Since Google launched its Content ID program on YouTube, it has been plagued with problems. The biggest problem is that anyone can claim a video without having to provide anything resembling proof. Additionally, when a video is claimed, the original creator completely loses control over the monetization of their work.
That is all going to change with one little adjustment from Google.
Are you ready for this? Google has announced that during the claim and dispute period of a claimed video, the video can continue to be monetized, but those funds will go into escrow waiting for the claim to be resolved. When everything is over and done with, the money made during that time goes to the victor.
Today, we’re announcing a major step to help fix that frustrating experience. We’re developing a new solution that will allow videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. Here’s how it will work: when both a creator and someone making a claim choose to monetize a video, we will continue to run ads on that video and hold the resulting revenue separately. Once the Content ID claim or dispute is resolved, we’ll pay out that revenue to the appropriate party.
Google even admits that this change should help alleviate the problems they created.
Even though Content ID claims are disputed less than 1% of the time, we agree that this process could be better. Making sure our Content ID tools are being used properly is deeply important to us, so we’ve built a dedicated team to monitor this.
Unfortunately, it will be a few months before this rolls out, but I guess it is a “better late than never” thing.
If you want to see just how terrible the problem is, you can check out our very own Andrew Eisen’s experiences trying to release a fun video about Captain Toad.
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“If the video producer disputes the claim, the video’s ad revenue should be held in escrow and returned if the claim is dropped, abandoned or defeated in court.” – Andrew Eisen, March 8,2016
Glad Google agrees!
Andrew Eisen
In related news: Jim Sterling found a new tactic to break the Content ID system. He calls it Copyright Deadlock.
Now if only they could start counting strikes against frivolous claims. Something that scales with their total number of claims. If they file 21 claims and 19 are bogus, that’s a problem. If they file 2100 claims and 19 are bogus, I’d say they’re doing pretty good.
Yep, that was one of my original requests too!
“And there should be some type of penalty for filing bogus, bad faith copyright claims.”
Andrew Eisen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYWNtkls2Jw Where’s The Fair Use Progress by nostalgia critic while note 100% directly related, its apart of the bigger picture. over 100k people submitted coments to the trademark office.
It’s an improvement certainly. I’ve heard stories from a few creators (Anime America being a notable one) who have been plagued by Content ID trolls who claim all of their most popular videos, take the revenue during the dispute period (which is very often the most profitable period), and then give up rather than escalate it to a copyright strike. Except… this requires the content creator to be willing to risk a strike. If you get three strikes at the same time (even if they’re unreasonable), your channel is gone. If you put out a lot of content and have three disputes going on in the same time period, you might not be willing to risk a strike, so you’ll have to give up and let the trolls have their money anyway. Perhaps the next change needs to be, make it so only if it’s three undisputed strikes and your channel is gone.
And then there’s the issue of companies who have their Content ID set so that any match is automatically blocked from monetizing at all. In this case, the creator would still end up losing out on all revenue that the video would have generated. There isn’t as obvious a solution to this issue, though.
And of course, as has already been pointed out by Andrew above, there needs to be a penalty for bogus claims. This is unfortunately going to be a tough one to get implemented, as very rich companies very much don’t want to face any consequences for anything they do.
So… this is a step in the right direction. One single step. Much more still needs to be done
Google does claim that they are punishing people who abuse the Content ID system, but based on the wording, it would seem to be just locking them out of certain Content ID features or the system itself.