Youtube put in place a controversial content ID system late on in 2013. What happens is, if a video gets content matched, it usually means that it's still playable, but you can't make money off it. The company who claimed get to do that instead. This doesn't effect me as I don't make money on my videos anyway. But what I don't like is the idea that people who have nothing to do with my video are able to content match it and start placing ads and making money off of my stuff. That's not right, and is unfortunately becoming a big problem that Youtube needs to act on.

The best example of fraudulent activity would be an incident that happened in late 2014, involving a company known as Streammer (Youtube channel here), who decided to start placing copyright claims on lots of gaming videos, mainly SEGA ones. Look at this notice Sixfortyfive got over a Gunstar Heroes video:

People (including me) started rejecting these disputes, only to have the disputes rejected. Some people then tried to reject the dispute again, and have it work, so I decided to do that for one of my videos Streammer had claimed on (Sonic 2, for the SEGA Saturn)...and Streammer rejected it again and gave me a copyright strike. Getting a strike on your account removes several features (such as being able to upload videos over 15 minutes in length) so naturally I wasn't happy. I joined SEGA's official forum as they had a thread about Streammer, and I posted what had happened to me. Then someone representing Streammer started making posts:

Streammer removed the copyright strike they'd put on my Sonic 2 video. I was thankful, but it turned out I had no need to be as Streammer was breaking the law doing this anyway. The "additional info" Streammer's rep said was coming soon never came, and then a forum admin made a post:

The moment this post was made was the moment Streammer was never heard from by anyone again. Suddenly all of the claims they'd made on videos vanished, even if you hadn't disputed them in the first place. What Streammer was doing was totally illegal and is a good example of how it's currently too easy to start putting in copyright claims on Youtube.

This thing happened again early on in 2015, this time with the culprit being known as "elisence". I won't go into this one much as it seems to be the same story as it was with Streammer. I got a few claims from them but didn't do anything, but they ended up vanishing as well. Read this Sonic Retro topic if you want more info (I'm Galvatron in that thread).


The content match system isn't 100% reliable. I've had some silly ones but by far the funniest are the claims I've had for one of my Streets of Rage 3 videos:

Somehow, the bleeps heard in the pre-final boss cutscene of the game are picked up by the content match as being several different songs! Thankfully these claims were released by the respective companies without issue.