YouTube announces changes to its infamous and horrible property rights violation system

The number of issues hanging over YouTube at all times is staggering, ranging from accusations of promoting extremist content to reports of his nightmarish algorithm recommended by home-made videos of pedophiles infesting his comments. One of the less overtly alarming but still prevalent problems is the poor state of its copyright claims system, which, report after report, has repeatedly stated that it is misused to false claims, extort creators and make ItTubers' life more difficult.

Earlier this year, CEO Susan Wojcicki said that this issue would be one of her priorities in 2019. On Tuesday, YouTube announced a number of changes to the manual portion of its rights claim system. The author (which is separate from its automatic content identification systems that verify the violations) intended to make it less prone to abuse has now been deployed. The biggest change is that anyone who files such a copyright claim will have to enter exact timestamps of the alleged infringement, which is intended to prevent copyright holders from having report entire videos in violation willy-nilly:

As you would if you received an automatic claim from our Content ID Matching System, you will now see the timestamps in Creator Studio when you receive a manual claim. Check out the YouTube Studio Video Copyright Information page, which offers a visualization of the location of the content claimed manually in your video, as well as additional information about the claimed content. . We will evaluate the accuracy of these timestamps.

This is important because the creators could previously not know exactly what content was supposed to be illegal, that the video lasts 10 seconds or more than one hour. YouTube added that it would review timestamp accuracy and that "copyright owners who repeatedly fail to provide accurate data will have their access to the claimed document revoked." (It seems a bit like something should have happened, but okay.)

In addition, YouTube wrote that the tools to bring the videos into compliance with the copyright, including cutting all sound while playing a song claimed, to replace it with "l '" one of our free songs from the YouTube audio library "or cut out the section, have been simplified. Although these methods are already available, creators can now use timestamps to quickly identify and correct portions of a video to edit.

While these changes bring much needed clarity to copyrighted YouTubers, they do not do much to ensure that the rules of the game are fair to rights holders and to those who claim to use equitable rights. documents for purposes such as criticism, education, news or research. .

Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998), digital service providers such as YouTube are protected from copyright infringement if they have a system of "notification and withdrawal". This creates legal and financial incentives for the platforms to give priority to aggressive surveillance in the event of alleged infringement, which creates a fundamental tension with users who insist that the use of material protected by copyright is incidental or falls under the guidelines of fair use.

YouTube summarizes badly in arbitration of these issues and, as the Week wrote in 2016, people or companies "who do not prove or systematically verify whether the content is fair use before making the application" are currency current and use the system for such purposes as critical censorship or trying to monetize content that does not properly belong to them. Although these changes have an impact, hopefully, timestamps will not solve it. In its announcement, YouTube stated that it "is always looking for ways to improve the copyright experience for creators while balancing the rights of copyright owners", and that there would be "more to come".