YouTube is enabling creators to check their videos for copyright infringement before uploading, as the EU’s Copyright Directive approaches. Photo Credit: Christian Wiediger
YouTube has officially debuted a “Checks” step in the upload process to automatically analyze videos for copyright violations and possible ad-monetization issues.
The San Bruno-headquartered video-sharing platform formally unveiled “Checks” in a YouTube Community blog post. Currently available to creators who upload content via desktop – YouTube is “slowly rolling out this feature,” per a supplementary resource – the copyright-violation checks “usually finish within 3 minutes,” according to the Google-owned entity.
Ad-suitability analyses, for their part, “can take a couple minutes longer,” though uploaders will have access to an on-screen estimated-completion timer. Moreover, creators can go ahead and post their videos before the “Checks” step finishes, but “if an issue is found, it might impact the video’s visibility or monetization of the video,” per YouTube.
On the copyright-claim front, YouTube will timestamp possible violations and identify the allegedly infringed material(s), and uploaders will then have the chance to dispute said claims or edit out the protected media. In terms of ad-suitability checks, however, creators can “request human review” if they believe that the system has incorrectly flagged components of their video, thumbnail, and/or metadata.
Lastly, YouTube emphasized that even if a video passes through “Checks,” it’s not automatically protected “from other potential issues after publishing,” manual claims and copyright strikes among them. Plus, given this new step’s presence, uploaders are no longer required to post their works as unlisted/private to check for possible copyright violations.
Significantly, “Checks” arrives a little over three months before European Union member states will be required to implement the much-debated Copyright Directive, which prominent tech players including YouTube fought extensively.
In brief, one component of the controversial measure is set to make content platforms themselves legally responsible for clearing protected content – and, in turn, liable for copyrighted media that’s uploaded without permission from rightsholders.
Furthermore, proprietary music-fingerprinting and rights negotiation platform Pex acquired Dubset, a licensing platform for DJ mixes and other content, about one year back – reportedly paying between $25 million and $50 million. This week, Pex hired former Warner Music Group president of network licensing Jim Griffin to serve as vice president of digital rights.
Earlier this month, Google announced plans to automatically deduct taxes from YouTube creators’ U.S. royalties. And yesterday, Google revealed that the YouTube Shorts beta would make its stateside debut in the coming weeks.
This tool only checks to see if any content you’ve uploaded matches an existing record in YouTube’s ContentID system. Not every copyrighted work is registered with ContentID. So you can get a negative result in their check system and still be infringing someone else’s copyright.