For example, Garth Brooks is notorious for sending out DMCA requests liberally on all unauthorized platforms, yet I can search YouTube and find all of his songs easily that have been there for years and are obviously unofficial channels. I know YouTube has an algorithm, and Garth Brooks is a pretty well known artist, so I don’t see how the algorithm could not detect and remove these. Garth himself could search and find these as easily as I could, I imagine, so how do they stay up?
In: Technology
YouTube has a system called ContentID. It recognizes sounds and videos that are registered into it in other uploaded content.
When a video gets flagged by the ContentID system, the original author of the content gets to control the monetization of the video. They control whether or not ads are shown on the video, and they get the revenue from those ads.
So if I uploaded a random video with Garth Brooks music to it, then Google would recognize the audio, flag it as belonging to Garth Brooks’ label, and it would be monetized with the revenue going to Garth Brooks’ label.
There isn’t much incentive to DMCA all the stuff on YouTube since YouTube has setup a system to get them the money from the content anyways.
Yuotube has a couple of different ways they allow people to deal with violations. One is to have the problem video removed. Another is to allow it to remain, but to demonetize it for the original uploader. That is, if there is an ad on the video, the money goes to the copyright owner (the music company, in this kind of case) and not to the person uploading the video.
Many artists only care about “piracy” in the sense that they aren’t getting paid, so if YouTube provides a method that they get paid for someone listening to their songs even if it’s just some random internet guy posting, they’re OK with it.
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