Ever since YouTube’s inception in early 2005, the site has been plagued by copyright issues. Manually reviewing every clip uploaded is impossible, with over 35 hours of video submitted each minute. Once YouTube established itself as the de facto standard in online video, the music, television and film industries leant pretty hard on Google Inc. (who own the video site) to crack down on the rampant uploading of copyrighted material.
To curb the uploading of copyrighted material Google instituted a “three strikes” rule for offending users, as well as a clever algorithmic solution called Video ID, which checks uploaded material against a database of known copyrighted works, and flags videos which is suspects contains offending material. This seems to have reduced the amount of illegal content on the site, and nine of the top ten YouTube videos of all time are now official music videos from record labels (who, of course, make a pretty penny advertising against them).
Google, always thinking the best of their users, seems to believe that a lot of people uploading copyrighted material simply doesn’t know it doesn’t belong to them, and as such will now be requiring users who attempt to submit copyright-protected works to watch a video on YouTube copyright policies, and take a quick quiz to prove they learned a thing or two. Google, adorably, are calling this process “YouTube Copyright School.”
Much like a young offender, if the user subsequently cleans up their act and is a good YouTube citizen the mark will be removed from their record. However, if they persist the “three strikes” rule comes into affect and their account will be suspended.
Google is clearly trying to appease copyright holders with this move (especially if it plans to court the music industry for an Android MP3 locker service), but it still has a long way to go. Amusingly, a YouTube search for “Copyright School” yields a whole tranche of copyrighted material uploaded in protest against the new measure, as well as several chunks of High School Musical that have been illicitly shared.
