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Improving rights management at YouTube

By Lars Krüger

Product Manager

Copyright protection is of the utmost importance to Google and YouTube. That’s why our team works diligently to develop and improve the copyright protection tool for your videos called Content ID. Today we have updated features of Content ID to share with you, but first, a refresher on how Content ID works.

Content ID allows rights holders to automatically detect uploaded content that contains potentially infringing works. This is possible through a system that creates a digital “fingerprint” of a video when it’s uploaded to YouTube. These fingerprints are automatically compared to partner-provided references. In case of a match, the rights holder can choose to monetize it, block it from the site or keep track of viewing metrics. Because of the vast scale of YouTube (remember: 1 hour of content is uploaded to the site every second), this is an automated process.

On to the news—the video fingerprint now offers better protection against copyright infringements, specifically in the form of cropped and mirrored videos. Below are examples of new matches against modified videos.


      Partner-provided video              User-provided video
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      Partner-provided video              User-provided video
image


      Partner-provided video              User-provided video
image

We’ll keep investigating new ways to give rights holders ever better tools, while supporting new forms of creative expression. More information about Content ID is available at www.youtube.com/t/contentid.

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