Youtube’s Inescapable Copyright Crisis

YouTube is part of many high school student’s daily routines, and with around 300 hours of video content being uploaded to the platform every minute, users will never stop watching their favorite content creators. These YouTubers are pumping out videos sometimes on a daily basis seem like a job. Sometimes, that is the case. A common question is “how do these people make a living on YouTube?”. The monetization system helps YouTubers make money.

Chances are, you have watched a video with an advertisement at the beginning, or even during the video. These are put in so that the video creator and YouTube can make money. On average, every 1000 ad views makes $1. But what would happen if a company stole all of the money you make from a video? That’s where Content ID Claims come in. This happens when a creator puts copyrighted material in a monetized video. When a video gets a Content ID Claim, all of the ad revenue made from that video goes to the owner of the original material. If the whole video is filled with copyrighted media, you can file a copyright claim. This can result in a strike, where a video is completely taken down. For 2 copyright strikes, all of your videos are demonetized, which means that you don’t make money. After 3 strikes, the channel is permanently taken down.

While this may seem like a great solution to stop people from uploading videos with copyrighted content, companies have been abusing the system to make more money for themselves. On most occasions, this is for around 30 seconds of copyrighted music, but on some, there is nothing there that should be claimed. Creators have the ability to repeal the claim, but that could take from 30-60 days. This has been going on for more than 2 years, and Youtube still has done nothing about it.

Overall, the Copyright Claim and Content ID Claim systems are great ideas on paper. The concept has great intentions but is not executed well. More and more channels are having their videos demonetized and taken down due to this horrible system, and people are losing hope. It seems at if Youtube will never fix the problem and have their priorities set for other things. Now that 2019 has begun, all we can do is wish for the best and that this issue will be fixed.