The prevalent search engine and social platform YouTube will now halts copyright holders from earning money through manual claims made on small music clips.
As a YouTuber, having your video claimed by a copyright owner because you used a few seconds of a song can be devastating. This is because, when a video is claimed, the copyright owner can block monetization of the video or restrict it from being viewed at all.
But now YouTube is changing how folks manually file claims.
“Going forward, our policies will forbid copyright owners from using our Manual Claiming tool to monetize creator videos with very short or unintentional uses of music,” wrote the YouTube team.
This change will come into effect on 1st September of the month. This is in order to give copyright owners enough time to adapt to the new policy.
But YouTube also acknowledges that this new policy has a downside.
“We acknowledge that these changes may result in more blocked content in the near-term, but we feel this is an important step toward striking the right balance over the long-term. Our goal is to unlock new value for everyone by powering creative reuse and content mashups, while fairly compensating all rights holders.”