YouTube videos hijacked for ad dollars

Big companies are reportedly exploiting what appears to be loopholes in YouTube's copyright-control filters to hijack videos uploaded by video makers and earning substantial amounts of revenue in the process

An Emory University physics doctoral student uploaded an 83-second Pepper video which has attracted over 149,000 hits. She became a victim after a Russian company known as Netcom Partners reportedly hijacked her homemade clip in order to steal the ad revenue. "YouTube has developed some system that allows these companies to hijack videos for revenue for content that is not their own without any legal oversight,'' WIRED quoted an Emory University physics doctoral student who produced the Pepper video told the wired in a telephone. Content ID Following concerns over copyright violations, YouTube, owned by Google, had launched a filtering system known as Content ID to help rights holders to upload music and videos they own to a “fingerprinting” database. “Our Content ID system works by checking user-uploaded videos against reference files provided by rights owners prior to publication on YouTube,” Wired quoted spokeswoman Annie Baxter as saying in a statement. Baxter said "if the system finds a match, the rights holder determines the policy applied to that video-block, track, or make money from the video using ads.” Faulty system A Regent University School of Law student in Virginia Patrick McKay who has been a victim of the filters says the system is faulty and killing makers of original content. “More and more, I’m seeing issues with people making original content, and it gets claimed by some random obscure company, using Content ID, and saying they own the copyright,” McKay said. TorrentFreak, a blog that gives latest scoops on file sharing, admits there are indeed loopholes in Content ID after Google’s filters falsely assigned its Dutch game-review site Gamer.nl ownership to as many as 10,000 user-generated videos. “It appears that the Content-ID filter is automatically assigning these videos to Gamer.nl, because the clips produced by the review site also include snippets of trailers and in-game play. In other words, the Content-ID filter is set so broad that official game trailers are assigned to Gamer.nl because Gamer.nl uses footage from the trailers in its reviews,” TorrentFreak wrote. YouTube’s Annie Baxter has said partners found to be abusing or attempting to abuse Content ID would face disciplinary action, including the possibility of account termination. But what would YouTube say of the issue raised by TorrentFreak and other victims?