YouTube Imposes Stricter Rules on Manual Content ID Claims — Here Are the Details

Effective immediately, those who manually file copyright-violation claims will need to specify, via timestamp, precisely when the violation(s) appear in the video.

YouTube’s automatic copyright-checking system, which reviews uploads to assure that they don’t include copyrighted content without the express permission of the copyright owners, will continue to operate as it has in the past.

In the vast majority of instances, videos’ copyright violations come from the unauthorized use of songs.  While YouTube appears to be committed to helping copyright owners protect their intellectual property, the criticism of video uploaders — namely that manually submitted copyright-violation claims have been unnecessarily difficult to respond to — hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Besides the inclusion of timestamps with manual claims, YouTube will now allow creators to use YouTube Editor to choose from several methods of satisfying uploading requirements.  That includes muting all sound during the timestamp, replacing a copyrighted song with a royalty-free track (which can be chosen from the YouTube Audio Library), or trimming the segment in-question from the video.

Moreover, by utilizing one of the mentioned tools, uploaders can automatically dismiss manually filed copyright-infringement cases; creators have long been able to do so when addressing violations that were detected by YouTube’s in-house system.

Lastly, creators can still dispute copyright-infringement claims, and individuals or organizations that are found to have a history of filing frivolous and inaccurate infringement claims will be barred from the manual-submission center.

This update seems to be something of a compromise for copyright holders and creators, and with any luck, both parties can benefit — the former by having their manual claims more quickly responded to, and the latter by being able to expediently and easily dispatch claims.

A statement released by YouTube indicated that this update is hardly the end of the website’s efforts “to improve the creator copyright experience while also balancing the rights of copyright owners.”