I think the more likely cause was precisely that it wasn't a technical professional/lawyer/writer doing the redacting, but someone in the administration or close to it that has no idea how to redact information correctly.
You're getting downvoted, but I totally agree with you (except for the "it has every song ever" part, it doesn't). Spotify has an amazing discovery engine (maybe subjective, but me for it is the best one I've tried), and I don't even remember the last time Spotify went down. It went down for a few hours, people asking for their money back (opinions on here are more rational, but on Spotify support forums, it's unhinged...jeez, shit happens).
I love spotify and I hope they can quickly figure out their issue and put some blocks in place so it doesn't happen again, and I hope the engineers didn't have too bad of a day (although I'm sure it was terrible), but I appreciate them for their service and its a service I'd gladly pay for.
If we're going to hate on subscription services, Spotify is way at the bottom for me.
I also have had great success with discovery on Spotify versus anything else I've tried (Pandora, etc.) Obviously I haven't tried everything but I discover tons of new music from Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist. If there is a better discovery service I'd love to know what it is, because that's a huge part of what I use it for.
100% seems to be rounding up a bit. Is it all on your device? Because that's a pretty prominent path to failure. Do you host it yourself in a service? Even if your OS layer has resilience, and your disks are resilient to failure, you have redundant power to your hosting infrastructure and your network connection? If it's in the cloud, it's not like AWS or the like don't have their own issues. People saying their own setup of anything has 100% uptime with no paths to failure I think are under-estimating how many ways your self-managed service could become unavailable. This is the first time I can ever remember having spotify have an outage of this magnitude (and I use it all day, every day) and it only lasted 5 hours. Pretty good SLA.
I think if companies actually said what they did, a portion of them would say things like "we use our massive collection of user data to help you _____".
Just playing the devil's advocate, "Fair Use" could be an interesting question here...I think it would fail the "academic use" rule, but worth consideration, if the criteria (from standford.edu) is:
1. The least amount of copyright material as possible should be used.
2. "Fair use" work must have significant new and unique material added (not be a compilation).
3. "Fair use" work must not harm future potential markets for the copyright work. (ex: not a highlight video)
4. Work must be either a parody, criticism, review, or "academic use" to qualify for "fair use".
If we're talking a 10s clip of audio where the original is significantly longer, I think the most significant question is whether the work could qualify under the legal term category of "academic/educational". A work can only be considered "academic/educational" if it meets all of the following (also from stanford.edu):
1. Noncommercial instruction or curriculum-based teaching by educators to students at nonprofit educational institutions.
2. Planned noncommercial study or investigation directed toward making a contribution to a field of knowledge.
3. Presentation of research findings at noncommercial peer conferences, workshops, or seminars.
I don't know the legal muster required to meet this, but from what I've read, this is where "almost all" youtube videos are going to be disqualified, especially by the intent of the rule, which is to provide an out for teachers/instructors and students.
The whole argument is rendered null by the fact that youtube has to comply with the DMCA, which requires that work be taken down if it contains work created by other people (clips, background music, photos), though.
Also youtube seems to have a fairly flexible amount of power here, can take down pretty much any content it wants, and if it chooses to side with the copyright side by default, they have the power to make that consideration.
My opinion is that if you're going to be creating content, and advertising and/or monetizing them, you really shouldn't have any copyright work in there. Saying "it's only 10 seconds of the work" may provide some legal footing for the "must have significant new work" rule, but it seems like you're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying your side is okay, whereas youtube owns both sides and the whole beach.
I happened on a YouTube video of a TedX talk where a guy is really into this Google Maps scam. He got to the point where he was able to impersonate the US Secret Service and recorded a bunch of phone calls. The Secret Service told google to fix their maps issue, but he said they just disabled some features and reactived them without change a few weeks later.
Well to be fair a lot of people contacting a front-line service center for a non-specialized product/service can't even articulate their problem accurately, if at all. I'm sure it'd be pretty easy to get jaded about people after hearing "I don't know if it's on or not, it just doesn't work...fix it" enough times.
You do need an email to sign up, although since they allow a user to be 'logged in' as more than one user at a time, they may allow more than one account per email address. And they don't do email confirmation, though. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.