YouTube’s new copyright policies and why games reviewers should be worried

Youtube

YouTube has stood by their new copyright material policy (more info here) despite anger shown by gamers across the world. For the uninitiated, YouTube has recently been flagging videos for containing audio (mostly the background music in games) that they consider in breach of copyright. This is not good news for games reviews, which by definition will contain in-game music. It appears that this action isn’t even endorsed by the copyright owners themselves in many cases and just looks like another step down the road of forced monetisation by the Google owned company.

I have been personally affected by this, with one of my own videos being ‘blocked in some countries’ because of some background music. Another track had been flagged causing it to trigger ads on my video (see below). I was able to reinstate the video by using the new YouTube feature called ‘Remove a Song – Beta’. According to YT, this only removes the layers of audio that contain the song as far as possible. In my video it removed the whole audio. Happy f*cking Christmas to you too YouTube.

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See more in this article over at Gamespot.

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