Korean YouTube is full of pirated content

It's been revealed YouTube, the world’s biggest video streaming site, has received 260,000 copyright infringement claims from Korea’s major broadcasting networks since last year.

According to the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), the country’s broadcasting networks KBS, MBC and SBS have filed 261,042 copyright infringement claims on YouTube.

This figure outnumbers the 3,979 cases on Korea’s top video streaming platforms - Naver, Daum and Afreeca TV.

Of the country’s broadcasters, KBS filed the most copyright claims as it requested YouTube to remove 126,570 videos from the past year till September. SBS complained about 81,085 cases of copyright violations on YouTube in the same period of time, and MBC filed 53,387 cases.

In August there were 8,833 copyright infringement cases on YouTube in Korea, showing little improvement from the 8,880 cases the previous year. The copyright infringement cases were mostly pirated movies and music.

YouTube has been plagued by copyright infringement issues for the past few years as major content creators are putting pressure on it to better police copyrighted content that have been uploaded by its users.

As an indicator of how video is taking over the Internet, over 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, which works out to 720,000 hours of new content on the platform every day. By comparison, in 2013, YouTube users uploaded just over 400 hours of content every day.

YouTube recently made changes to its copyright enforcement policies which will make it less easy for copyright holders to make manual claims for YouTube videos that include very short music clips or unintentional music. This will prevent dishonest YouTube users from making fraudulent or illegitimate claims on content and diverting the revenue from the video to their pockets.

YouTube’s policy is that it does not mediate copyright disputes. And it has been known to prefer to use automation for such cases, creating absurd situations where users who have disputes are asked to contact themselves, or the claimant.

Besides allowing manual claims, YouTube also has its own algorithms that automatically flag copyright-infringing content. We wonder why this system did not work and allowed so much copyrighted content from Korea to be uploaded.