YouTube Playa Vista. (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

Grammy award-winning artist Maria Schneider is demanding access to YouTube's copyright enforcement tools, which she argues only protect major record labels and studios, in a class action complaint filed Thursday.

Korein Tillery and Boies Schiller Flexner filed the suit in the Northern District of California on behalf of Schneider, a composer, musician and advocate for artist rights, and Pirate Monitor LTD, a company that owns the rights to several Hungarian films.

The lawsuit contends that YouTube's copyright policies leave artists like Schneider behind by design to boost the platforms' user volume and advertising revenue. YouTube's primary policing tool, Content ID, uses automation to identify copyrighted works. Qualifying copyright holders, who can demonstrate a need and that their content can be claimed through the tool, can protect their intellectual property with Content ID, but it is not available to all artists, the lawsuit claims.

"Smaller rights holders, including plaintiffs and the class, are, however, denied access to Content ID and thus are relegated to vastly inferior and time-consuming manual means of trying to police and manage their copyrights such as scanning the entirety of YouTube postings, searching for keywords, titles, and other potential identifiers," write a team of attorneys that includes Korein Tillery's George Zelcs and Boies' Philip Korologos.

Zelc and a Boies representative declined a request for comment.

Instead, they assert, proposed class members must file individual takedown notices through YouTube's web-form email. "Defendants have, in effect, created a two-tiered system whereby the rights of large creators with the resources to take defendants to court on their own are protected, while smaller and independent creators like plaintiffs and the class are deliberately left out in the cold," they wrote in the 44-page complaint.

The lawsuit is asking the court to require YouTube to offer Content ID and its other enforcement tools to the public. The proposed class is also asking for disgorgement and damages based on profits from the website's allegedly infringing acts.

Google, YouTube's parent company, declined to comment on pending litigation.

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