YouTube Content ID changes irritate content creators

YouTube was never really considered broke, so why does Google insist on "fixing" it every other month? This time it's the change to the Content ID system that has our collective panties in a bunch.

YouTube's Content ID system is an automated program that crawls any video that's being monetized (the ones that the video owner has allowed advertising on) and looks for any infringing content that may appear in the video per DCMA rules. In the past, it would flag content that was a blatant rip-off by automatically listing the video as private, then notifying both the infringing party along with the alleged content owner. While it could have made life hard for people like us who make a living producing funny yet informative videos that sometimes have to sample someone else's content, the system was working decently.

However last Friday when the new ContentID system went live, we were immediately slapped with a takedown notice ... from ourselves!! This new system is so sensitive that it totally ignored the fact that we have multiple channels so we can put our content in multiple languages and markets. We thought we were alone in this, but when the dust settled we noticed a lot of YouTubers were having similar issues. There was the indie videogame studio accused of infringing on Sony because five seconds of its gaming clip looked like a PlayStation title. Then there was a guy who got a takedown notice because he happened to record himself playing a cover of a pop song ... on an ACCORDION.

So we formally submit an open letter to the big GOOG:

Dear Google,
We know you're the coolest company around. You're making cars that drive themselves, phones that know what you want before you do, and have been serving up detailed searches of any and everything the internet has to offer for a very long time. We know you want to make YouTube into the world's media center. But please stop for a minute and remember it was lolcats, game walkthroughs, car accidents caught on Russian das