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YouTube is finally pushing back against overzealous copyright policing from music companies.
If you frequently upload to YouTube, or have done in the past, you’ll be all too aware of the platform’s copyright pitfalls. Countless videos have been manually flagged over the years for the presence of what YouTube calls ‘unintentional’ music violations. Passers by listening to their car radios, or background music in a supermarket had previously been enough to run afoul of the guidelines and get your content taken down. But YouTube are finally fixing their strange policy 14 years after the platform’s conception.
Starting in mid-September, YouTube will forbid copyright holders from commandeering revenue generated by videos featuring unintentional music. Once the new policy is launched and enforced, any copyright owners that continue flagging unintentional music playing for ‘single digit seconds’ will have their manual-claiming privileges suspended.
Until this point, successful copyright claims had transferred all revenue from the creator to the claimant, leaving a large number of creators feeling disgruntled and duped by a technicality largely out of their control.
This new legislation will undoubtedly help the issue, but it’s far from the perfect solution. When future claims regarding audio copyright are validated, the rights holder will no longer be allowed to earn money from the video’s ads. Instead, they’ll have the option of blocking the owner’s earnings, blocking the video entirely, or just letting the video stay up.
YouTube are hoping that this monetary change will deter record labels from spending so much time actively searching out background music. The trouble is, there’s no guarantee that’s what’ll happen until the patch is up. Record labels could keep the pressure on by choosing to just block videos entirely. We just don’t know.
Last month YouTube updated the tools for creators to respond to manual claims – and potentially avoid their videos being taken down. Manual reports now request specific timestamps, meaning the creators can quickly remove or replace the audio in violation, allowing their video to stay up and their ad-revenue to recommence.
