YouTube is looking to close a loophole in its copyright policies following a rise in the number of claims against music clips within monetised content.
“One concerning trend we’ve seen is aggressive manual claiming of very short music clips used in monetized videos. These claims can feel particularly unfair, as they transfer all revenue from the creator to the claimant, regardless of the amount of music claimed,” the video sharing site said in a blog post Thursday.
A month ago, YouTube began to require claimants to provide timestamps for all manual claims to make it clear exactly which part of a video had a claim against it.
Changes have also been made to editing tools within its Creator Studio. It makes it possible to manually remove claimed content.
YouTube is now amending its policies to forbid copyright owners from using its Manual Claiming tool to monetize creator videos with very short or unintentional uses of music. At the same time its reminding content creators to avoid using unlicensed content in the first place.
The company says it will begin enforcing the rules from September.
