Youtube Adjusts Copyright Claims Meaning Less Money to Creators
YouTube is changing how some videos with music are claimed by copyright owners. YouTube says this change is being made primarily because of “aggressive manual claiming of very short music clips used in monetized videos.”
They hope that this will prevent so many videos from being shut down by their algorithm.
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The videos may include very short snippets of music, a song title or song lyrics that the copyright claims process can attack to prevent a video from being seen or getting monetized by the creator.
Julian Bill, YouTube’s product manager said in an announcement yesterday, July 9, that the platform will now require copyright owners to provide timestamps to indicate exactly where their content appears in videos when making an infringement claim.
YouTube said that from now on, it will be evaluating the accuracy of the timestamps and copyright owners who repeatedly fail to provide accurate data will have their access to the claiming system revoked.
Additionally, the platform will also improve editing tools for creators, to make it easier to remove infringing content from their videos.
These editing options will be: muting all sound when the claimed song plays, or replacing the infringing song with one of YouTube’s free-to-use songs from its audio library. Creators will also have the option to trim out the content.
They further stated:
“Including someone else’s content without permission — regardless of how short the clip is — means your video can still be claimed and copyright owners will still be able to prevent monetization or block the video from being viewed. However, going forward, our policies will forbid copyright owners from using our Manual Claiming tool to monetize creator videos with very short or unintentional uses of music.”
These new changes to YouTube’s manual claiming policies are intended to “improve fairness in the creator ecosystem, while still respecting copyright owners’ rights to prevent unlicensed use of their content.”
But the result in the short term will mean more blocked videos:
“We acknowledge that these changes may result in more blocked content in the near-term, but we feel this is an important step toward striking the right balance over the long-term. Our goal is to unlock new value for everyone by powering creative reuse and content mashups, while fairly compensating all rightsholders,” said YouTube.
Will this also reduce earnings for many artists? Yes.
The stated purpose of this overhaul is to balance the rights of copyright holders with the needs of YouTube creators.
According to Pex, the video and audio analytics company, snippet usage of music — then seconds or less — is on average roughly 9% of an artists’ YouTube views, and hence 9% of the revenue they earn there.
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