Gizmodo – “YouTube’s copyright filter is a labyrinthine nightmare called Content ID. Content ID works by scanning all the videos on YouTube and comparing them to a database of material submitted by copyright holders—often music labels and movie and TV studios—which have been given the ability to add things to the database by YouTube. Once Content ID matches a few seconds of an uploaded video to something in the database — regardless of context — a number of automatic penalties can be imposed. According to Google, most of the time the rights-holder chooses to just take the money generated by ads placed by Google on the video. If the original creator didn’t want any ads put on their video, too bad. But in other cases, the rights-holder can make something much worse happen: They can make sure no one sees the video at all…” [h/t Pete Weiss]