YouTube FIXES Copyright System

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On August 15th, @TeamYouTube on Twitter announced that they were making some hotly-anticipated changes to the copyright system. The tweet describes the new policy that will prevent copyright owners, such as much-hated UMG, from making money on manual claims on unreasonable grounds, including short song clips and unintentional audio.

Many YouTubers have been speaking out about the broken copyright system on YouTube for years now, as large media corporations have been taking advantage of this broken system by using manual claim farms, basically where people are paid to watch big YouTuber’s videos and listen for any remotely claimable content, and then manually claim all of the video’s ad revenue.

What this new policy will do is that it will remove the financial incentive of these claim farms and make them less valuable to the big media companies. Copyright owners can still block monetization or the video itself, but as most of these claims are solely for the purpose of making money, it’s unlikely that this will be used much.

Furthermore, timestamps of the copyrighted content will have to be given in order to help the creators edit out the material in YouTube’s built-in editor. Although not perfect, it’s a huge step in the right direction for YouTube. The system has been broken for years and it’s now clear that YouTube is listening to their creators and are trying to make changes.