How YouTube thinks about copyright Margaret Gould Stewart

so if you’re in the audience today or

maybe you’re watching this talk in some

other time or place

you are participant in the digital

rights ecosystem and whether you’re an

artist a technologist a lawyer or a fan

the handling of copyright directly

impacts your life

now rights management is no longer

simply a question of ownership it’s a

complex web of relationships in a

critical part of our cultural landscape

a YouTube cares deeply about the rights

of content owners but in order to give

them choices about what they can do with

copies mashups and and more we need to

first identify when copyrighted material

is uploaded to our site let’s look at a

specific video so you can see how it

works

two years ago recording artist Chris

Brown released the official video of his

single forever a fan saw it on TV

recorded it with her camera phone and

uploaded it to YouTube now because Sony

Music had registered Chris Brown’s video

and our Content ID system within seconds

of attempting to upload the video the

copy was detected giving Sony the choice

of what to do next but how do we know

that the users video is a copy well it

starts with content owners delivering

assets into our database along with a

usage policy that tells us what to do

when we find a match we compare each

upload against all of the reference

files in our database now this heat map

is going to show you how the brain of

the system works here we can see the

original reference file being compared

to the user generated content the system

compares every moment of one to the

other to see if there’s a match now this

means that we can identify a match even

if the copy uses just a portion of the

original file plays it in slow motion

and has degraded audio and video quality

and we do this every time that a video

is uploaded to YouTube and that’s over

20 hours of video every minute when we

find a match we apply the policy that

the

it’s owner has set down and the scale

and the speed of this system is truly

breathtaking we’re not just talking

about a few videos we’re talking about

over a hundred years of video every day

between new uploads and the legacy scans

we regularly do across all of the

content on the site and when we compare

those hundred years of video we’re

comparing it against millions of

reference files in our database it he’d

be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000

monitors each and every day without so

much as a coffee break now what do we do

when we find a match well most rights

owners instead of blocking will allow

the copy to be published and then they

benefit through the exposure advertising

and linked sales remember Chris Brown’s

video forever

well it had its day in the Sun and that

had dropped off the charts and that

looked like the end of the story but

sometime last year a young couple got

married this is their wedding video you

may have seen it

what’s amazing about this is if the

processional of the wedding was this

much fun can you imagine how much fun

the reception must have been I mean who

are these people I totally want to go to

that wedding so their little wedding

video went on to get over 40 million

views and instead of Sony blocking they

allowed the upload to occur and they put

advertising against it and linked from

it to iTunes and the song 18 months old

went back to number four on the iTunes

charts so Sony is generating revenue

from both of these and Jill and Kevin

the happy couple well they came back

from their honeymoon and found that

their video had gone crazy viral and

they ended up on a bunch of talk shows

and they used it as an opportunity to

make a difference the videos inspired

over $26,000 in donations to end

domestic violence and the JK wedding

dance became so popular that NBC

parodied it on the season finale of The

Office which just goes to show it’s

truly an ecosystem of culture is it’s

not just amateurs borrowing from big

studios but sometimes big studios

borrowing back by empowering choice we

can create a culture of opportunity and

all I took to change things around was

to allow for choice through rights

identification so why is no one ever

solved this problem before it’s because

it’s a big problem and it’s complicated

and messy it’s not uncommon for a single

video to have multiple rights owners

there’s musical labels there’s multiple

music publishers and each of these can

vary by country and there’s lots of

cases where we have more than one work

matched together so we have to manage

many who claims to the same video

YouTube’s Content ID system addresses

all of these cases but the system only

works for the participation of rights

owners if you have content that others

are uploading to YouTube you should

then you’ll have the choice about how

your content is used and think carefully

about the policies that you attach to

that content by simply blocking all

reuse you’ll miss out on new art forms

new audiences new distribution channels

and new revenue streams but it’s not

just about dollars and impressions

just look at all the joy that was spread

through progressive rights management

and new technology I think we can all

agree that joy is definitely an idea

worth spreading thank you