How YouTube deals with copyright claims: Tools used and more – Times of India

Over 2 billion logged-in users come to YouTube every month and more than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. No doubt than that the company faces an onerous task of dealing with copyright infringement complaints on a daily basis. In an interaction with media, Fabio Magagna, group product manager, YouTube shared how Google‘s video-sharing platform deals with such complaints. He spoke about the copyright system that YouTube has developed to safeguard and protect the content creators. Called Copyright Management Suite, it is claimed to be designed to balance the needs of the entire ecosystem. It has three tools: Webform, Copyright Match, and Content ID.
Talking about the measures that YouTube has taken to protect and uphold the rights of content creators, Magagna said, “YouTube has given rights holders opportunities to earn money from both their own and user-generated content through our subscription-based and advertising-supported models. We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and operate YouTube’s Copyright Management Suite. These investments have been critical in preserving the flourishing creative economy; ensuring content uploaders have a way to share and make money from their content. In fact YouTube has paid out $30B to creators, artists, & media companies over the 3 years. And, more than $5.5 billion revenue paid to rights holders as of December 2020 from content claimed and monetized through Content ID,”
How YouTube ensures rights holders have control over their work
Everyone has access to YouTube’s Copyright Management Suite, which aims to gives rights holders complete control of their copyrighted material on YouTube. YouTube’s actions against copyright violation depend on the preference of the copyright owner or creator. These include — Block a whole video from being viewed; monetise the video by running ads against it, in some cases sharing revenue with the uploader; or track the video’s viewership statistics. In most cases, as per the company, this means that rights holders don’t need to submit copyright takedowns for these videos and instead have the opportunity to monetise and run ads in exchange for the videos being live. The company claims that in most cases the rightsholders choose to monetise 90% of all Content ID claims, opening up a multitude of new revenue streams for themselves.
How three main tools of YouTube’s Copyright Management Suite work
* Webform: It is available in 80 languages. This tool is claimed to be the simplest way to have unauthorised copies of copyrighted content removed, by manually submitting a copyright notification.
* Copyright Match tool: Copyright Match tool is designed specifically for Creators. It uses Content ID matching technology to find re-uploads of videos on YouTube. Instead of uploading a reference file to YouTube, creators who are the first to upload a video to YouTube are shown subsequent uploads of their videos. Creators can then review the matching videos and file takedowns for any they wish to remove. They can also choose to contact the uploader.
* Content ID: This is YouTube’s enterprise solution for those with scaled rights-management needs like music labels, movie studios, collection societies and other service providers. According to the company, today over 98% of copyright claims on YouTube globally are handled through our fully automated Content ID solution, rather than the notice-and-takedown process. Content ID is basically a digital fingerprinting system that allows rights holders to upload content that they have exclusive rights to as reference files, and then scans videos uploaded to YouTube for matches of that content. When a user uploads content, Content ID scans against the database for matching videos. If there is a match, then an action is taken based on the predefined rules or policies that a content owner sets themselves.