YouTube Announces New Copyright Match Tool To Protect Creators Against Re-Uploads

YouTube has announced a new tool that will help creators take down content that has been copied and re-uploaded by other users. Called the Copyright Match tool, the new feature is designed to scan YouTube and automatically find videos that may have been re-uploaded by other people without the original creator’s permission.

“Today we are excited to announce the new Copyright Match tool, which is designed to find re-uploads of your content on other channels,” YouTube’s product manager for Copyright Match tool Fabio Magagna said in a blog post. “Here’s how it works: after you upload a video, YouTube will scan other videos uploaded to YouTube to see if any of them are the same or very similar. When there is a match, it will appear in the ‘matches’ tab in the tool and you can decide what to do next.”

The technology being used for the Copyright Match tool appears to be similar to YouTube’s current Content ID matching technology, as pointed out by 9To5Google. The only major difference here is that Copyright Match provides YouTube creators more control on unauthorized re-uploads, which is already a big problem for a lot of people.

YouTube creators will be able to review the matches that the Copyright Match tool has detected. Creators can choose to do nothing, try to get in touch with the person who re-uploaded their content or request YouTube to take down the content. The Google-owned company said that when creators request for a removal, they have the option to include a 7-day delay to give the re-uploader a chance to take down the content themselves. Takedown requests will be reviewed by YouTube.

YouTube is asking creators to carefully evaluate all matches to confirm if they own the rights to the content. Creators must also take into consideration whether the re-uploaded content is protected under fair use, or if it is considered public domain content. The Copyright Match tool is also designed for full re-uploads and will not work if only a clip of the creator’s content is used. If a creator wants a video taken down because it includes a clip from their own video, they will have to report it through YouTube’s copyright web form.

“Next week, we’ll start rolling this tool out to creators with more than 100k subscribers,” Magagna said. “As this is a powerful feature, we will monitor usage closely and will continue to expand over the coming months with the long-term goal of making it available to every creator in the YouTube Partner program.”