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Jimmy Broadbent was working late at night on April 14 when everything suddenly went dark. He is one of many people who professionally stream games on YouTube’s livestream service, with over 86,000 subscribers, and around 1,500 people watching him play motor racing simulations every day. The game of choice that night was the TT Isle of Man. Based on the famed motorcycle race, this wasn’t Jimmy’s ideal challenge – he often states that he isn’t a motorbike guy, much preferring four wheels to two. Nonetheless, he did his best to pilot his virtual bike around the 61km circuit.

After a few hours, Jimmy decided to show how these laps should be done, and how professional motorbike racers brave the Snaefell Mountain Circuit. He brought up a GoPro video of Michael Dunlop’s 2016 lap record for the circuit – 16 minutes and 54 seconds. Then, just three minutes into the video, his stream died, leaving a placeholder screen and his fans bewildered. It turned out YouTube’s algorithm had also been watching, and terminated his stream automatically for using copyrighted content. Jimmy had been shut down.


Jimmy on Twitch discussing his temporary YouTube ban. He has roughly 80,000 subscribers on YouTube, compared to around 5,000 on Twitch Jimmy_Broadbent/Twitch

Over 400 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. The scale of its platform means that manually enforcing copyright is impossible – especially when video is being broadcast live. Therefore, to fulfil its legal obligations, YouTube turned to an algorithmic solution.

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Since 2007, it has used a system named Content ID to police copyright on its platform. Due to the ‘safe harbour rule’ present in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, while websites are not held responsible for what their users do, they still have to remove the offending content.

Content ID works by compares a database of copyrighted video and audio to newly uploaded videos. If there is any copyrighted content, then one of three different things can happen depending on the options the copyright holders have chosen. It can merely track the video to see the same kind of statistics that the uploader can; it can remove or place advertisements onto the video, thereby allowing them to make some money from the unauthorised usage or stop any money being made at all, or it can simply block the video.


This is separate from a full ‘copyright strike’, which is issued manually by a copyright owner, and can result in the deletion of an account if the user reaches three total strikes.

In the case of livestreams, they are all actively scanned for “third party content”, with YouTube warning the streamer if they are in danger of getting banned before actually carrying out the penalty. Jimmy says he didn’t receive this.

For streamers trying to make a living from the platform, a strike on their account is a disaster. The penalty is a flat 90-day streaming ban, issued at the same time as the strike. For people like Jimmy, this means that their ability to make a living is not controlled by themselves, or their paying fans, but rather a particularly unforgiving algorithmic boss that can deny them three months’ pay for the slightest infraction of the rules.

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Jimmy playing TT Isle of Man after his ban was lifted. The recorded video of the stream itself was deleted at the request of Duke Video Jimmy Broadbent/YouTube


Jimmy didn’t immediately know that he had been struck by Content ID. “I only knew about the stream being cut due to the massive wave of comments that appeared in live chat,” he explains. He didn’t receive any notification at the time from YouTube explaining what had happened and only discovered he was banned by accident while he was poking around the stream’s advanced option menus trying to reset it.

This ban was bad news for Jimmy. He relies on the paid subscriptions and donations of his fans to make a living, as uploading videos, once fairly lucrative, no longer functions as a livelihood for content creators, with the exception of the very largest channels.

To try and appeal the ban, Jimmy contacted YouTube, saying that while he would accept the strike, he was not intending to steal anything, and that it was unfair that he would get such a serious penalty for a first offence. He hoped that his ten years of good behaviour on YouTube would count in his favour.

“The guy at the other end of the support chat just wasn't interested. He effectively told me, ‘Sorry, deal with it’ and then tried to get me to leave the conversation,” Jimmy says. “This was my first ever offence of this nature, and to be handed a punishment like that with no warning made me realise that YouTube aren't really bothered about [smaller] creators. I can't help but feel if I had a larger channel, I would have received a different response.”

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Jimmy swapped over to his Twitch account so he could discuss the situation with his audience. He had left his channel page untouched for almost a year so he could cultivate his audience on YouTube, which he says is a better site for him to be on as he pursues his career goal of becoming a motor journalist.

But one advantage Twitch does have is its treatment of copyright. Had Jimmy been streaming on Twitch from the start that night, the only penalty he would have faced was having the recorded version of that night’s stream muted. “I’ve effectively had my career ripped out of my hands”, he told his audience at the time also explaining how his hopes to save his streaming money to move house and attend fan events had also been ruined.

“Faced with the end of my streaming career, I stayed up all night updating my Twitch channel, and trying to prepare myself for the massive hit that the ban would have given me,” he says. “I went between sobbing and trying to tell myself that I would get through this.”

Although the ban was a shock, Jimmy’s friends and viewers were quick to react. Another user passed him the email address of Duke Video, the rights holder of the video in question. After sending what he describes as “an apologetic and grovelling email” to the company, Jimmy got a far better response than he expected. Having sent the email at 03:00 on April 15, Duke had lifted the claim by 09:50 that morning. With his livestream reinstated, and the recording of the offending stream deleted from the site. Jimmy could livestream once again and his mercifully brief ordeal now over.

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Duke Video manages the official videos of the Isle of Man TT, owned both by itself and other organisations, such as the Isle of Man government. Lee Masterson, Duke’s YouTube content manager, looks after the videos uploaded on the site, and is responsible for dealing with the numerous Content ID claims and counterclaims that Duke receives.

Duke is also a YouTube partner, meaning that it can make contact with a YouTube representative if it needs assistance. Masterson explains that Duke had not spoken to its representative for several years as the whole process was automated. According to Masterson, if Content ID finds any of Duke’s material in an unlicensed but edited source, the video is flagged for manual review, rather than a straight-up ban that would happen to a more obvious clone.

He finds Content ID to be very effective, but occasionally too effective. “The system is not foolproof and often I have to release material which is similar to our copyrighted material,” he says, giving the example that video game footage can sometimes look similar to its videos and fall foul of an over-zealous Content ID. He says that Duke is generally quick to release a claim if it gets sent manually, but in the case of automatic claims, it relies on the user disputing it to draw it to its attention.

Content ID has even turned on Duke itself in the past. Masterson tells the story of a “very frustrating time” when the channel had been conducting its own livestream of a race event, where the organisers were playing music over loudspeakers before the event began. The music was flagged by Content ID, and the stream was instantly shut down, much as it had with Jimmy. The only way to get the stream going again was to not claim the content, therefore sending any potential revenue from the stream to the creator of the music, and not Duke.

Google, or YouTube specifically, didn’t respond to Jimmy’s case. It originally sent publicly available help articles to explain how their system worked. It later gave a statement explaining how Content ID helps copyright owners manage their rights.

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For all the concerns around how Content ID is making life difficult for YouTubers, rights holder groups believe that the site is still too relaxed when it comes to enforcing copyright. The IFPI, which represents the global music industry, argues that there is a “value gap” when it comes to YouTube – artists, it claims, are not being paid fairly for the plays of their music on the site.

According to the IFPI, nearly five times as many listeners use video streams compared to audio streams. And while video streaming takes up over half the time users spend streaming, the estimated annual revenue for a YouTube user is less than a dollar, compared to the twenty dollar per user per year from Spotify.

YouTube’s counter to this in the form of a report it commissioned from RBB Economics, concluded that it provides substantial value to the music industry. Its counterclaims include that the site still pays over $1 billion a year to the music industry from advertising revenue, that the majority of music is uploaded onto partnered channels owned by the music publishers themselves, and that its recommendation algorithm is invaluable for users to discover new songs, especially if they haven’t been released recently.

What this means for streamers is that YouTube has little room to manoeuvre when it comes to changing Content ID for their benefit. To do so would risk damaging the site’s relations with copyright holders – and, perhaps more crucially, it would be bad news for YouTube’s profits. And since its rivals can’t compete with its prevalence, streamers have little choice but to continue nervously side-eyeing their algorithmic overlord. And that leaves them in a precarious position.

“If YouTube switches you off, that's the closure of your business in the way that it could never be in the offline world,” says Phil Sherrell, partner and head of media, entertainment and sport at international law firm Bird & Bird. “They're in a position of quite substantial commercial power.”

Sherrell compares the relationship to how Google is often left on its own to deal with right to be forgotten requests, with little interference from the courts. “One of the interesting and controversial issues with big platforms is the extent to which they become mediator or arbitrator of some really complex issues” he says. “It’s a good example of the de facto concentration of power in platforms having unexpected consequences.”


But, more than a decade after it introduced Content ID, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that YouTube has a greater responsibility to both protect copyright but also the YouTubers who can fall foul of its systems.

“The rights holders would say YouTube is arguably part of the cleverest company in the world in terms of its ability to create clever technical solutions to things – and indeed they were a bit of a pioneer with Content ID,” says Sherrell. “It can't be beyond their capabilities to continue to evolve the technology.” For streamers like Jimmy, a solution can’t come quickly enough.

Updated 16.05.18, 16:10: Comments made by Phil Sherrell with regards Content ID have been amended to show that he was putting forward the views of rights holders, not himself.