New YouTube Team Aims to Ease Tensions Between Support, Creators

A number of high-profile YouTube content creators have been hit with copyright notices lately. Whether fair or not, the resolution process can be frustrating, as it often sucks up a great deal of a person's time to respond to notices, file counter-notices, and generally hope that YouTube doesn't pull your advertising while it all gets sorted out—effectively leaving these creators without a revenue source for something they might not ultimately be guilty of doing.

Now, some changes are afoot to hopefully please the service's content creators and copyright owners without placing a heavy burden on either.

"Recently, there's been a lot of discussion about the enforcement of our policies, from video takedowns to channel demonetization. We want you to know that we monitor video takedowns very closely, and while we haven't seen a big change in the overall rate of removals, it's true that we do make mistakes. For this, we're sorry and we strive to do better by you, our community," reads a recent post from a member of YouTube's policy team on the Google Product Forums.

"The good news is that the feedback you've raised in comments and videos on YouTube and beyond is having an impact. It's caused us to look closely at our policies and helped us identify areas where we can get better. It's led us to create a team dedicated to minimizing mistakes and improving the quality of our actions. And it's encouraged us to roll out some initiatives in the coming months that will help strengthen communications between creators and YouTube support. We'll also make improvements to increase transparency into the status of monetization claims. And of course, as we work to implement these improvements as quickly as we can, we'll continue to take your feedback seriously."

It remains to be seen how YouTube might specifically address the elephant in the room: The notion that a copyright claim can pretty much be filed by anybody, and the onus is then on the content creator to prove that he or she is using the work in a fair manner. While that kind of a system might work for average people who just upload videos of things they shouldn't because they don't know any better, it can lead to a world of difficulty for the uber-popular YouTube stars who rely on the service for a paycheck.

"Why not make it so channels with over 50k (or another set amount) subscribers undergo a manual review when flagged for copyright infringement, and channels with less than that amount can be subject to the automated system. The chances of a larger channel posting something that needs removing by the automated system quickly (something that severely breaches policy) would be a lot less than a small channel," one reader of YouTube's post suggested.

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Of course, YouTube's hands are a little tied, given that it has to respond to copyright claims fairly quickly in order to maintain its "safe harbor" status under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (And losing that would be a much more problematic issue for the company to deal with.)

Editor's Note: This story was updated on March 1 to clarify that this effort is being handled by YouTube's policy team, which is separate from the copyright team.