Changes To YouTube Copyright Claims May Affect You

YouTube is now unveiling some important changes to its Content ID feature which could impact artist videos moving forward, requiring content owners to provide infringement timestamps, and limiting the number of manual copyright claims.

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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

YouTube is rolling out a couple of new provisions revolving around its Content ID feature that may affect your videos in the future. The company will soon be limiting the number of manual copyright claims and requiring content owners to provide timestamps indicating exactly where their copyrighted content is located in creator’s videos.

Content ID is YouTube’s automated system that searches the vast library of user generated material that’s been logged into its database. If it finds a match, it then flags the video by notifying the copyright holder and provides the holder with a number of choices – either block the video from being viewed entirely, monetize the video, or simply track its usage.

Doing It Manually

It’s also possible to manually flag a video, although this feature is not available to most YouTube users and is typically only used by multichannel networks and other larger rights holders. This can get messy though, as sometimes it results in multiple claims if Content ID is also flagging a video.

In an effort to streamline the process and push more users to relying on Content ID alone, YouTube will soon only allow a single claim to be lodged against a video and that will be from Content ID. If the automatic system hasn’t already logged a claim, then the manual tagging will be allowed.

Timestamped

Which brings up the next new stipulation, and that’s if you flag a video manually, you also have to provide the timestamp of where your copyrighted content is located in creators’ videos. This was implemented to decrease the number of disputed claims because a user couldn’t find the spot in the video where the content was being claimed.

This was especially difficult for YouTube creators who published large amounts of videos, as the time spent looking for the offending content became unworkable.

Now if you’ve ever gotten caught up in a YouTube copyright dispute you know how crazy it can get, especially if someone else is claiming your music. It seems that many of these are a result of manual flagging instead of Copyright ID, so this might make it a little easier on the average user down the road. And if you do get hit with a manual claim, at least you’ll know exactly where the disputed material is located.

While YouTube has announced these changes, it hasn’t said when they will be implemented, but speculation is it will happen in the next few months.