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
register in the Content ID system and
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