YouTube Content ID

Content ID is a proprietary digital fingerprinting SaaS system that has been developed by American transnational corporation Google since 2007 to automatically identify and manage copyrighted content on the YouTube video-sharing platform. It's an integral part of YouTube Services, allowing qualifying content owners to their copyrighted audio and video material in the Content ID database; each new on the website is analyzed for potential matches, giving rightsholders an option to either block, track (by receiving in-depth analytics) or monetize their intellectual property used in third-party videos without permission (by adding ments to the clip and sharing revenues with YouTube). By Google's estimate, the development and maintenance costs of the system sured $100 million.

Since its inception, the Content ID has been criticized for highly selective and almost prohibitive eligibility requirements, with only major entertainment industry corporations benefiting from the system; in 2021, for instance, YouTube ed almost 1.5 billion Content ID claims on behalf of merely 4,800 copyright owners. (The company responded by introducing a simplified "Copyright Match" tool in mid-2018, available to most s with over 100,000 views.) Several independent researchers also presented cases of major labels like Universal Music Publishing Group claimed that YouTube's algorithm failed to identify up to 40% of its catalog.