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. 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.
Today we are excited to announce the new Copyright Match tool, which is designed to find re-uploads of your content on other channels. Here’s how it works: after you upload a video, YouTube will scan other videos uploaded to YouTube to see if any of them are the same or very similar. When there is a match, it will appear in the “matches” tab in the tool and you can decide what to do next.
We’ve been testing this tool with creators for nearly a year to make it safe and effective for the whole community. Thank you for all the feedback you provided. It helped us build a product that will help a lot of creators.
Here’s what you need to know:
- It's important that you’re the first person to upload your video to YouTube. The time of upload is how we determine who should be shown matches.
- This tool is intended to find full re-uploads. If you find a clip of your content that you’d like removed, you can always report it via the copyright webform.
- Once the tool has found a match, you can choose either to do nothing, to get in touch with the other creator, or request that YouTube remove the video. When you request removal you can do so with or without a 7-day delay to allow the uploader to correct the issue themselves. Takedown requests will be reviewed to make sure they comply with YouTube’s copyright policies.
- Before taking action, we ask that you carefully evaluate each match to confirm that you own the rights to the matched content and ensure that you believe it infringes on your copyright. You should not file a copyright takedown request for content that you do not own exclusively, such as public domain content. You should also consider whether the matched content could be considered fair use or could be subject to some other exceptions to copyright and hence not require permission for reuse.
- You might be wondering: Isn’t this Content ID? No. The Copyright Match Tool does use similar matching technology used by Content ID, but the Copyright Match Tool is a unique tool designed especially for YouTube creators who have problems with unauthorized re-uploads.
Next week, we’ll start rolling this tool out to creators with more than 100k subscribers. As this is a powerful feature, we will monitor usage closely and will continue to expand over the coming months with the long-term goal of making it available to every creator in the YouTube Partner program.
Thank you for helping to keep YouTube a platform which inspires vibrant creativity and respects and protects creative rights. Learn more about
Copyright on YouTube.
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