YouTube & Copyright Laws - Part 1

Copyright laws are important to be aware of when making YouTube videos.  There are many cases everyday when audio from videos, or the video altogether, are removed from YouTube due to copyright infringements.  The way to avoid this is to become responsible for your videos and make sure that you have legal rights to everything you use in your videos.  YouTube has an entire Copyright Center on their website that lays out these rules and guidelines.

The first thing you need to know about copyrights is what exactly you need to check and get permission to use.  Anything that is an original work and is in physical form is the property of the creator.  This automatically gives the creator copyrights to their work.  Such works include videos, movies, TV shows, video/computer games, advertisements, musical compositions and/or recordings, plays, books, lectures, paintings, posters, etc.  Being continually aware of this, make sure to double check that you have the right to use any of these types of works before adding them to your video.  If you don’t have the rights, try contacting the owner of the work and get permission to use it.

If you do not have the rights to use copyrighted subjects and you use it in your videos, the owners have the right to ask that their work be removed from YouTube.  If you have seen some similar work used in someone else’s video, that does not mean that you are safe to use the same work.  The reason YouTube removes videos from their site is because the owner of the copyrighted work has sent a request to have it removed.  By law, YouTube must comply with the request.

Some creators allow others to reuse their works with some conditions, while others do not allow their works to be reused at all.  A further explanation of some of these conditions are outlined on the fair use link of the YouTube Copyright Center page.  YouTube does not provide the information about individual works’ copyright conditions, nor will with they help you find them or help you contact the owner of the copyright.  These are matters that you will have to simply sit down, research, and figure out yourself.

Although you may be thinking that this is a lot of work and that you would rather take the risk, it is worth it and important for you to follow the proper procedure.  When you follow the procedure, you will be protecting yourself, respecting the owner of the copyrighted work, and quite possibly be saving your videos.

This blog post is simply an introduction to YouTube and copyright laws.  In my next few blogs I will further explain what copyright laws and the consequences of infringing on them are, how to prevent infringement on copyrights, and steps you may take if you feel that your video was wrongfully removed from YouTube.