If you’re a YouTube creator and you frequently upload videos to the website for all to see, chances are that you may have already known about the policies that have changed and now taken place over use of copyrighted material in uploaded videos. While this could happen to anyone, it would likely be more of a possible situation for users who have a larger number of followers and are monetizing their videos. If you upload a video of your latest gaming session in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare with background music from Trivium and it only gets a handful of hits and is not being monetized, it’s less likely to be requested to be taken down due to copyright.
Should you have any questions about when you may be subject to this type of situation though, YouTube has announced today that they have implemented a new feature that will alert you if you are uploading copyrighted material. The alert is followed with a message that tells you your video could be displaying ads as part of the monetization and that it could be subject to removal if copyright holders see it and change their policies or request for it to be taken down. YouTube uploads with copyrighted material have been subject to this type of scenario prior to now, but it seems that YouTube is making an attempt to be more transparent and clarifying on what may happen, while also alerting users to the possibilities regarding uploaded copyrights.
They even provide an audio library for users to check and see if and how material they may use in their videos would be affected by this new feature and change. Further, YouTube mentions that you can download thousands of songs from the YouTube Audio Library to use in the videos without restrictions for life, so there’s no worry about having your video taken down at all. It’s good that YouTube is now trying to be preemptive and give users a warning about possible video removals, and in turn giving them a way to prevent this sort of things from happening before they upload anything. While plenty of users might have been conscious of things like this before, now anyone who wants to monetize their video uploads will be informed properly.