A positive ContentID story

I strongly dislike YouTube's copyright infringement detection software named "ContentID". It is frequently gamed by bad actors, frequently works incorrectly, and like all things related to Google, has no humane way for content creators to dispute charges against them. Worse, it can lead to them taking your monetization and giving it to someone else with no recourse.

However, this is not one of those stories. This is kind of, sort of, almost how it was supposed to work (if you squint). A musician used it to discover that China's state TV was using his music illegally in a bunch of their TV shows and movies and he ended up getting a settlement out of them thanks to ContentID.

You’ve heard Kerry Muzzey’s work (Bandcamp, Spotify), even if you haven’t heard of him. The 50-year-old classical music composer from Joliet, Illinois, who now lives in Los Angeles, produces haunting orchestral scores that soundtrack some of the most poignant moments in film and television. When Finn Hudson kissed Rachel Berry for the first time on TV’s Glee, it was Muzzey’s stripped-back piano playing in the background.

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China Central Television (CCTV) is a network of dozens of TV channels that broadcasts video content to more than a billion people inside China. ... And CCTV has repeatedly shown it’s more than happy to breach copyright.

Among the huge numbers of results that Muzzey found when he ran his regular ContentID searches were scores of hits from TV shows broadcast on CCTV. In all, he found 17 TV programs and movies emanating from CCTV that used some of his music.
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“Some had used 25 episodes' worth of music,” he says.
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“I’m so fortunate that I can make a living as a composer, ... But I did not expect that this would become 50 percent of my job and my life for the past seven years or so. I did not expect that.”