YouTube makes changes to its sometimes controversial Content ID program, in a bid to avoid the number of "unintentional claims" and to provide uploaders with a better appeals process
Google owned YouTube has announced changes to its "Content ID" program, which automatically scans and detects infringing content and flags them for further action.
While copyright holders have generally embraced "Content ID", YouTube uploaders often have to deal with false positives, having perfectly fine videos being flagged for little or no reason.
There have also been many well publicized mishaps, the most recent being the video of First Lady Michelle Obama's Democratic Convention speech being blocked for copyright infringement, even though it was uploaded via the official convention YouTube account.
Perhaps as a response to these unintended consequences, YouTube has announced a set of improvements to the Content ID system.
For end users, the most notable change will be the introduction of an appeals process. Uploaders could previously dispute a claim, but once rights holders reject the dispute, there are no further actions that the uploader can take. With the new appeals process, uploaders can now appeal the rejection of their dispute, and rights holders will either have to release the claim or file a formal DMCA notice for the video.
On the back-end, YouTube has also promised to reduce the number of "unintentional claims" (another way of saying false positives) by refining the automated algorithm used to detect infringing videos. Any videos that are flagged as possible unintentional will placed in a queue for the content holders to manually review.
YouTube will hope these changes will bring back some balance to the anti-piracy mechanism behind the world's largest video website, "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", the blog post states.
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