YouTuber Has Video Demonitized Over Washing Machine Chime
It should not be controversial to state that, as it stands today, YouTube's ContentID platform for policing copyright on YouTube videos is hopelessly broken. The system is wide open to abuse from bad actors who might lay claim to content that simply isn't theirs, sometimes to the tune of raking in millions of dollars. ContentID is also abused by some in law enforcement to prevent recordings of police from showing up on YouTube. And then of course there are all the times that ContentID simply flags content that it shouldn't, such as the sound of a cat purring or plain white noise.
And so it isn't much of a surprise that these issues keep popping up. YouTuber Albino took to social media to complain about how he received a copyright strike for a let's play video because, well, a home appliance made a noise.
On May 27, 2024, Norwegian YouTuber Albino' revealed that one of his six-hour playthroughs of Fallout: New Vegas had been given a strike due to supposedly including the song Done' by music artist Aduego.
However, this track was never actually in Albino's video. Instead, the audio that plays at that particular point in his playthrough was the jingle from a Samsung washing machine, which plays when a wash cycle is complete.
Sadly, it's even dumber than that. Apparently this recording by this particular artist" isn't a song at all, but just an upload of that same washing machine jingle that's been on YouTube for nearly a decade. So, some rando records his washing machine jingle, uploads it to YouTube, then registers it with ContentID, and goes around demonetizing other YouTube videos where the jingle plays. And, because of how ContentID is policed - or not -, none of this is caught by anyone at all.
Albino also pointed out the myriad of comments criticizing Aduego underneath his video, with one viewer writing: Did you record the Samsung washer, then upload it to YouTube with a content ID?" At the time of writing, it appears that Adeugo's video has been either privated or removed from YouTube.
This is the most egregious example of the MANY outright fraudulent content ID claims I've gotten over the years," he wrote. Are you guys doing anything to prevent this? It's completely out of hand."
YouTube's response was of standard fare. It indicated that Albino could dispute the strike and then Adeugo would have 30 days to respond. This of course would open Albino's channel to the risk of being bounced off the platform completely. Whatever this is, it is obviously not good and sound enforcement of valid copyrights.
But we've had a million of these posts on the site over the years and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. At some point, YouTube is going to have to come to terms that its Content ID system is broken and come up with something better. If all of this can occur because of a washing machine, after all, there's no hope for far more nuanced copyright claims and issues.