Content ID is a digital
fingerprinting
A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfac ...
system developed by
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
which is used to easily identify and manage copyrighted content on
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...
. Videos uploaded to YouTube are
compared against audio and video files registered with Content ID by content owners,
looking for any matches. Content owners have the choice to
have matching content blocked or to monetize it. The system began to be implemented around 2007. By 2016, it had cost $60 million to develop and led to around $2 billion in payments to copyright holders.
By 2018, Google had invested at least $100 million into the system.
Overview
Content ID
creates an ID File for copyrighted audio and video material, and stores it in a database. When a video is uploaded, it is checked against the database, and flagged as a copyright violation if a match is found.
[More about Content ID](_blank)
YouTube. Retrieved December 4, 2011. When this occurs, the content owner has the choice of blocking the video to make it unviewable, tracking the viewing statistics of the video, or adding advertisements to the "infringing" video with proceeds automatically going to the content owner.
Only uploaders who meet specific criteria can use Content ID. These criteria make the use of Content ID without the aid of a major backer difficult, limiting its usage to big corporations in practice.
Context
Between 2007 and 2009, companies including
Viacom Viacom, an abbreviation of Video and Audio Communications, may refer to:
* Viacom (1952–2006), a former American media conglomerate
* Viacom (2005–2019), a former company spun off from the original Viacom
* Viacom18, a joint venture between Par ...
,
Mediaset
Mediaset Italia S.p.A., also known as Mediaset, is an Italian-based mass media company which is the largest commercial broadcaster in the country. The company is controlled by the holding company MFE - MediaForEurope. Founded in 1987 by former ...
, and the English
Premier League
The Premier League (legal name: The Football Association Premier League Limited) is the highest level of the men's English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Foo ...
filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material. Viacom, demanding $1 billion in damages, said that it had found more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of its material on YouTube that had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times".
During the same court battle, Viacom won a court ruling requiring YouTube to hand over 12 terabytes of data detailing the viewing habits of every user who had watched videos on the site. On March 18, 2014, the lawsuit was settled after seven years with an undisclosed agreement.
History
In June 2007, YouTube began trials of a system for automatic detection of uploaded videos that infringe copyright.
This system uses 'digital fingerprints' of songs or videos to automatically identify their matches. More precisely, it detects the unauthorized use of copyright-protected content.
Google CEO
Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer known for being the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 20 ...
regarded this system as necessary for resolving lawsuits such as the one from
Viacom Viacom, an abbreviation of Video and Audio Communications, may refer to:
* Viacom (1952–2006), a former American media conglomerate
* Viacom (2005–2019), a former company spun off from the original Viacom
* Viacom18, a joint venture between Par ...
, which alleged that YouTube profited from content that it did not have the right to distribute. The system was initially called "Video Identification"
and later became known as Content ID.
By 2010, YouTube had "already invested tens of millions of dollars in this technology".
In 2011, YouTube described Content ID as "very accurate in finding uploads that look similar to reference files that are of sufficient length and quality to generate an effective ID File".
By 2012, Content ID accounted for over a third of the monetized views on YouTube.
In 2016, Google stated that Content ID had paid out around $2 billion to copyright holders (compared to around $1 billion by 2014), and had cost $60 million to develop.
Since mid-2018, Google has been beta-testing a new tool called Copyright Match, a simplified version of Content ID with limited options, which would be available to uploaders with more than 100,000 views.
However, contrary to Content ID, which sends copyright notices automatically, with Copyright Match no action is taken until the creator chooses to do so.
In 2021, YouTube recorded nearly 1.5 billion Content ID claims, including 759.5 million by the second half of the year among which 4.840 were copyright owners'.
Trademark lawsuit
In 2006, YouTube and content protection company
Audible Magic
Audible Magic Corporation (commonly Audible Magic) is a Los Gatos, California-based company that provides content identification services to social networks, record labels, music publishers, television studios, and movie studios. The company also ...
signed an agreement to mainly create 'audio identification technology', and precisely, to license the use of Audible Magic's own "Content ID" fingerprinting technology. When Google bought YouTube, in November of the same year, the license was transferred to Google. The agreement was terminated in 2009, but in 2014 Google obtained a trademark for its own "Content ID" implementation. Audible Magic sued Google the same year on the basis that they owned the "Content ID" trademark and therefore that Google trademarking their implementation was a fraud.
Criticism
An independent test in 2009 uploaded multiple versions of the same song to YouTube, and concluded that while the system was "surprisingly resilient" in finding copyright violations in the audio tracks of videos, it was not infallible. The use of Content ID to remove material automatically has led to
controversy
Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin ''controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an opposite d ...
in some cases, as the videos have not been checked by a human for fair use.
If a YouTube user disagrees with a decision by Content ID, it is possible to fill in a form disputing the decision. However, this claim is sent directly to the party that owns the supposed copyright, who has the final decision in the matter unless legal action is pursued. If the reporting party denies their claim, the channel receives a strike. If a channel receives three strikes, it is removed from the platform. Prior to 2016, videos weren't monetized until the dispute was resolved.
In December 2013, Google changed the way the system worked (seemingly to cover YouTube in case of lawsuits), leading to numerous content creation copyright notices being sent to YouTube accounts. Those notices led to ad revenues being automatically diverted to third parties, which sometimes had no connection to the games.
Since April 2016, videos continue to be monetized while the dispute is in progress, and the money goes to whoever won the dispute. Should the uploader want to monetize the video again, they may remove the disputed audio in the "Video Manager". YouTube has cited the effectiveness of Content ID as one of the reasons why the site's rules were modified in December 2010 to allow some users to upload videos of unlimited length.
The music industry has criticized Content ID as inefficient, with
Universal Music Publishing Group
Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) is a North American music publishing company and is part of the Universal Music Group. It was formerly known as MCA Music Publishing until it merged with PolyGram.
Universal Music Publishing is the worl ...
(UMPG) estimating in a 2015 filing to the US Copyright Office "that Content ID fails to identify upwards of 40 percent of the use of UMPG’s compositions on YouTube".
Google has countered these assertions by stating that (as of 2016) Content ID detected over 98% of known copyright infringement on YouTube and humans filing removal notices only 2%.
In January 2018, a YouTube uploader who created a
white noise
In signal processing, white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density. The term is used, with this or similar meanings, in many scientific and technical disciplines, ...
generator received copyright notices about a video he uploaded which contained only white noise.
In September 2018, a German university professor uploaded videos with several classical music performances for which their copyright had expired, because both the composers were dead long ago, and the performances were not covered anymore by copyright. After he received several copyright violations by YouTube, he could lift the majority of them, but
Deutsche Grammophon
Deutsche Grammophon (; DGG) is a German classical music record label that was the precursor of the corporation PolyGram. Headquartered in Berlin Friedrichshain, it is now part of Universal Music Group (UMG) since its merger with the UMG family of ...
refused to lift two of them even if their copyright had expired. In other cases, copyright violations notices were even sent to uploaders who recorded themselves playing public domain classical music, with
Sony Music
Sony Music Entertainment (SME), also known as simply Sony Music, is an American multinational music company. Being owned by the parent conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, it is part of the Sony Music Group, which is owned by Sony Entertainment ...
asserting copyright over more than 1,100 compositions by
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard w ...
via Content ID. Commentators noted that this was also the case on other platforms such as
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
.
In December 2018
TheFatRat
Christian Friedrich Johannes Büttner (born 1 June 1979), known professionally as TheFatRat, is a German DJ, record producer and musician. His genre is often described as "glitch-hop". He is best known for his 2016 extended play ''Jackpot'' which ...
complained that Content ID gave preference to an obvious scammer who used the automated system to claim ownership of his content and thereby steal his revenue.
In April 2019,
WatchMojo
WatchMojo is a private company in video producing, publishing and syndicator that is based in Canada. The company has created around 20,000 videos on YouTube, and 5,000 additional videos from other platforms. It primarily is known for their ...
- one of the largest YouTube channels with over 20 million subscribers and 15 billion views with an extensive library of videos that rely on fair use - released a video that relied on its 10-year experiences managing claims and strikes via Content ID to highlight instances of alleged abuse. In a follow-up video, the channel estimated that rights holders had unlawfully claimed over $2 billion from 2014–19.
See also
*
Acoustic fingerprint
An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.
Practical uses of aco ...
* EU
Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market
The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, formally the Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96 ...
*
Fingerprint (computing)
In computer science, a fingerprinting algorithm is a procedure that maps an arbitrarily large data item (such as a computer file) to a much shorter bit string, its fingerprint, that uniquely identifies the original data for all practical purpose ...
*
Media Identification Code
The Media Identification Code (MID) is used on DVD-R, DVD+R and DVD-RAM discs to identify the manufacturer and to assist the DVD burner to select the best write strategy for the inserted media. The technology is inherited from the ATIP code used ...
(MID)
References
External links
How Content ID works - YouTube Help
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