YouTube is adding some extra protection to their content creators with a new tool that is sure to make plenty of people happy. The Verge reported that this new feature will doll out to creators with more than 100,000 subscribers sometime early next week. For those with a heavy subscriber volume, the service will scan and check to find out if the content already exists, or if it is similar to other videos on the site, and notify the appropriate parties via notifications.
Copy Match tool will be the name for YouTube’s creation. The company is happy to announce this protection and stated on its YouTube Creator Blog that they understand the expressed frustration of creators and have heeded the long-awaited call for more protection against video and copyright theft. If a copied video is found, content creators can then decide which action to take. Options include contacting the person who has uploaded the copied video without expressed permission, do nothing, or simply ask YouTube to remove the offending video. For YouTube to honor this, a person has to be considered the original creator of the recording. That does leave open the possibility that someone who is already on Vimeo or Facebook copies your video and uploads it to YouTube first. As stated on the company blog, “The time of upload is how we determine who should be shown matches.”