YouTube ContentID is still broken and dumb

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get my music copyrights properly enforced on YouTube.

The problem is that I’ve released pretty much all of my music under CC by-nc-sa, which means that people are free to use it as long as they credit me, use it noncommercially, and also put their content under the CC by-nc-sa license.

However! People never fucking do. It’ll never be credited, is often used in a literal fucking advertisement, and is also absolutely never put under the same license.

So, you’d think this would be a perfect use case for YouTube’s copyright enforcement tools, right?

Unfortunately, no:

  • ContentID eligibility excludes things with non-exclusive licensing, and specifically calls out Creative Commons (treating it as effectively “public domain” when it FUCKING isn’t)
  • Content Match requires that you’ve submitted copyright takedown requests
  • Takedown requests are an all-or-nothing bludgeon that removes a video entirely, rather than simply enforcing credit and doing a rev-share like ContentID, and this is usually not what I want
  • Takedown requests also seem to not allow for Creative Commons material even if the CC license isn’t being followed

The only YouTube copyright thing that seems to exist for my actual use case is the Creator Music program… which requires that you be a YouTube Partner to qualify.

So, in order to have YouTube care about correctly enforcing my copyright I need to become a fucking YouTube celebrity?

This is so fucking stupid.

I was previously working with AdRev to enforce my stuff but they got acquired by another company which then removed the ability to allow channels to use my stuff without penalty, and also doesn’t allow me to drop their automatically-generated claims against individual videos, and certainly doesn’t allow me to enforce the necessary granularity for Creative Commons music.

And I mean, I don’t even want automatic enforcement! I just want ContentID to be able to inform me when a video pops up using my stuff so that I can properly work with the uploader to come into compliance, especially attribution. But the fucking ContentID system is so goddamned all-or-nothing, unless you’re someone who’s YouTube-famous enough to be a YouTube musician, which is definitely not a thing I want to go down the path of.

What I really need is a ContentID partner or someone on the YouTube copyright team who’s savvy with Creative Commons, but none of them seem to be. Or at least I’m not finding someone who is, and I’m too small-potatoes for anyone to give a shit about my situation.

Just, fucking ugh.

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