YouTube’s Copyright Match Tool finds videos uploaded without the creator’s permission

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Copyright infringement has been a frustration for YouTube creators for years. In a big step toward addressing the problem, YouTube announced is releasing a Copyright Match Tool next week that will allow creators to find out if their videos have been uploaded by other channels.

Using technology similar to YouTube’s Content ID tool, the Copyright Match Tool will first scan a video uploaded for review by a creator, and then scan other video uploads to detect if similar, or the same, video content has been uploaded by another channel.

“When there is a match, it will appear in the ‘matches’ tab in the tool and you can decide what to do next,” writes Fabio Magagna, the product manager for the Copyright Match Tool, on the YouTube Creators blog.

For it to work, YouTube says it’s important that the creator looking for matches is the first person to have uploaded the video. “The time of the upload is how we determine who should be shown matches,” writes Magagna.

The tool searches for full re-uploads (versus videos that contain short clips of other videos), and then lets the creator decide what they want to do, whether it’s reaching out directly to the person who has uploaded the content to ask them to remove it, or completing an official takedown request through YouTube. YouTube says all takedown requests will be reviewed to make sure 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,” writes Magagna.

Right now, with this initial launch, YouTube is only offering the tool to creators with at least 100,000 subscribers but says it has a long-term goal of making it available to all creators who are part of the YouTube Partner Program.

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Amy Gesenhues

Amy Gesenhues was a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.