YouTube's copyright system becomes more transparent

Users have always been able to report videos and get them “copyright stricken” off YouTube if they could prove copyright infringement. This process was easily abused, with bad-actors using this to take down videos they disagreed with or competed with for one reason or another.

Now Google is making a change to insert some accountability into this system.

For one, any user who wants to copyright strike a YouTube video will have to demonstrate the infringing content via timestamps so the creator would be able to check and action that content specifically. Google offers trimming, muting and content replacement features without users having to re-upload their videos. Of course, if a user abuses the manual claims feature, Google will take their toys away.

“Just as you would if you receive an automatic claim from our Content ID matching system, you’ll now see timestamps in Creator Studio when you get a manual claim. Check out the Video Copyright Info page in YouTube Studio that offers a visualization of where the manually-claimed content appears in your video, and also, it provides more info about the content being claimed.”YouTube’s Julian Bill says, “We’ll be evaluating the accuracy of these timestamps. Copyright owners who repeatedly fail to provide accurate data will have their access to manual claiming revoked.”

YouTube is getting better for content creators, and this move will mean that trolls have one less tool to abuse.