YouTube Launches The Copyright Match Tool
There are a lot of practices on YouTube that one might categorize as “unseemly,” and one of the biggest is re-uploading a video. That means that a viewer downloads your video then uploads it on their channel and classifies it as their own. YouTube has heard content creators cries for help though, and has launched a new tool called Copyright Match to try to alleviate the problem.
Copyright Match only works on full videos and not on clips, but it does provide the original creator with some protection. “Original creator” is the key term here because the tool recognizes the first person to upload the video as the creator, so the exact time of the upload is critical.
When the tool finds a match, it alerts the original creator, who then has 2 options. The first option is to do nothing, which most creators probably won’t settle for, and the second is to contact YouTube and ask to have the re-uploaded video removed. If you do ask for the video to be removed, you can specify whether the platform should act immediately or provide a 7 day window for the re-uploaded to correct the condition themselves.
When using the tool, YouTube asks that you make sure that you really own the content in the first place, and that it’s not actually owned by someone else, or public domain or fair use material.
Copyright Match is not the same as YouTube’s Content ID (although the technology is similar, according to YouTube), which fingerprints uploaded music and alerts the copyright holder when its being used in other videos. Match is looking at video content and not the music, so there is a distinction between the two.
That said, this is a tool only available to users with channels that have 100,000 or more subscribers, although YouTube says that it will eventually roll it out to users with smaller subscriber bases as well.
