YouTube is updating the way it handles manual copyright claims with changes that should make them much less of a headache for video creators.
Owners of copyrighted content — like a record label or a movie studio — will now have to say exactly where in a video their copyrighted material appears, which they did not have to do in the past when manually reporting infringement.
That will allow creators to easily verify whether or not a claim is legitimate and to then edit out the content if they do not want to deal with the repercussions, like losing revenue or having the video taken down.
Until now, copyright owners did not have to say where infringing content appeared when making a manual claim. That has been the source of much frustration for creators, who would find themselves searching through lengthy videos to determine exactly what part was even at issue.
The lack of detail made it hard to dispute the claims, and it meant that if a creator tried to edit potentially infringing content out, they would have to wait and see if the copyright owner agreed that the problem was resolved before the claim would be let go.
With this change, the whole system will be a lot clearer and should operate much smoother. Video creators will be able to see the chunk that has been claimed, and YouTube will allow them to mute the audio during that portion, replace the audio with a free-to-use song from YouTube’s library, or cut out that chunk of the video.
If they choose any of those options, the copyright claim will automatically be released. (All of those options were previously available, but creators had to figure out on their own what they needed to cut out.)
The more egregious copyright violations on YouTube often come through automatic copyright detection. That feature already provided specific timestamps so that creators know what portion of a video is being claimed.
Because of that, manual claims have been more likely to be used in edge cases that could not be automatically detected and then lacked clarity in what they were actually about.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the changes were coming earlier this year. “We are exploring improvements in striking the right balance between copyright owners and creators,” she wrote in April.
