown on Monday. The apps were restored, but protests widened in anger.

On Tuesday, other Nepalis joined the crowds. Parliament was set ablaze, KP Sharma Oli resigned as prime minister, and the army took charge of the streets. Now, many activists are taking to the US group-chat app Discord to talk over their next steps. One server with more than 145,000 members has hosted feverish debate about who could be an interim leader, with many pushing 73-year-old former chief justice Sushila Karki. It is just one example of how social media has driven demands for change. [...]

More than half of Nepal's 30 million people are online, according to the World Bank. Days before the protests, many had rushed to VPN services — or virtual private networks — to evade blocks on platforms. Fears of a wider internet shutdown also drove a surge in downloads for Bluetooth messaging app Bitchat, created by tech billionaire Jack Dorsey. "Tech played... an almost decisive role," journalist Pranaya Rana told AFP. "The whole thing started with young people posting on social media about corruption, and the lavish lives that the children of political leaders were leading."

Hashtags such as #NepoKids, short for nepotism, compared the designer clothing and luxury holidays shown off in their Instagram posts to the difficulties faced by ordinary Nepalis. One post liked 13,000 times accused politicians' children of "living like millionaires," asking: "Where is the tax money going?" "NepoKids was trending all the time," including in rural areas where Facebook is popular, said rights activist Sanjib Chaudhary. "This fuelled the fire" of anger that "has been growing for a long time," he said. [...] Chaudhary said the government "seriously underestimated the power of social media." Nepal's first female prime minister was sworn in Friday as interim leader after protesters held an informal vote on Discord. "Former chief justice Sushila Karki, 73, was the unlikely choice of the 'Gen Z' protesters behind the movement that started out as a social media demonstration against the lavish lifestyles of 'Nepo Kids' but spilled out onto the streets and into the deadliest social unrest Nepal has seen in years," reports CNN World.

"Karki has spent much of her career within the very establishment the youth are protesting against, yet her reputation as a fearless and incorruptible jurist has appealed to many young people in the country of 30 million."

"President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act may have quietly changed the economics of the creator economy," reports the Hollywood Reporter. The Treasury Department has ruled this past week that digital creators, including podcasters, influencers, and streamers, qualify for the U.S. "no tax on tips" policy, allowing them to deduct tipped income up to $25,000. From the report: The change could cause digital creators to rethink how they seek income. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat all offer a variety of ways for creators to generate income, be it a share of advertising revenue or creator funding programs, or options to launch subscription tiers for their channels or profiles. But they also give creators the option to turn on tips or gifts. If revenue from user tips or gifts is eligible, while recurring subscription revenue is not, it could shift how streamers, podcasters or influencers ask their followers to support them.

To be sure, there are limitations: The tax deduction is capped at $25,000 per year, and it begins to phase out at $150,000 in income for single filers and $300,000 for married joint filers. The act also provides that tips do not qualify for the deduction if they are received "in the course of certain specified trades or businesses -- including the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics," Treasury says, further limiting the deduction opportunity for some in entertainment-adjacent lines of work.

But by making influencers, Twitch streamers and podcasters eligible, the administration has nonetheless changed the incentive structure for digital creators, and the ramifications could be felt across the creator economy in the name of tax efficiency (Don't be surprised if users are asked to like, subscribe, and tip). Platforms may also develop more ways to more prominently feature tips and gifts, pushing creators to add more opportunities for that income. But the inclusion of digital creators is also a recognition of how the power dynamics have shifted in media.

Bending Spoons has entered a definitive agreement with Vimeo to purchase the video platform for $1.38 billion. From a report: Per the agreement, Bending Spoons will acquire Vimeo in an all-cash transaction and take Vimeo (VMEO), a public company, private. Vimeo shareholders will receive $7.85 per share in cash when the transaction closes.

[...] Vimeo, once a significant player in the streaming video space, has lost massive ground to other platforms, including YouTube, in recent years. Rather than fight a losing battle in the creator space, Vimeo has catered more toward business and enterprise users lately.

A U.S. congressional hearing today on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) featured testimony from military veterans and witnesses describing encounters with mysterious craft, including glowing red squares, tic-tac-shaped objects emerging from the ocean, and videos of missiles striking unidentified orbs. While NASA maintains there's no evidence of extraterrestrial life, lawmakers stressed the need for transparency, whistleblower protections, and further investigation.

There were four witnesses at today's hearing:
Jeffrey Nuccetelli: U.S. Air Force veteran and self-described UAP witness who investigated the reported "red square" sighting above Vandenberg Air Force Base.
George Knapp: Award-winning journalist and chief reporter at KLAS-TV, known for his decades of UFO coverage and multiple Peabody Awards.
Alexandro Wiggins: Navy veteran of 23 years who reported witnessing a "Tic Tac" UAP aboard the USS Jackson in 2023 and noted his father's work at Area 51.
Dylan Borland: Air Force veteran and UAP witness with little public information or media exposure available.

"The public senses that it's real and the people in authority dismiss them," said Knapp, arguing that the public can handle the truth. One of the clips he showed lawmakers was of a drone operator tracking a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen before a missile struck the object. "That's a Hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just bouncing right off," he said. "What the hell is that?" Knapp said the clip is not unique, claiming multiple video servers with similar UAP footage are being kept from Congress. Borland testified: "This craft interfered with my telephone, did not have any sound and the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic."

Pakistan has built surveillance systems that it is actively using to spy on millions of its citizens and to block millions of internet sessions, according to Amnesty International. The Asian nation's Lawful Intercept Management System enables intelligence agencies to tap calls and texts across all four major mobile operators.

A Chinese-built firewall, WMS 2.0, currently blocks approximately 650,000 web links and restricts platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and X. The surveillance infrastructure combines technology from Chinese company Geedge Networks, U.S.-based Niagara Networks, France's Thales DIS, Germany's Utimaco, and UAE-based Datafusion. Balochistan province has experienced years-long internet blackouts under the system.

Young Americans are abandoning traditional retirement planning for dividend-focused ETFs that promise immediate income and freedom from traditional employment. Income-generating ETFs captured one in six dollars flowing into equity ETFs in 2025, pushing the sector to $750 billion -- with the most aggressive funds offering yields above 8% quadrupling to $160 billion over three years.

The r/dividends subreddit has grown tenfold to 780,000 members over five years, while YouTube channels and Discord servers dedicated to dividend investing proliferate. YieldMax's MSTY fund, offering a 90% distribution rate through complex derivatives, has underperformed MicroStrategy stock by 120 percentage points since February 2024 when dividends are reinvested -- nearly 200 points when payouts are withdrawn. Speaking to Bloomberg, finance professor Samuel Hartzmark identified this as the "free dividends fallacy," where investors fail to recognize that dividends reduce share prices rather than creating additional wealth.

Nepal's government said Thursday it is blocking most social media platforms including Facebook, X and YouTube because the companies failed to comply with regulations that required them to register with the government. From a report: Nepal's Minister for Communication and Information Prithvi Subba Gurung said about two dozen social network platforms that are widely used in Nepal were repeatedly given notices to come forward and register their companies officially in the country. The platforms would be blocked immediately, he said.

TikTok, Viber and three other social media platforms would be allowed to operate in Nepal because they have registered with the government. Nepal government have been asking the companies to appoint a liaison office or point in the country. It has brought a bill in parliament that aims to ensure that social platforms are properly managed, responsible and accountable.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Adobe is bringing its video editor Premiere to iPhone, promising "pro-level" editing on the go for free. The app will launch later this month, with an Android version also under development.

The Premiere app features a familiar multi-track timeline, with support for an unlimited number of video, audio, and text layers. There's automatic captioning, 4K HDR support, and one-tap exporting to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram -- including automatic resizing that frames content for each platform.

The iOS version of Premiere will be free to download and use, though Adobe says there will be charges for additional cloud storage and generative AI credits. Speaking of, it includes support for Adobe's generative sound effects and AI-powered speech enhancement, plus a wider range of AI assets generated through Adobe Firefly. If you'd rather not use AI content, there's a selection of Adobe fonts, along with images, sounds, music, and video assets that are free to use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out, didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.

The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.

In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview. "It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere."

"I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate," Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're sharing an ad-free YouTube Premium or YouTube Music account with friends or family who live outside of your home, you could lose your premium privileges. Customers who lose these can still watch YouTube or listen to music with ads -- but let's be real, it's not the same.

Multiple reports have shown people who have the service have been receiving notices that their premium service will be paused for 15 days due to violating a policy that's been in place since 2023. On its support page, YouTube says that an account manager can add up to five family members in a household to their Premium membership. But, the post says, "Family members sharing a YouTube family plan must live in the same household as the family manager."

"I'm still teaching at Princeton," 83-year-old Brian Kernighan recently told an audience at New Jersey's InfoAge Science and History Museums.

And last month the video was uploaded to YouTube, a new article points out, "showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic..." "Do you think there's any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?" one audience member asked... "Or is this just a huge hype bubble that's waiting to die down...?"

'"I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt," he said. "And I found it a — pain... I just couldn't grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn't even an issue!" Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said "The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow. And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow..."

All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. "When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes..." It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust "I'm probably unduly cynical. "But I'm — I don't think it's gonna replace C right away, anyway."
Kernighan was also asked about NixOS and HolyC — but his formative experiences remain rooted in Bell Labs starts in the 1970s, where he remembers it was "great fun to hang out with these people."

And he acknowledged that the descendants of Unix now power nearly every cellphone. "I find it intriguing... And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can't get at it!"


Kernighan answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2009 and again in 2015...

In 2017 Rick Beato streamed "Rick's Rant Episode 2" — and just received a copyright claim this month. And days after jazz pianist Chick Corea died in 2021, Beato livestreamed a half-hour video which was mostly commentary, but with several excerpts from Corea's albums (at least one more than three minutes long). He also received a copyright claim for that one this August — just minutes after the claim on his 2017 video.

These videos "are all fair use," Beato argues in a new video, noting it's also affected other popular YouTube channels like The Professor of Rock: Rick Beato: Universal Music Group [UMG] has continued to send emails about copyright content ID claims — and now copyright strikes — on my channel. As a matter of fact, I have three shorts — these are under a minute long — that if they go through in the next four days, I'll have three strikes on my channel! Now if you don't fight these things, those three strikes would actually remove my channel from YouTube.
Five months ago Rick Beato had posted a clip from his interview with singer-songwriter Adam Duritz (founder of The Counting Crows) on YouTube. After 250,000 views, he'd earned a whopping $36.52 — and then Universal Music Group also claimed that video violated their copyright. (In the background the video played Duritz's song as he described how he wrote it.) "So they're gonna take my channel down over less than a hundred bucks — for using a small segment from an interview with him, on a song he sang on," Beato complained on YouTube. "That video is 55 seconds long!"

"You need to play people's music to talk about it," Beato argues. "That is the definition of fair use. These are interviews with the people about their careers." (And the interviews actually help promote the artists for the record labels...) Rick Beato: The next one has me in it — it's an Olivia Rodrigo song — that I played maybe 10 seconds of the song on, and the short is 42 seconds long. Who did it? UMG. The third copyright strike is from a Hans Zimmer short. It's also UMG — it's from the Crimson Tide soundtrack.

Now, what do these things say...? "Your video is scheduled to be removed in four days and your channel will get a copyright strike due to a removal request from a claimant. If you delete your video before then, your channel won't get a copyright strike." [And there's also emails like "After reviewing your dispute, UMG has decided that their copyright claim is still valid..."] I've had probably 4,000 claims, over the last 9 years — from things that are fair use. [When he interviewed producer Rick Rubin, that video got 13 separate copyright claims.]

That's when I hired a lawyer to fight these. [Full-time, Beato says later.] And what he's done is he fought every single claim... We have successfully fought thousands of these now. But it literally costs me so much money to do this. Since we've been fighting these things — and never lost one — they still keep coming in... They're all Universal Music Group. So they obviously have hired some third party company, that are dredging up things, they're looking for things that haven't been claimed in the past — they're taking videos from seven or eight years ago!
Slashdot reader MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) writes on the "New York's Linux Scene" site that video bloggers like Beato "have been hounded by copyright pirates like UMG," arguing that new videos of support are a "rebellion gaining traction". (Beato's video drew 1,369,859 views — and attracted 24,605 Comments — along with videos of support from professional musicians like drummer Anthony Edwards, guitarist Justin Hawkins, and bassist Scot Lade, as well as two different professional music attorneys.)

"Since there's rarely humans making any of these decisions and it's automated by bots, they don't understand these claims are against Universal Music's best interests," argues the long-running blog Saving Country Music (first appearing on MySpace in 2008). On YouTube videos, creators can freely filch copyrighted photos and other people's videos virtually free of ramifications. You can take an entire 2 1/2 hour film, impose it over a background, and upload it to YouTube, and usually avoid any problems. But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight... People continue to ask, "Why doesn't Saving Country Music has a podcast?" Because what's the point of having a music podcast when you can't feature music? In fact, after over a decade of refusing to start one, I finally did, music free. What happened? About a dozen episodes in, someone took out a claim, and not only were all the episodes deleted, so was the entire account, even though no music even appeared on any of the episodes. I was given absolutely no recourse to fight whatever false claim had been made...

The music industry continues to so colossal fail the artists and catalogs they represent, and the fans they're supposed to serve with this current system of how podcasts are handled. If everything changes today thanks to the Rick Beato rant, it would still be 15 years too late. But at least it would happen.
Instead, they write, "Music labels have been leaving major opportunities to promote their catalogs and performers on the table with their punitive copyright claims that make it impossible to feature music on music podcasts and other platforms...

"You aren't screwing podcasters. You're screwing artists who could be using podcasts to help promote their music. "