YouTube, owned by Google, is the second most popular website in the world. It handles over a billion unique visitors per month and 400 hours of video uploads per minute. In 2007, under legal pressure in the United States, it introduced Content ID. This is a system (detailed by Google in the video above) which matches videos against a database that today includes some 50 million media fingerprints. When a match is found the rightsholder can claim a share of advertising revenue from the video, block it, or leave it be. The user who uploaded the video being matched can appeal the decision, remove the matched content, or accept the outcome.

Content ID has been a tremendous success for all concerned. Members of the public can upload and watch videos containing or derived from copyrighted material; the material’s owners can receive a slice of advertising revenue; advertisers can capture interest in both the original material and its remixes; and Google can sit above them all, taking their cut. The system underpins YouTube’s Partner Program, which has launched the careers of a new generation of entertainment stars, and has allowed the easing of restrictions on video length, giving rise to long-form documentary uploads. In the 11 years since Content ID was first introduced YouTube has grown over fifty times larger.

How did this poster child for copyright harmony become weaponised, and why are its creators involved in that process? For answers we must peel back the surface and examine the system’s flaws.

Campaigners against copyright reform point out that while Content ID is remarkably accurate it lacks human intuition. In one well-documented case it matched videos of white noise against each other, and in another a derivative work was mistakenly considered to be the original. It is also incapable of identifying a derivative work which is permitted by law, such as a parody or review, and so in principle enables such abuse as selectively suppressing negative reviews of a copyrighted work, at least until appeals are made.

Supporters of copyright reform, including the EU, have an entirely different set of grievances. Content ID pays a pittance: $553m worldwide in 2016 against $3.9bn from Spotify, despite YouTube’s music-listening audience being eight times larger. It is also an exclusive club, with Google numbering users at “8,000+” worldwide, biased toward the big players. Everyone else must fall back on the blunt and high-maintenance instrument of individual takedown notices, an inferior option for consumers and creators alike; the grunt work of filing notices is often farmed out to third parties with sometimes disastrous results. Shifting this responsibility to larger content hosts and compelling them to offer everyone their services, the European Commission reason, would lead to more deals being made on better terms and with better results.

This July, after almost a year of trials, YouTube announced the Copyright Match Tool. This is similar to Content ID but will eventually be available to everyone in the site’s Partner Program. Unlike its more sophisticated cousin it only flags “full re-uploads” of a video and does not permit revenue sharing, but it does retain the design of allowing both parties involved in any matches to choose what action to take, if any. The tool seems designed to fulfil the requirements of the EU’s proposals and may well help to define the norms of compliance, at least for video content.

Educate to Inoculate

If only these were the grounds of debate. Well aware that the Commission’s proposal is implementing a very successful formula, the campaign against copyright reform distorted it with embellishments designed to enrage their audience.

The public has been told that the proposal is to force all content hosts to install Content ID or an equivalent. That everything uploaded will be compared against a general database of all copyrighted works, and that any matches will be immediately deleted. That private uploads will be scanned. Each of these claims is false, as a reading of the proposal will attest, yet each of them was lapped up by many young, liberal, digitally-literate Europeans. Talking to them can reveal mental images more distorted still.

YouTube should be a focal point of debate, but is very often absent from the the campaign’s messaging.

This strategy’s huge success is explained in large part by the decades of pump-priming which preceded it. Ever since the American music industry’s ham-fisted attempts to shut down file sharing networks in the early 2000s, large swathes of internet users have fed on a diet of negative news stories regarding copyright.

Some of this has been entirely justified: the copyright lobby has gone rent-seeking in its time and is now paying the price for its past intransigence. But that does not compensate for the years of unbalanced coverage on copyright having built up an echo chamber which stifles critical thought, nor for the weakness created by that structure having now been exploited by one of the most powerful corporations in the world.

There is no mystery as to how this came to be. Next to cherry-picked tales of burning injustice the daily success story of copyright is simply dull. It has no popular champions to explain or defend it, save perhaps for when famous musicians are handed a script by their managers and told to read it in front of a webcam. Copyright is the creation of boring men in suits who call themselves “experts”. Unfortunately, sometimes the truth is boring.

Much of this story will be depressingly familiar to anyone who followed the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the EU and who remembers the decades of disinformation in right-wing media which preceded it. There, an entirely different cultural group also developed a narrative of oppression by global elites. Nobody took them seriously until they were roused to political action by ideologues and created a democratic crisis. Anyone who thought that such populism was a disease unique to the right wing should think again.

But despite two years having passed since the UK’s enormously significant vote, no solutions to the vulnerabilities that identity politics create are yet apparent. Who has the energy or enthusiasm to chase each subculture bubble with a pin, when most will never do any harm? If we instead selectively target the groups judged to be at risk of exploitation, what is our selection process and how do we justify it?

Rather than combating the current crop of echo chambers, the hope of governance organisations including the EU and United Nations is that education can provide inoculation. Long-running efforts to place Media and Information Literacy on school curricula have had their profile raised significantly by the populist crises of recent years.

Currently the subject is taught only in the Philippines. But in a report created for the European Commission (and mentioned previously in this series), a group of academics, journalists, and representatives of web platforms, including Google, advocated that it be introduced to schools across the EU.

The report described this as a measure “aimed at strengthening societal resilience in the longer term” and also emphasised that educational programmes should be devised by “independent institutions” rather than by internet platforms. Away from the consensus of the report, several of its contributors made clear their concerns that “technology companies might be tempted to use such projects as public relations exercises”.

It might just work — eventually. Until then we need to stay alert.