Hour-long track of cat purring triggers YouTube’s Content ID system, but it’s definitely not a feline cover version of Focus track

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Cats and copyright infringement: two of the internet’s most popular pursuits ... together at last! Except in this case, the copyright infringement has turned out to be a red herring.

The cause was an hour-long, audio-only YouTube video of a cat purring, uploaded in March 2014 by a user named Digihaven. With less than 3,000 views, it was very much in the long (furry) tail of Google’s online video service.

In 2015, though, it’s suddenly at the centre of a copyright row, after being flagged by YouTube’s Content ID system as possibly using a song called Focus, with its rights administered by music publisher EMI and collecting society PRS for Music.

By “claiming” the video, those rights holders disabled Digihaven’s ability to make money from it through advertising, according to TorrentFreak.

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Even though the revenues wouldn’t even have paid for a forkful of cat food, their response has been firstly to dispute the claim, and secondly to plaster an over-dramatic “LARGE RECORD COMPANIES WANT TO TAKE THIS VIDEO DOWN! DON’T LET THEM!” message on top of the clip.

That’s not strictly true – EMI and PRS aren’t record companies, and they didn’t take the video down – and the additional message encouraging viewers to “CLICK HERE: SUBSCRIBE TO SAVE THE CATS OF YOUTUBE!” hints at a mischievous hope of turning online outrage into an audience for future videos.

There are some serious issues bubbling away in the background here, though. How did the audio-fingerprinting software used by YouTube for Content ID mistake a cat purr for a musical composition, for a start.

But there’s also a long-running debate about how the Content ID system works when false copyright claims are filed, with suggestions that music rights holders can be too trigger-happy with their claims on occasion, and questions over whether Content ID does enough to combat bogus claims.

In truth, YouTube has improved on that score over the years, shaking up its appeals process to tilt it a bit more towards creators in 2012, for example. That’s the process that applied in Digihaven’s case, as they challenged the copyright claim, with EMI having already withdrawn it.

“When it’s brought to our attention that a video or channel has been claimed mistakenly, we work with the claimant to fix it,” a YouTube spokesperson told the Guardian, confirming that the issue had been corrected.

Digihaven’s cat is free to crack on with their career as a YouTuber. Although if they want to make it big, they might need an instrument.