In an extremely rare case of YouTube making a good decision that benefits its creators and watchers, the platform has announced changes to its Content ID system that should make everything run smoother or at least faster.

As a quick bit of background, “Content ID” is the broad system YouTube has in place to make sure that rights holders are in control of their content on the platform. It’s an insanely complex system that even YouTube veterans struggle with immensely but it has a terrible and rightfully earned reputation of being poor in many regards, especially around bogus claims where people and companies try to take down videos they don’t like by issuing claims that it infringes on their content ownership in some way. 

We’ve seen this system fail spectacularly several times in just the last month or so. The famous Lofi Girl stream was taken down erroneously, Bungie is suing someone for fake DMCA strikes and Content ID was abused to take down fair criticism of heinous actions on the platform. 

So what is being done to fix it? On top of all the problems in the system one of the key issues is the long periods of time each step can take and how all the waiting can adversely affect channels. Two key changes will now hopefully address this, which are: 

1. Reducing the Content ID appeals process from 30 to 7 days. We know that waiting up to 30 days for review of an appeal of a rejected dispute can be frustrating.
2. New ‘Escalate to Appeal’ option for block claims will allow creators who are eligible to appeal to skip the initial dispute step and move straight to the appeal stage. Since block claims are especially disruptive for monetization and building your audience, we created this new option which will allow you to get quicker answers about claims for videos that are blocked and avoid a lengthy dispute process.

To understand some of the wording above a “Claimant” is anyone who attempts to claim ownership over a “Creator’s” video, where a Creator is anyone who uploads a video.

Those who frequently upload to YouTube in any capacity are recommended to read the full announcement of these changes here but, as with most things on YouTube, don’t expect it to work entirely as expected.