I want to talk about content ID. Starting from 2:25 and ending at 3:17 of this episode of Hitman (2016), I hide in a coffin in a morgue, attached to a church. During this time, an angelic song plays in the background.
Imagine my surprise when I found this shortly after I uploaded the video (it was unlisted at the time, like most of my videos are pre-release).
Yes, the song was from legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and it was copyright claimed by a group called Atmosphere TV (or, more accurately, a bot on their behalf).
None of this will be new or interesting if you are one of those people who knows how YouTube works and what it is like. But it’s more evidence that their ecosystem is broken in a severe way. I uploaded this video a month ago and got the dispute filed the day after, when I saw it was made. But that still gives Atmosphere TV 30 days to respond.
I have a day job and don’t make money off my YouTube content, so this doesn’t affect me personally at all. For someone whose livelihood comes off YouTube, this would mean that the claimant has 30 days to just mooch off their content and bleed them dry without having to do anything beyond saying that Mozart is owned by them.
YouTube does have a process (and from my experience testing it, not a bad one) to scrub the song from the video, but I shouldn’t have to scrub my video of public domain content just because someone else falsely claimed to own it.
YouTube, fix your broken system.
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