YouTube’s New Caste System

YouTube’s eagerly anticipated system for rightsholders to discover and flag unauthorized uploads of their material, “Claim Your Content,” has gotten bit closer to reality.

“It’s entering the testing phase,” YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante in an extended interview for BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting. Back on April 16, Eric Schmidt suggested the system would be available in mere weeks.

What seems to be happening is YouTube content creators are being divided into camps. Based on how I understand Claim Your Content might work — namely, that it won’t pro-actively screen and block infringing content — it’s doubtful YouTube will ever open up its new revenue-sharing program or “Claim Your Content” to all users, so if your home-produced video goes viral unexpectedly, don’t expect to cash in and defend your turf against copiers.

It seems non-premium providers who can prove their legitimacy as rightsholders will have to hope that they’re hand-selected. But in addition to revenue sharing, they’ll be getting some follow-up support from YouTube — as, in Chen’s words, “we want to be able to create these mini-communities around certain pieces of content.”

To open up revenue sharing site-wide would add fuel for the prosecution in suits brought by Viacom, Bob Tur and the English Premier League. And apparently Claim Your Content is hard enough to implement that pushing it site-wide could also be problematic.

So for know, either you’re already content aristocracy by virtue of heredity, like the broadcast networks; you’ve achieved enough influence with the YouTube court to be knighted like Lonelygirl15; or you’re just another web serf prey to the whims of the peerage.

Photo by Wang Junyu.