[6] These criteria make the use of Content ID without the aid of a major backer difficult, limiting its usage to big corporations in practice.
[7] Between 2007 and 2009, companies including Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material.
[13][14][15] Google CEO Eric Schmidt regarded this system as necessary for resolving lawsuits such as the one from Viacom, which alleged that YouTube profited from content that it did not have the right to distribute.
Unlike Content ID, Copyright Match is used to detect and list verbatim copies of a channel's videos that are uploaded by other YouTube users, and no action is taken until the creator chooses to do so.
YouTube product manager Fabio Magagna stated that Copyright Match was derived from the Content ID system.
[20] In 2021, YouTube recorded nearly 1.5 billion Content ID claims, including 759.5 million by the second half of the year among which 4,840 were copyright owners'.
An independent test in 2009 uploaded multiple versions of the same song to YouTube, and concluded that while the system was "surprisingly resilient" in finding copyright violations in the audio tracks of videos, it was not infallible.
[25] The use of Content ID to remove material automatically has led to controversy in some cases, as the videos have not been checked by a human for fair use.
[31] YouTube has cited the effectiveness of Content ID as one of the reasons why the site's rules were modified in December 2010 to allow some users to upload videos of unlimited length.
[1][33] Google has countered these assertions by stating that (as of 2016) Content ID detected over 98% of known copyright infringement on YouTube and humans filing removal notices only 2%.
[40][41] On November 6, 2021, Jose Teran of Scottsdale, Arizona and his co-conspirator, Webster Batista, was charged by a federal grand jury of 30 felony counts which include Conspiracy, Wire Fraud, and Transactional Money Laundering.