Legal Geek No. 72: Will YouTube Content ID Changes make Content Creators Happy?

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review some recent changes to YouTube's copyright protection system called Content ID and determine whether more changes will come to help content creators relying on Fair Use and their own licensed works.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp72

For copyright owners wanting to stop infringing uses on YouTube videos of third parties, there are multiple options for making claims to pull potential infringing videos down or mute them for further investigation under DMCA procedures. For example, copyright owners can make manual claims about specific videos they notice, or for some users with a lot of copyrights, an automated system called Content ID can also make such claims. Although the video poster can challenge such claims to try and get the video posted again, this process causes significant delays and frustration even if the copyright claim turns out to be not valid.

For online content creators like podcasters with video content and streamers, the use of YouTube and viewer access to videos is vital for staying in business, but these copyright claims can pull those videos down at critical junctures. Especially for those who make money monetizing with ads on YouTube, this could be the difference between making rent or not in a given month.

So particularly with the automated Content ID system, any over inclusive identification of potential infringing content stifles the very content creators which draw so many viewers to the platform. Thus, YouTube is always striving to make this system more accurate at properly identifying copyright infringement while leaving fair use and licensed uses alone.

The most recent of those changes were announced on YouTube's creator blog last week. Essentially, a video subject to an automated copyright claim under Content ID will still be able to generate advertising revenue while the claim is resolved, and once the claim is resolved, the winning party will be paid accordingly. Thus, videos from popular content creators will not always just disappear or get muted, and more importantly, the ad revenue that would normally come in will still be possible if the copyright claim is challenged as invalid.

These changes will help balance the leverage between the parties in a YouTube copyright dispute. Content creators will not just be at the total whims of the automated Content ID system. And YouTube indicated in the blog post that further improvements to make the system even more accurate are likely on the way. It's certainly a positive step for content creators, and more may be on the way.

The Bottom Line is, the concept of Fair Use is a gray area in copyright law that is ever shifting thanks to many court challenges and decisions. That makes tailoring an automated copyright infringement detection system even more difficult, and we should give YouTube credit for making efforts to have the system be fair and balanced for both copyright owners and content creators, both of which deserve to be fairly compensated for their creative works.

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