Today YouTube announced a significant change to how it handles manual copyright claims. In the past, if a small part of a video included copyright material, the content owners could claim all revenues from the video. Many creators have felt that this was unfair as maybe some background music from a store only appeared in 10 seconds of a 20 minutes video. This has lead to what YouTube called “aggressive manual claiming of very short music clips used in monetized videos.”
Now YouTube has announced that they will no longer let content owners claim revenues from videos with only a short bit of copyrighted material in it. Content owners will still be able to block videos or prevent monetization, but they won’t be able to claim all profits from these videos.
YouTube has also recently added the ability to cut out segments with copyrighted content or replace the audio with fair use music YouTube offers to all content creators. This means if a 20-minute video contains just 15 seconds of copyrighted music that was manually created the video creator now has the ability just to remove the copyrighted content from their video. In the past, the only option for the content creator was to remove the video from their YouTube page or let the copyright owner get all revenue from the video.
“We strive to make YouTube a fair ecosystem for everyone, including songwriters, artists, and YouTube creators. 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.” YouTube said in a statement on their website.
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