Dan Bull Takes On YouTube's ContentID Changes, Stolen Revenue, With A Diss Track

from the dear-youtube dept

YouTube's ContentID is receiving an awful lot of well-deserved criticism lately, and the company -- true to unfortunate form -- still doesn't seem to realize that it should (a) fix its broken program and (b) actually respond to the criticism. YouTube seems to think that the issue will blow over, but every time there's another bogus takedown/copyright claim, things seem to get worse. The fact that it's allowing major labels to claim the revenue of independent artists is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.

In the meantime, many of the people who have built careers off of YouTube are now speaking out against ContentID as well. Dan Bull, who we've written about many times before, has put up his latest video, entitled, simply FUCK CONTENT ID, and it calls out the company for taking money from independent creators and handing it over to whoever claims the copyright with no legitimate basis (amusingly, Dan also mocks YouTube's "copyright free audio library" which he uses as the base of his song). There are elements of ContentID that are certainly useful, but since the program has been introduced, it's been plagued with serious problems, providing way too much power to those who make bogus claims. It feels, unfortunately, like YouTube has gotten increasingly complacent on this issue because it has (by far) the majority market share on amateur videos. But things change, and if it continues to make it difficult for content creators, they're going to go elsewhere. And, yes, YouTube is getting hit from both sides on this issue, as it's still fighting its lawsuit with Viacom that claimed that the company didn't do enough to stop infringement. But now the problem seems to be that it defers so easily to claims of infringement that people creating their own content are having it "monetized" by big companies based on nothing. That's not the right solution at all.

Filed Under: contentid, dan bull, diss track, youtube
Companies: google, youtube