YouTube Paid More Than $3 Billion To Copyright Holders Through Content ID

Google has released many anti-piracy measures and products and in the latest report of Google, it has released how it has been faring some of those products. In the latest “How Google Fights Piracy”, YouTube has reportedly paid more than $3 billion to copyright holders through Content ID.

For those who do not know what is Content ID. It is a popular digital fingerprinting system that allow Youtube content creators and owners to identify and manage their own content on YouTube. When Content ID detects another user uses their intellectual property, it will notify users and give them two options which are removing the content or do nothing and gaining revenue the content generates.

Content ID is still not close to be perfect. There were some people even taking advantage of its weakness and claim revenue from others’ content. YouTube already fixed the issue by allowing content owners and creators to continue getting paid from their content even when they are still involved in a copyright dispute. Besides the $3 billion paid to copyrights owners, Google claims that YouTube paid the music industry around $1.8 billion from advertising alone from October 2018 to September 2018.

YouTube has long been a gold mine for both legitimate content creators and pirates

Google said that it has invested more than $100 million into the support and development of Content ID. It is committing to make sure that its users can have legitimate access to various content, which not only helps fight piracy, but also benefit copyright owners. The University of Amsterdam conducted a study showing that there was a significant decrease in piracy in the last few years, while people have been spent more on legitimate content.

Not just protecting copyright owners, Google also states that it is trying to limit the earnings of pirates. Google has reportedly removed more than 3 billion URLs from its Search after releasing a tool that enabled copyright holders to report pirated pages and websites. In 2017, Google disapproved around 10 million ads because it believed that those ads linked to infringing websites.