YouTube Will Now Notify Creators When Their Content Has Been Stolen

YouTube has now created a service that notifies creators when their content has been stolen. Whenever someone steals or duplicates any creators content, YouTube now can find the stolen content and inform the creator directly with a select few options for action they can take. The new tool is known as the Copyright Match Tool

This is perfect for creators as it means that any content stolen is found and sorted fast and effectively.

How Does It Work?

The new process called Copyright Match Tool is what is used to identify copied content, which was announced by YouTube on their blog recently. Having been in the pipeline for the last year, YouTube has been collaborating with popular YouTuber’s to help develop the effectiveness of the app.

As described on their blog, Copyright Match Tool is a useful and innovative way to help creators find any duplicate content on the site, but how does it actually work? According to YouTube, after uploading a video, the scanner will search other videos uploaded to YouTube to see if any of them are the same or incredibly similar. If there is a match, it will appear under the “matches” tab in the tool, and you can decide what to do next.

The Benefits

The whole point of this new system is to help creators protect their content, that is the sole purpose. Anyone who is a creator will know the frustration of seeing a copy of your content uploaded to a different channel, but not knowing what to do or if you can even do anything to stop it. Now, there is a defined and proved way to prevent people from copying your content and also to stop you accidentally copying anyone else’s content, too.

The Disadvantages

Currently, we do not know the rate of how successful this tool may be. Now being tested on participating YouTuber’s, the tool will only be available to those who have over 100,000 subscribers. This means that any smaller creators trying to make a living off the site won’t receive this tool after a few months.

The actions which someone could take against those who copy or re-upload content created by someone else are very slim, stating that there are three different actions you can make. Either you contact the uploader directly, asking politely to take down the stolen content, do nothing about it, or ass YouTube to remove the copy from YouTube but with no guarantees.

Although this tool is an excellent advance into what is a disadvantageous circumstance within the YouTube community currently, it does have its downfalls.