Droids vs ContentID - edge cases in our emerging algorithmic police state

The Droids takes a piece of copyrighted and highly protected film footage – “These are not the droids you’re looking for” from Star Wars - and re-encodes it over and over so that the video and audio slowly degraded to incoherent digital mush. Each iteration is then uploaded to YouTube and only some of them are caught by the ContentID algorithm. My work looks for the edge cases in our emerging algorithmic police state; searching for the points where a copyright infringement evades the pattern-matching robots running algorithms searching for copyrighted material

http://art.peteashton.com/the-droids/

“I’m sitting in a room” by A.Lucier is an obvious reference and this same artist also made other works inspired by it: Pete Ashton's Art | Sitting In Stagram

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Not sure how Youtube handled the case I mentioned above (which is obviously a provocation, not representative of the average user or content), but according to the report below you’re absolutely right, humans play a big role in they way Youtube flag and remove content

https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removals?hl=en