Major change to YouTube rules: Copyright claims now require timestamp

Matti Robinson
10 Jul 2019 10:43

YouTube has managed to dodge the 'copyright mafia' since the beginning, or at least since acquisition by Google, fairly well. I guess having tons of lawyers from Google helping out fighting the copyright problems has been the key.
Obviously adding complete and easy-to-use copyright claim features to the platform has made it less likely of a target of copyright holders.

Unfortunately there are consequences to giving so much power to the individuals and organizations. There's even an aphorism of some kind about power and corruption.
There certainly has been corruption among the folk posting mass copyright claims on YouTube. So much so, that for much of the independent YouTube community copyright claims have become a joke.

Whether it is to suppress ideas or content of critics, or just to gain a competitive edge against competitors, YouTube's copyright claim has been used for it all.

Due to YouTube's abhorrent record in communicating with the community, many of the creators have probably given up that there's any kind of protective action against what can be truly called the copyright claim mafia.

However, sometimes it is very nice to be wrong. For those people, today is the day.

YouTube has announced that it has changed the copyright claim measures in a few significant ways. The first of them is that copyright claims now require a timestamp of exactly what was claimed.

Secondly, YouTube offers easy to use tools with which the creators can mute the segment claimed, or change the audio to a free to use alternative from YouTube's own audio library.

Furthermore YouTube announced that copyright holders who continuously wrongly claim copyright violations will be punished and they won't be able to make further claims.

There will also be tools like a one click trim feature to cut out the copyrighted segment, and other measures to help the creators will follow.