YouTube improves its copyright claim system

YouTube is the world's biggest public video-sharing platform. Most of the content shared on the site comes from once non-descript persons, who may or may not rise to fame later.

However, to ensure that their work is not misappropriated, stolen, or copied, it is of sole importance to guarantee solid copyright protection mechanisms.

As a platform, YouTube has not been the best at protecting intellectual property rights. Videos shared have often been abused or leveraged to extort the original creators. However, it is now on the path of making amends and ensuring there are stricter processes in place to deal with infringement claims.

It has introduced a host of new rules, one of the most important of those being to make video uploaders manually file for copyright infringement claims replete with precise timestamps for the part of the video clip they are reporting.

According to a report by Engadget, the platform always scans uploaded videos against files preserved in its database. Now, its content ID technology looks for video and audio matches, so that it can weed out any instance of copyright infringement. This is the platform’s automated content ID claim. A manual claim is for when copyright infringement cases are reported by the owners themselves.

Now, to ensure that truant individuals don’t get to abuse this rule, YouTube plans to revoke the manual claims of any user who keeps failing to mention the exact manual timestamps.

Since the recipient of the manual claim can see the timestamp that’s reported, they can edit that part of the video that’s problematic rather than disputing the claim. Apart from this, they can cut out that segment altogether if they think that’s the right way to go about it.

Meanwhile, YouTube has announced that it will keep augmenting its video editing tools so that users can finally cut out a claimed segment of a video with just one click.

The platform’s Product Manager said: “Our work won't stop here. We're always looking to find ways to improve the creator copyright experience while also balancing the rights of copyright owners.”