YouTube Changes Their Content ID Dispute Process

Since its inception, YouTube’s Content ID system has been fraught with loopholes and issues that have negatively affected many of the sites content creators and currently YouTube is making changes to their Content ID dispute system to change that.  Recently there has been a sort of scam going around on YouTube where some jerk will register a bunch of pieces of random content as their own, much of which belongs to someone else who has yet to register it in YouTube’s system, at which point the system will do the scammer’s dirty work and will start sending out a bunch of false content ID claims that it thinks are legitimate and the scammers end up making money by stealing the ad revenue of the claimed videos.

There are various reasons that legitimate copyright holders can flag a video, and sometimes the system does undoubtedly do its job and either takes a video down or gives the revenue a video makes over to the people who deserve it, however even when there is not a scam occurring and a takedown claim is made by a legitimate copyright holder YouTube’s system can still be abused and made to hurt video creators.

YouTube’s official explanation image.

The issue here is what YouTube does with the ad revenue from a video while there is a copyright dispute occurring over it.  Up until now if a video was found to have third party content in it, the third party would receive the ad revenue from the video up until the dispute was over and either they or the uploader would be awarded the revenue from that point onwards based on the outcome of the dispute.  But that whole process can take up to a month and the takedown and copyright claims usually take place right after a video is initially posted which is usually the most traffic heavy period for most YouTube videos; that equals a huge loss of income for the content creator.

What YouTube has come up with is a simple but effective fix to many of these issues.  Whenever a challenge is issued to the ownership of the rights to the content in a video, YouTube will keep all of the money earned during the arbitration process and then award that to the victor.  An elegant solution, this will definitely help prevent content creators from losing their profits in cases like this, however it does still appear that the third party copyright claimants can still ask for the video to be taken down and this new process, while definitely a step in the right direction, will do nothing to stop the loss of profit in cases where video takedowns are requested.  At this time, it is uncertain exactly when these changes will go into effect.  The official announcement simply states that they “hope to roll it out to all YouTube partners in the coming months”.

Do you think this helps out people who host their channels on YouTube?  Do you think this is something the company should have looked into doing a long time ago?  Is this your first time hearing about YouTube’s Content ID system?  We would love to hear from you in the comments section.