On Thursday, July 2, 2020, Grammy award-winning composer and musician Maria Schneider filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, against YouTube, LLC, Google, LLC, and Alphabet, Inc. The lawsuit concerns copyright piracy on YouTube and alleges that YouTube's copyright management tool, Content ID, "actually insulates the vast majority of known and repeated copyright infringers from YouTube's repeat infringer policy" and leaves plaintiffs in the class with "no meaningful ability to police the extensive infringement of their copyrighted work." The complaint requests, among other things, equitable relief in the form of providing Content ID to all copyright owners and monetary relief in the form of defendants' profits derived from copyright infringement on YouTube.
