YouTube is currently releasing a tool for video creators that checks to see if their videos are being stolen. So from now, whenever a video is uploaded to YouTube, the online streaming platform will scan and check if the content that is being uploaded is already available on the service or if it is the same with any other video on the site. The only thing is that it can only be able to identify complete videos and not clips.
This tool which the online streaming service refers to as the Copyright Match tool has already been rolling out to creators that have more than one hundred thousand (100,000) subscribers for some time now. It will be released to more users starting from now and well up to the next few months. For those creators who will be making use of the tool, they will receive notifications if and when copies of their videos appear on YouTube and when these creators find that the tool has identified matches for their videos, it is then up to them to decide on what actions they want to take. The actions available to them include; doing nothing, or contacting the person who had made the copy and finally asking YouTube to remove the copy.
One thing is important to note and that is that you have to be the first to upload a particular video before you can be considered as the original creator of the video by the tool. Now what this means is that, there is a chance that if someone copies a video you uploaded in Vimeo or Facebook and uploads it on YouTube before you do, that person will be recognized by the tool as the original creator of that video.
Before this tool, YouTube had a program called Content ID which pretty much functions in a like manner. It helps copyright owners find people making use of their content without their permission. The only hack with Content ID is that it is limited in its accessibility and it also lets content owners monetize unauthorized uses of their work which is something the new tool doesn’t do.
