YouTube Makes A Big Change To Content ID Disputes

If you ask virtually any content creator on YouTube, they'll tell you that the system for sorting out Content ID disputes is broken. We're not talking about some small hiccups that cause some issues here and there, but flat-out broken to the point where creators can lose money, or even have their channel taken down with little recourse. Well today YouTube has announced one change that's aimed to help alleviate one of the concerns that has been an issue.

Let's take a hypothetical situation. You upload a video to YouTube, and some piece of audio, or a video clip is claimed by a company as theirs. If you had monetization turned on for your video, this is immediately turned off, and will remain off until the dispute is resolved. If your video racks up a few hundred thousand views while the dispute is ongoing, you won't get paid for it, even if the dispute is resolved in your favor. For some content creators, they'll spend a large chunk of time and resources on a video, only to have this exact scenario happen to them.

Today, YouTube has announced a major change to this policy. Instead of disabling monetization, YouTube will leave it on. But instead of giving the money earned to the uploader, they will instead keep any money earned in a separate account. This will continue to accumulate until the dispute has been resolved. At that time, they will take the money earned and deposit it into the account of the appropriate party.

While this is hardly a solution to all of YouTube's Content ID problems, this will go a long way toward helping content creators who have to deal with disputes. Rather than removing their source of income entirely, they will still get paid, so long as they weren't using someone else's content unfairly.

Source: YouTube