Advanced Television

YouTube improves Content ID

October 4, 2012

By Colin Mann

YouTube has announced fresh updates to Content ID – the set of copyright policies and content management tools which aim to give rights holders control of their content posted on the site.

Writing in the official YouTube blog, Thabet Alfishawi, Rights Management Product Manager, highlights three particular efforts that YouTube thinks improve Content ID for everyone.

The first concerns a new appeals process. “Users have always had the ability to dispute Content ID claims on their videos if they believe those claims are invalid. Prior to today, if a content owner rejected that dispute, the user was left with no recourse for certain types of Content ID claims (e.g., monetise claims). Based upon feedback from our community, today we’re introducing an appeals process that gives eligible users a new choice when dealing with a rejected dispute. When the user files an appeal, a content owner has two options: release the claim or file a formal DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notification,” he advised.

The second covers what Alfishawi describes a smarter detection of unintentional claims. “Content owners have uploaded more than ten million reference files to the Content ID system. At that scale, mistakes can and do happen,” he admitted. “To address this, we’ve improved the algorithms that identify potentially invalid claims. We stop these claims from automatically affecting user videos and place them in a queue to be manually reviewed. This process prevents disputes that arise when content not owned by a partner inadvertently turns up in a reference file. Smarter claim detection minimises unintentional mistakes. Of course, we take action in rare cases of intentional misuse, up to and including terminating Content ID access.”

The third relates to improved matching quality. “At the heart of Content ID is the matching technology that identifies partners’ content among all the videos on YouTube. Earlier this year we introduced a significant improvement to how the matching happens. We continue to work on ways to make the matching more precise through better algorithms and a more comprehensive reference library,” he advised.

“There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but we believe that these are significant steps forward in our efforts to keep YouTube a vibrant place where the rights of both content owners and users are protected and everyone can control their original content and make money from it – money which can be put towards the production of more great content. For now, keep on watching, upload a video or two and please, please keep the feedback coming,” he implored.

 

 

Categories: Articles, Content, Piracy, Rights, UGC