What is Content id?
Content ID is unique software created by YouTube to protect the rights of copyright owners. Therefore, content creators, composers and other right holders can protect their files on YouTube.
How can they do it?
- First, content owners give to YouTube audio or visual files that belong to them. Therefore, they create a library of their copyrighted files.
- Then, Content ID database creates a ‘fingerprint’ from the files. YouTube keeps these ‘fingerprints’ for hundreds of years and it consists of different types of content.
- After, the system scans and finds all possible copies of the content in other YouTube videos. Although the software is completely automatic, it still can recognize audio, video and even melodies files!
Why do content creators need to know it?
Because if your video was matched to a copyright owner file, your content will receive a claim or a strike, and only the right holder can decide what to do with your project.
How does content id work?
As it was mentioned previously, every YouTube video that’s been posted online automatically scanned for all the tracks and information used in it. This way YouTube identifies if the creator of the video has copyright ownership of the files used in the project or not.
If everything is correct and the video has no copyright problems, the video sets free.
However, if during the scanning the system finds any files that are protected and have a copyright owner, your video can get a claim.
So what can copyright owners do?
It happened to all content creators when their video ended up in the copyright owner Content ID studio. Let’s see what can copyright owners do with your project:
- The most obvious decision is to take your video down. However, nowadays most of the right holders don’t really choose it.
- Next, the most popular solution is when the copyright owner monetizes the video that matches their files.
- Last but not least, they can track viewer data to get detailed analytics.
What can creators do to avoid this situation?
As a content creator, you probably didn’t really like any of these solutions that are perfect for the owners of the copyrights. However, YouTube decided to be fair not only to the owners’ rights but also to the content creators. So let’s see what you can do if you ended up in the copyright claim situation:
- First of all, Content ID system is still software and sometimes it does make mistakes. Therefore, if you believe that the content that’s been flagged in your video is completely yours and doesn’t belong to anyone, you can dispute the claim. This way, if the claim turns out to be invalid, the content creator won’t lose anything.
- If the file you used is actually not yours, you can trim out or mute that flagged content out of your video. YouTube immediately notifies you whenever you receive a claim. Therefore, we want to notice here that you shouldn’t take your time with it. The sooner you resolve the situation, the better.
- The last solution that we like at Tunetank is when you can replace the content in your video. Usually, if it’s background music, you can just find another file that is similar to the previous track. There are plenty of websites that provide royalty free soundtracks to creators completely for free. All you need to do is to choose the one you like.
If you’re new to YouTube or don’t know where to find royalty free music, look no further, because at Tunetank we have a full library of free soundtracks!
Check our most popular albums:
Tunetank is a royalty-free music library for content creators.