Tech

YouTube Hits User With Copyright Strike For Uploading His Own Song

YouTube Screenshot, July 6, 2018

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Kyle Perisic Contributor
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YouTube issued a copyright strike to a popular YouTube content creator for uploading his own song on the platform, claiming it’s actually the property of another musician.

Paul Davids, a Dutch YouTuber, has over 600,000 subscribers on his channel, where he teaches users how to play the guitar and creates his own songs. He uploaded the original video, which he created entirely himself, on June 28, 2016.

YouTube handed Davids the copyright strike almost exactly two years later.

“Just like probably all the music YouTubers out there, once in a while I get an email stating I’m infringing on someone’s copyrighted material,” Davids said in a video explaining the situation.

“Someone took my track, added vocals, added guitars, made their own track, uploaded it to Spotify, YouTube, whatever, and I get a copyright infringement notice,” Davids said.

YouTube uses a content filtering system, called Content ID, which aims to protect artists from users who would copy their content, re-upload it to their channel, and profit off it.

The filtering software created a digital fingerprint of copyrighted material, and all videos on YouTube are subject to Content ID. In Davids’ case, someone had copyrighted his song and his video was flagged by Content ID, the BBC reported Thursday.

Content ID has had many hiccups in the past. Recently it deleted every video off the Blender Foundation and MIT’s OpenCourseWare channels. (RELATED: YouTube Automatically Blocks MIT Courses … And Blender Videos?)

“Videos on a limited number of sites have been blocked as we updated our partner agreements,” YouTube said in a statement to TorrentFreak on June 18.

Other YouTube features have been exploited by users, including manually flagging videos.

In one case, a fast food review video by The Report Of The Week was labeled “offensive” after being “manually reviewed and flagged.” The video was placed in limited state for a few days before YouTube reviewed the content again and placed it back in its normal state.

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