Google / YouTube Copyright controversy

This topic won’t be an easy one. Let us start with an important information. We are no copyright lawyers, we provide Public Relations and Marketing Services. We advise and remind our clients to create and use their own images, content, music, video footage and explain them the risks when using material from other sites. Our support and advise is based on our own experience and certainly not a legal advise.

In this post we will express our own opinion and we hope to support some healthy discussions that have already been started. For the purpose of this post we will refer to videos created by video content creators on YouTube. We also want to mention that we try to keep this post simple and advise that you should keep in mind that this topic is actually more complicated as expressed in this post. However we hope it will still help to get an idea what is happening at the moment on YouTube.

Let’s get started.

If you create an article, compose music, shoot a video or take a picture you can decide if everyone can use it freely or if your material should have a copyright on it. There are even possibilities in between, but we think that would unnecessarily complicate this post.

Let say you decided to have copyright on your brilliant picture and you see that someone else is using this images without your permission. Now you go ahead and contact the person using your image and manage to get it back. But now it becomes a bit more complicated. What if this images has generated a lot of money for the person who used your images without asking?

You may say you would like to get every penny this person has made using your image, right?

But what if the person created a Blogpost and used your images to support this post? Now the Blogger will say that the post is not yours and that the revenue was generated because of the information provided in the Blogpost and has nothing to do with your image.

So who should get the money?

Now we go one step further and will bring YouTube into the mix.

Let’s say you composed some fantastic music. Now you upload your music to YouTube to show others how talented you are. While searching YouTube you stumble upon a video that plays your music. Via the YouTube tools you claim your copyrights based on the music and now advertisement that runs on this video will generate revenue for you and not the one who uploaded the video that has your music in it. Easy, right?

But what if the other video is 20 minutes long and the part with your music is just 10-20 seconds? Do you still think it would be fair to claim the entire advertisement revenue for the video that is not yours and has only 20 seconds of your song in it?

We think we reached a point where it is clear that this entire situation isn’t clear at all.

We as well created videos for clients and ourselves. We used music from freeplaymusic.com in our videos and uploaded them to YouTube. Some of those videos have copyright claims some don’t. But in our case the videos we produced are created to support our clients and we do not need to generate money via advertisement on them. In some cases we don’t even want to have advertisement on those videos. Therefore if the automated system from YouTube matches our video with the music from freeplaymusic.com we simply claim that the video is ours and if we get it back fine if not than we decide if it is worse our time to take it a step further.

But there are also some people / groups on YouTube who created a living for themselves by generating video content on YouTube. We think it is fantastic that they have found something they love doing and want to help them with this post. Many of them are very entertaining and as far as we know good people. We would even go so far and say some had a great influence on the video gaming industry. Please find here what some of them have to say:

Angry Joe from the Angry Joe Show – Video Title: Youtube Copyright – Whats Broken & How to Fix it 

TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit – Video Title: YouTube copyright blitz focuses on gameplay videos 

farfromsubtle – Video Title: YouTube vs Gamers!?! 

MaskedGamer – Video Title: MCN FOLLOW-UP – CONTENT ID, & THE GREEDY MCNs 

boogie2988 – Video Title: Youtube’s Copyright Changes to Game play Footage 

We excuse and hope you can understand that we can not link to every available YouTube video regarding this topic. We tried our best to have videos from various YouTubers with different opinions to give you the opportunity to build your own. We encourage you to subscribe to all of them if you like and wish all of them well.

We believe that everyone of them have and made some valid points in their videos and hope that there will be an easy solution.

We wish everyone a good holiday season.