’How Google Fights Piracy’ report sparks questions for labels

This week Google released an overview of its anti-piracy efforts and it’s added a fresh rebuttal to the complaints made by major record labels.

Updated to 62 pages from 26 in 2014’s version, the ’How Google Fights Piracy’ report couldn’t be more timely as labels renegotiate terms with the Google-owned YouTube.

The report suggests YouTube greatly benefits the music industry and content creators, and isn’t the unfair streaming conglomerate artists and labels say it is.

Google announced this week that YouTube Content ID system has paid out $2 billion to copyright holders, on the back of its $60 million investment in the digital fingerprinting system. In fact, the $2 billion generated for copyright holders since Content ID’s launch in 2007 is double what it announced in 2014’s report.

“To date, more than 8,000 rightsholders have used Content ID to manage their content on YouTube, with well over 90% choosing to monetize videos containing their copyrighted material,” reads the report.

“These partners include network broadcasters, movie studios, songwriters, and record labels. The music industry, for example, chooses to monetize over 95% of sound recording claims.”

However, despite 95% of the industry using Content ID to monetise videos instead of block or report infringing uploads, the Content ID system is at the core of labels’ issue with YouTube.

As The Verge points out, in a footnote of the music industry’s filing to the US Copyright Office, which formed part of a review of the DMCA, Universal Music Publishing Group claimed the Content ID system is flawed.

“[Universal Music Publishing Group] estimates that Content ID fails to identify upwards of 40 percent of the use of UMPG’s compositions on YouTube,”the note read.

Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said YouTube abuses1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act which gives services like YouTube a ‘safe harbour’ from copyright infringement liabilities.

“YouTube takes advantage of the dysfunctional DMCA to do less about piracy than it could and pay unfairly low royalty rates,” Shermasn said. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Google’s report also claims its downraking efforts, which usesDMCA requests as an indicator for sites it needs to demote in search results, have seen pirate sites lose the majority of their traffic.

“In May 2016, we found that demoted sites lost an average of 89% of their traffic from Google Search. These successes spur us to continue improving and refining the DMCA demotion signal,” Google wrote.

As reported inTMN,180 artists and 19 labels including Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, U2 and Bruce Springsteen have pennedan open letter to Congress saying the DMCA laws were outdated and were not effectively protecting their interests.

However, the ’How Google Fights Piracy’ report claims the music industry generates 50% of its revenue on YouTube from monetising fan uploads.

Google’s report has already been blasted bythe British recorded music industry’s trade body, BPI.

Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive BPI & BRIT Awards, said in a statement:

“This report looks a lot like “greenwash”. Although we welcome the measures Google has taken so far, it is still one of the key enablers of piracy on the planet. Google has the resources and the tech expertise to do much more to get rid of the illegal content on its services. If Google is sincere about fostering creativity online, it will now commit to implement new measures that will effectively protect artists from sites and apps that rip off their work, and help more fans get their content legally.”