YouTube has a system in place called ‘Content ID’ which provides content/copyright owners an automated way to force the removal of YouTube videos (or monetization of the videos) that contain copyrighted audio or video. Up until now, it was very hard to fight back when your YouTube video was removed by Content ID; Content ID allowed users to appeal flagged videos but other than that, there wasn’t anything you could do except suck it up. Copyright owners simply had to ignore or reject your appeal and that was that, even if Content ID falsely flagged your video. YouTube has now modified Content ID to allow for a better appeals experience for people who’s videos are flagged.

In a blog post, Thabet Alfishawi, the Rights Management Product Manager at YouTube, introduced a new Content ID appeals process. Under this new process, after a user challenges a copyright violation, copyright owners are forced to manually review the flagged video and either release the video (if the video has been falsely flagged) or file a formal DMCA removal notice (if the video has been correctly flagged). The biggest difference in this new appeals process is copyright owners are now forced to file a DMCA if they want to remove the removal of a video that has been appealed. In the past, copyright owners could simply reject an appeal and the video would be removed — no DMCA was required.

Aside from the new appeals process, two other changes have been made to Content ID:

• A new algorithm has been introduced that finds potentially false copyright claims. These potentially false copyright claims are automatically put into a queue that must manually be cleared by the copyright owner before the Content ID notice is sent to the owner of the video in question.
• The underlying matching algorithm for Content ID has been improved, reducing the chances of false flags.

Is this a glimmer of hope I see in the fight against excessive copyright claims?

[via YouTube]