Recently there was kind of a scandal regarding YouTube and what content is "eligible" for monetization. I am not going to talk about that scandal nor the shutdown of YouTube channels due to infringing on the rules. I will cover this as an amateur content producer on YouTube.
To start, it's quite easy to get an Adsense license to be able to monetize your YouTube videos with advertising. I began to screen my gameplay on different games. The app I used to screen them didn't record the game audio. In order to put music on my videos, I began making loop-based Garage Band soundtracks. Garage Band's loops are royalty-free. This means you can make your loop-based soundtracks and sell and be free of charge to use them on your work. This soundtracks can even be sold and you aren't liable for selling content that includes royalty-free loops.
I incorporated my soundtracks to the videos and uploaded to YouTube. Hours, minutes or months after the video's publication, I received a message like the following.
A copyright owner using Content ID claimed some material in your video. This is just a heads up
Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble and your account standing is not affected by this. There are either ads running on your video, with the revenue going to the copyright owner, or the copyright owner is receiving stats about your video’s views.
Video title: “Name of the video”
Copyrighted content: Acoustic Band
Claimed by: TuneCore
What happened? There are people who made soundtracks based on royalty-free loops and sold them. Their record companies have bots on sites like YouTube and denounce a copyright infringement. But you never did that copyright infringement. Those bots as well as the record companies should know that you can't claim for copyright infringement in royalty-free content.
How this affects content creators? Since the claim, creators can't monetize their claimed content until a dispute is won against the claimer. I normally wrote a text saying that I used royalty-free loops from Garage Band, so the claim should have no action on my content. The claimer has around thirty days to answer your dispute. You know you are right, but normally they answer the dispute until the thirtieth day. You won the claim and now you are able to keep monetizing your video, but you might as well receive more claims on the same video. I have received copyright claims even of songs created on a latter period than my own. This is unacceptable. Probably other content creators have suffered the same process.
