YouTube has announced new updates on how it will handle manual copyright claims on the video-sharing platform. The changes are designed to make things a little easier for content creators in the future. In the new update, owners of copyrighted content will now be able to pinpoint exactly where in a video their copyrighted materials appears as they manually report copyright infringement. This is not something they could do before the update. The update will make it easier for content creators to also verify if the infringement claims are genuine or not. They can then go exactly where the infringement has been reported in their videos and remove it before the issue is escalated further.
Until now, it wasn’t possible for content owners to exactly point out where a copyright infringement occurred in published videos. This was a considerable cause of frustration for creators who had to go through hours of content on their own to just see where they could have gone wrong. This made it extremely difficult for any infringements to be addressed in time. It was also very hard for content creators to dispute infringement claims since there was no way of telling exactly what kind of copyrighted material was used and where. Content creators had to edit out what they thought could be the issue and would then have to wait for the copyright owners to go through the video and ensure their concerns had been addressed to their satisfaction.
The new update is designed to make the whole process of reporting these claims manually smoother and a little bit more efficient. In very rare cases, copyright infringements are often too obvious. This could be a situation where the content creator has used a popular song or played a movie clip directly. But in most of the situations, the claims tend to be more complicated. Some claims have even been described as frivolous. For example, we have seen cases where content creators have been served with infringement claims for small snippets of songs that were playing in the background of the stores they were actually recording in. Because of this, most manual copyright claims take too long to resolve due to the lack of clarity.
The new updates were first announced early this year by YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki. The company said at the time that it was exploring a number of improvements designed to “strike the right balance between copyright owners and creators.” It seems like the new updates will be doing exactly that. Despite this, the updates don’t solve all the issues that content creators have had with copyright owners in the past. For instance, the law makes it mandatory for YouTube to work directly with copyright owners once an infringement claim has been made. This puts content creators at a clear disadvantage when they try to prove fair use. Besides, frivolous copyright claims can also make it harder for content creators to develop educational content that may involve the use of copyrighted content to send the message across. But the new updates are at last a good first step in making this right.
