Since the dawn of digital content, piracy has been a problem for creators of all kinds. But those who make short-form content are particularly vulnerable, because industry-standard digital rights management tools like YouTube‘s Content ID “weren’t built for clips that were shorter than 30 seconds,” James McFadden tells us.
In 2012, at the height of the Vine era, McFadden and his brothers Tyler and Will co-founded Collab, a digital content studio and video creator development company. They were creators themselves, and only joined YouTube because people were taking their content from their own website and uploading it to Google’s platform without their permission. Sure, having their stuff on YouTube exposed them to more viewers, but like many thousands of other pirated creators, they were losing out on crucial revenue that was rightfully theirs.
So, recognizing the magnitude of piracy as a whole and the specific issue Vine creators faced because their videos were too short for the major DRM systems, the McFaddens (along with COO Soung Kang) launched Collab.
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Collab offers a lot of things to its hundreds of creator partners, including talent development, marketing, production support, and proprietary tech tools. But a big part of its business is ensuring creators’ content isn’t reuploaded without their permission–and, if content has been reuploaded, Collab works on reclaiming the revenue pirates stole.
Vine might have perished (RIP), but these days, thanks to the rise of TikTok, short-form content is everywhere. Collab works with creators who publish videos on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and more. And some things never change: short-form content is still harder to protect than long-form videos.
“We had to develop a team of people doing manual reviews, human reviews, watching a bunch of videos, identifying our content and creators, and placing manual claims for our creators,” James says. “We were very successful at that for many years, transitioning over from Vine to YouTube and Instagram and eventually TikTok. Nowadays, a lot of them are coming from TikTok, but we’re still helping protect the rights of their content primarily on YouTube.”
Collab has a team of 20 people working on DRM, but the magnitude of what they’re up against grows every day. Collab wanted to figure out how to support its human team members so they could process more claims, without having to sit through videos that might be 30 minutes or an hour long, searching for a second or two of creators’ stolen content.
That’s where CollabScan comes in.
Collab started working on the scan-and-recognize system five years ago. In its earliest iteration, CollabScan could recognize text, so it primarily read the auto-watermarks TikTok places on videos.
“It would know, ‘Okay, @soandso is one of our creators,’ and that would send a notification to our team that it found some of our creators in videos that were being scanned,” James explains. “From that, we were able to do a couple things: Create a database of where our creators’ content was appearing, and for creators we didn’t work with, it was finding opportunities for us to help them protect the rights to their content.”
That system helped Collab’s manual reviewers, but Collab says it’s nothing compared to what CollabScan 2.0 can do.
To build 2.0, Collab brought in recent developments in data analysis and large language models.
“We’re using modern AI technology, which obviously has come a long way and has improved tremendously over the last couple years,” James says. “Nowadays, CollabScan doesn’t just read handles, it can identify exactly what is happening within each individual clip and match it back to creators and clips we have in our library.”
The system is “especially good at identifying content that is under 10 seconds long, five seconds long,” he adds.
The new version of CollabScan “really helps increase the productivity and output with a small team of manual claimers,” James says, but notes that Collab still relies on humans to double-check CollabScan’s results to “make sure we’re placing accurate claims.”
Collab currently files around 40,000 DRM claims per month on behalf of creators.
Another benefit of CollabScan 2.0 is that it’s quick, Tyler says.
“It’s important, when you are providing DRM management for a rightsholder or creator, that you identify the claims opportunity as quickly as possible to maximize potential earnings,” he says. “You don’t want a video to be posted and then not be able to detect that claim for a few weeks or months after it was posted. You want to be on it immediately.”
CollabScan, the brothers says, “detects piracy as soon as it happens.”
And a final, crucial element of Collab’s approach to DRM is that in many cases, it leaves pirated videos uploaded, but claims the revenue on them–so creators benefit from the exposure to potential new viewers, but are also able to redirect revenue from the pirate uploader back to their own bank accounts.
“We’ve found that taking them down is somewhat of a game of whack-a-mole,” James says. “It’s almost an endless struggle. But monetizing it, if you can leave it up, helps the creator grow their business without them having to put in any direct effort.”
That’s not the only source of passive income Collab provides to creators. A separate branch of its DRM management arm involves licensing. Collab represents a library of around 230,000 viral clips, and licenses them out to third parties–including other creators, like reaction channel hosts.
If a channel wants to license clips from Collab, Collab looks to see “if they’ve done a good job with building an audience, if they’re using the content in a way the partner might not object to,” Tyler says. “Some meme edits, for example, might be controversial, or in bad taste. But if they’re redistributing in a way the content partner might not object to, they might be eligible for an agreement.”
To date, across all its offerings, Collab has paid out over $300 million to creators, it says.
Right now, it wants creators to know about the benefits of CollabScan 2.0, and how being proactive about protecting their content will also help protect their rightful earnings. When the system looks for creator content, there are cases where it’s finding content from creators who don’t yet work with Collab. Collab wants to put together audits for these creators, to show them how CollabScan 2.0 could help them.
“We can say, ‘Hey, we found your content in 100 compilations, here’s what we can do,'” Tyler says. “Pirates know which creators to prey on, in terms of who has a service like this and who doesn’t. We want to help.”
You can check Collab out here.
Collab is a Tubefilter partner.
