Solutions to the YouTube Music Copyright Rules

Have you had your content mistakenly taken down from a video hosting platform like YouTube for music copyright infringement? Have you gotten a strike on your account after being falsely accused of violating the YouTube music copyright rules? Well sit tight and take your hand off that stress ball, because this blog will cover solutions to prevent these problems.

The Problem

Over 300 hours of YouTube video is uploaded every minute. Despite that enormous amount of content, YouTube is adept at flagging and removing content that violates copyright rules and regulations. This includes simple things like a song being played in the background of your video. To help you avoid these situations, you should familiarize yourself with some of the basics of copyright law:

Copyright: When someone creates an original work, they are granted the exclusive rights to its use and distribution for their lifetime and several years beyond.

Fair use: Part of the Copyright law where people are allowed to comment, criticize, and parody your work legally.

Intellectual property that can be copyrighted includes:

• • Music compositions
  • Music performances
  • Written works
  • Video games
  • Computer software
  • Audiovisual works
  • Paintings and other artworks

2 ways your video can get taken down on YouTube:

• Takedown Notice
  • YouTube (like all similar services) has been granted protection from copyright infringement liability as long as they follow the rules and regulations. When they receive a formal takedown notice from a copyright holder, they must remove the content in order to remain protected.
• Copy ID Match
  • When videos are uploaded, they run through a system to see if anything matches copyrighted content already on YouTube. If there is a match, the owner of the original content is notified and allowed to either block your content or monetize it. Monetizing means that they put ads on your video and take the revenue from that.
  • You can dispute this to challenge the accuracy of a copy ID match.

What can happen if you have licensed music on your YouTube video:

• Your video is removed from the site entirely
• The audio is muted
• Links to promote and purchase the copyrighted music will be added

The setup

Some broadcasters on YouTube get their content taken down even when they haven’t infringed on any copyrighted material. If you use royalty-free music from a website, or you make your own, you still could have a problem with YouTube’s copy ID match.

There are times when royalty-free music is uploaded with a video on YouTube. Another person may use the same royalty-free music because everyone is entitled to its use. Since the other person uploaded their video first, your content could get red-flagged because it uses the same music.

Solutions

YouTube is the be-all and end-all platform for hosting video content. You have other options available to you that will help you avoid some of the copyright headaches that come with posting content on YouTube. One of these is Dacast.

Instead of having a strict music ID checker, Dacast relies on referral restrictions that prevent others from pirating your content and embedding it onto other websites. If anyone tries taking the URL from your video to embed your content onto their website, the video will not play and you will retain your original content.

Conclusion

Remember, YouTube’s automatic copy ID match is for checking against copyrighted music. Hosting your content on Dacast will ensure you don’t run into any problems or confusion with copyrighted music. With Dacast’s video-on-demand playlists, you can activate referrer restrictions to prevent pirates from stealing your content.

You should never use copyrighted music or songs without permission in the first place. But to work around some of YouTube’s trigger happy restrictions, switching to an alternative online video platform like Dacast can help you avoid the very common problem that YouTube’s copyright match service creates. Dacast does aggressively honor copyright takedown notices, and anyone who tries to steal someone’s content and pass it off as their own will have their videos taken down and their account closed. Keep your content safe while avoiding the stress of a copy ID match with Dacast.

By: Nick Small. Follow me on Google+.