YouTube Creators Will Now Be Informed When Their Videos Have Been Re-Uploaded To The Service

YouTube could about to take a big step toward solving a long time setbacks for creators: It’s about to roll out a tool that will identify videos that are stolen and re-posted by someone else — and let the original creator pull the ripoffs down.

After almost a year in beta-testing, YouTube’s new Copyright Match tool is scheduled to launch next week for creators with more than 100,000 subscribers. With the new system, after a user uploads a video — and YouTube verifies it as the first iteration of the video — YouTube will scan other videos uploaded to the service to see if any of them are the same (or very similar).

“We know how frustrating it is when your content is uploaded to other channels without your permission and how time consuming it can be to manually search for these re-uploads,” Fabio Magagna, who oversees the Copyright Match tool as product manager at YouTube. “We currently provide a number of ways for copyright owners to protect their work, but we’ve heard from creators that we should do more and we agree.”

Once a video is uploaded, YouTube now scans its library videos to find others that my be the same or very similar. The tool will only identify complete videos, not individual clips, meaning users won’t have to worry about content that uses other footage that falls under fair use, such as criticism. If a re-uploaded video is found, the original creator will be notified in the ‘matches’ tab. From there, they’ll have the option to do nothing, contact the channel responsible for the copy or request YouTube to remove it.

It’s important to note that the tool only protects those who are considered to be the original creators of uploaded videos. Therefore, the tool won’t cover videos initially posted to other platforms like Facebook by one person but copied and uploaded to YouTube for the first time by someone else.

YouTube will monitor usage and expand availability in the coming months. The “long-term goal” is to make it available to every creator.