YouTube Drops 2 Billion Fake Music Industry Views 167
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube has dropped 2 billion fake music industry views and their offending videos. From the article: 'Google made good on its promise to weed out views inflated by artificial means last week, according to Daily Dot. Record company sites impacted included titans like Universal Music Group, which reportedly lost 1 billion of its 7 billion views, and Sony, who lost 850 million views. The cuts affected marquee names like Rhianna, Beyonce and Justin Bieber. YouTube said in a statement that the figures had been deliberately, artificially inflated. 'This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our view count policy,' the company, which is owned by Google, wrote.'"
-Conflicted (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Joe Jobbing of the future? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:YES! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure you are getting this. Google suing should be the least of these people's worries. From AFA linked from TFA:
If they have been faking 1/8th of their viewership, then that was artificially increasing their apparent influence and so share price. The SEC should be coming around damn soon now if a shareholder would just make a complaint.
Now that would be sweet.
Re:What if Google is wrong? (Score:2, Interesting)
As someone who has fought abuse in the past for an extremely large service, I can tell you that in any even-somewhat-sophisticated company, the abuse flags and signals flagging things are extremely complex and detailed. Especially when you're talking about the best data analyzers in the world (Google), don't doubt what they know about the abuse happening.
I can also tell you that people constantly, all the time, blatantly horribly lie. People who shamelessly broke the rules would publicly bitch about being shut down and (at best) be misleading or (at worst) outright lie about the circumstances. They know that the company will never come forth publicly to refute their claims, so they do it as a form of revenge after they've been caught.
How about weeding out infringing material? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know, -1 Flamebait, but ...
has anybody here every seriously looked at the process to report and have removed infringing material from youtube? if you try, the first thing google/youtube does is basically threaten you with jail and worse if you dont happen to be the copyright holder. they make it as slow and painful as possible though probably within what is allowed by law. why? google has a vested interest in keeping the pirated material on there.
it would take me all of one day at most to find over 1000 movies just with the search "full movie", each of which has a view count of 10,000+. Google could too, but they have no interest in this. They play this game where they pretend they are some innocent service, and of course meanhwhile providing de facto anonymity to serial uploaders (anybody even ONCE prosecuted for uploading pirated stuff? at worst it's "account suspended, make a new one homer jo jo junior shabadoo"). meanwhile, google collects HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in ad revenue on infringing material. Oh, and when something is pointed out to be infringing, does google contact the rightsholder and offer them a the money or at least a split? you must be joking.
If youtube were anything but a giant company armed with masses of lawyers *and didnt enjoy the popular support of those below who find it useful and who are about to make all sorts of yesbuts and rationalizations, it would have been shut down for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement a long time ago.
yes, i find it useful too. but i'm under no illusions that the system is any way a fair to the rightsholders off of whom youtube is making massive profits especially during that delay between upload and takedown.
again - actually try the takedown process before you flame away. it's diabolical.
Re:YES! (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)