YouTube Fails to Protect Smaller Copyright Owners, Suit Says

Alphabet Inc.‘s YouTube LLC only enforces the copyrights of large copyright owners like movie studios and record labels to drive the site’s growth through piracy, according to a complaint filed by a purported class of copyright holders in California federal court Thursday.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says that YouTube withholds its Content ID screening technology from all but the “most powerful” copyright holders to maximize a “focused but reckless drive for user volume and advertising revenue.”

Content ID allows YouTube to make a “digital fingerprint” of a user’s copyrighted ...