I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube since 2007, when it wasn’t the beast that it is now. Copyright and other content restrictions were fairly lax back then, but over the years Google has enforced its rules on copyright very aggressively. For that reason, if we want to include a music track in a video, we either go to the YouTube Audio Library for 100% guaranteed copyright-free music or find so-called copyright-free tracks on YouTube or other sites. But all is not what it seems in the world of copyright for numerous reasons, not least bad actors jumping on the copyright claim bandwagon, but I’ll come back to that shady subject later.
Check In To YouTube Studio Regularly
If you have a YouTube channel and particularly if you’ve added music to your videos, you should check your YouTube Studio statistics page regularly. Since my channel was demonetised some time ago, I lost a lot of interest because eligibility to earn is now tighter than ever. However, yesterday I checked in only to find that I had 12 copyright claims against videos I’d created dating back to 2012.
These are not serious infractions, but I need to address them. What bugs me is the fact that the music tracks referred to were downloaded from copyright-free music sites at the time of editing, but I’ve since learned that over time a track’s status may change, thus making it no longer royalty-free. Some of my other videos include driving around Europe with background music coming from the radio, but this triggers the copyright infringement mechanism automatically. Copyright throughout the internet has become a minefield, especially on YouTube, and it’s advisable to keep up with the ever-changing landscape. Furthermore, YouTube has now become fully automated, so arguing with a machine (AI) will be rather difficult.
Check The Claim Carefully
The reason I’ve highlighted the above claim is that I remember the track, Anthem of Inspiration, as I’ve used it in more than one video and acquired it from a copyright-free site more than six years ago. However, I understand that today it’s not entirely copyright-free:
“Anthem of Inspiration” by RomanSenykMusic is royalty-free for non-commercial and general use, but it is not entirely copyright-free. You can use the track for free if you give proper credit, but it is registered with Content ID, meaning you must follow specific rules to avoid copyright claims or to monetize.
I then hit the View Details button of the claim to find out about the who and when:
No date is given for when the ‘claim’ was made, which is annoying, so I ran a search for We Are Era Music BV and found dozens of complaints about them, with most complainants suggesting fraudulent YouTube claims, with many fighting the claims and We Are Era Music backing down, as evidenced in this report and this Medium article. I simply don’t have the time to fight this fantasy claim, especially since I’m not monetised, so I’ll remove the track from the video.
What is distasteful about all this is that YouTube treats the target of the claim, i.e., me or any ‘creator ‘, as the criminal, whereas policing the so-called claimant appears to be non-existent. In the meantime, I’m either erasing the songs or removing the videos entirely, so I’ll update this article when my channel gets a clean bill of health.
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