As contents kept adding, there are increasing chances that they are duplicates. The case is exceptionally true on YouTube.
The largest video-streaming platform of the web has to deal with a staggering amount of video hours that are added to its platform every minute. Eager to encourage content creators to do what they do best in creating contents, YouTube has released a tool that it hopes will help reduce the number of video theft and duplicates.
Called the 'Copyright Match Tool', it is meant to deal with frustrations of copyright infringements that plagued creators for years.
What the tool does, is allowing creators to find out if their videos have been uploaded by other channels in the platform.
To do this, the tool uses a similar technology previously used by YouTube’s Content ID tool.
First of all, the Copyright Match Tool will scan a video uploaded for review by a creator and dedicate a pattern it. The tool will then scan other videos and reflect to the recognized patterns on other uploaded videos to detect any similarities.
"We know how frustrating it is when your content is uploaded to other channels without your permission and how time-consuming it can be to manually search for these re-uploads," wrote Fabio Magagna, the product manager for the Copyright Match Tool, on the YouTube Creators blog.
With the tool, "When there is a match, it will appear in the ‘matches’ tab in the tool and you can decide what to do next,"
In order for the tool to work, YouTube said that it's important for creators looking for matches, to be the first person who uploaded the video. "The time of the upload is how we determine who should be shown matches," explained Magagna.
If the original video creator is notified about re-uploaded videos, they can decide what they want to do next: they can either contact the person who uploaded it to remove it, or completing an official takedown request through YouTube.
YouTube said that it will manually review all takedown requests to make sure that they comply with the company's copyright policies.
"You should not file a copyright takedown request for content that you do not own exclusively, such as public domain content. You should also consider whether the matched content could be considered fair use or could be subject to some other exceptions to copyright and hence not require permission for reuse," said Magagna.
In its initial launch, the Copyright Match Tool is only available for creators with at least 100,000 subscribers. YouTube has plans to make it available to all creators who are part of the YouTube Partner Program and regardless of their subscribers count.
The tools is YouTube's response to complaints that the company should do more to ensure contents are not being re-uploaded and used by other YouTubers without permission.
With more than 1.8 billion users, the platform has indeed become a powerful marketing platform for businesses regardless of their size. From big enterprises to small business owners, they can all engage with their customers by creating videos about the products and services they offer, and more.
With the many videos uploaded on YouTube every minute, and also with the many hardware and software available to create and edit videos with ease, it's obvious that content creators want to protect their content and brand so no one else takes advantage of their work.
It takes a lot of effort to create a compelling video. And for that matter, YouTube that wants push creators into creating more original videos, is not welcoming plagiarism.
The tool has been tested for about a year with creators to ensure that it is safe and effective. However, YouTube said that the tool will only identify full re-uploads - ones in which the full copied video is included. So when only a short clip is used in one larger video, the tool won't notify the original creator.
Creators are on their own to spot and report them.