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YouTube ‘Cautiously’ Praised for Video Takedown Policy Update

Oct. 4, 2012 8:15pm Liz Klimas

Remember when YouTube accidentally blocked the Democratic National Convention’s livestream for a short period of time? This was due to an incorrect copyright claim, and now, YouTube is taking steps to make it harder to block videos on the site.

The Google-owned product is updating its algorithms to better review complaints before aut0-blocking now.

YouTube Improves Copyright Infringement Policy That Has Wrongly Taken Down Videos

This image shows up when a video has been bocked due to claims of copyright infringement on YouTube.

Here’s what Rights Management Product Manager Thabet Alfishawi writes of the update on YouTube’s blog:

Content owners have uploaded more than ten million reference files to the Content ID system. At that scale, mistakes can and do happen. To address this, we’ve improved the algorithms that identify potentially invalid claims. We stop these claims from automatically affecting user videos and place them in a queue to be manually reviewed. This process prevents disputes that arise when content not owned by a partner inadvertently turns up in a reference file.

Smarter claim detection minimizes unintentional mistakes. Of course, we take action in rare cases of intentional misuse, up to and including terminating Content ID access.

YouTube is being praised to an extent for making these updates. Ars Technica’s Timothy Lee calls it “clearly an improvement [but] still leaves a lot to be desired.” Lee also includes the opinion of Regent University law school graduate who has the website FairUseTub.org, Patrick McKay, saying he is ”cautiously optimistic” about the improvements.

“It looks like they have finally made the exact change I and other critics of the Content ID dispute process have been calling for them to make,” he said. “I only regret that it took YouTube several years to realize that giving copyright claimants the ability to reinstate their own claims was a problem,” McKay told Ars Technica.

Alfishawi wrote on the blog that the YouTube team “still a lot of work ahead of us, but we believe that these are significant steps forward in our efforts to keep YouTube a vibrant place where the rights of both content owners and users are protected and everyone can control their original content and make money from it – money which can be put towards the production of more great content.”

This post has been updated to include Google’s correction that it will not in fact be manually checking videos for copyright infringement before blocking them.

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Comments (12)

oldfiredog
Posted on October 5, 2012 at 3:07pm
Well I managed to see Dinesh D’Souza’s entire 1 and 1/2 hour of “2016,Obama’s America”before it was yanked from Youtube.It scared the crap out of me.

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msswim.com
Posted on October 5, 2012 at 11:44am
There’s probably some really microscopic fine print that says if a video is posted that has content relating to Islam, and is flagged even just once, they’re probably going to say it’s a copyright violation because Allah and Muhammad have exclusive rights to the video’s content. LOL

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- The Third Archon
  Posted on October 5, 2012 at 6:40pm
  LOL–but then the “Innocence of Muslims” video, still up in multiple posts, needs explaining.
  
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Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Posted on October 4, 2012 at 9:13pm
This bodes bad news for all those people copyrighting their cat videos, now Red Eye has endless material and Joe Biden will be distracted with shiny videos of tinsel.

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americansfightingforcommonsense
Posted on October 4, 2012 at 8:59pm
Yes, Romney made Barack Hussain Obama look like the freshman, uneducated, unresponsive, incoherent president that he is. Obama had no answers for the truth and the facts. Romney had an excellent night with the debate.

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- MarkinGermany
  Posted on October 5, 2012 at 7:36am
  My motorcycles exhaust pipe is rusty and nothing I use can clean it properly. But at the end of the month when I put it away for the winter, I’ll take the gas tank off and fix it.
  
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- The Gooch
  Posted on October 6, 2012 at 1:30pm
  Chuckle…
  
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TJexcite
Posted on October 4, 2012 at 8:53pm
So will this prevent the YouTube riot next time. One click on from some in the State department and have every copy removed and the DoJ will arrest the person who uploads it.

And Jihad tube continues unimpeded. The bots can’t catch the beheading when it is recorded by a cell-phone and a uninterested human in some office is not going to watch a 8 minutes video in Arabic or Pasto to watch the last 1 minute murder at the end.

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- U.N.hater
  Posted on October 4, 2012 at 9:04pm
  I kinda can’t believe there aren’t 100′s of moohamhead clips on youtube by now. Just to let them know we are not scared to tell the truth. $200k a head. They shouldn’t be able to afford all of them. We need to start excerise’ing our right’s a little more.
  
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MrButcher
Posted on October 4, 2012 at 8:29pm
Good for them.

Hey, did anyone see Mitt Romney curb-stomp Obama in that debate last night?

Beautiful!

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- Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
  Posted on October 4, 2012 at 8:53pm
  I didn’t see the curb stomp, but I did see when Romney made him dress up as The Gimp and sing “I’m a Little Tea Pot”, plus the utra-wedgie was awesome, and that was just what Joe Biden did to Barrack after the debate. I heard Moochelle took his testicles back and put them in her purse, see, she let him use them for one night, and this is what he does.
  
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maxwillson1
Posted on October 4, 2012 at 8:29pm
It’s about time! Thank you Youtube!

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