I am not a fan of YouTube right now. Since deciding to kick our channel into gear, four of our recent videos have been flagged by ContentID, despite them all falling under Fair Use. Even with some workarounds (blurring visuals, excluding audio), they are still being flagged.
Hours of work effectively gone or monetised by other parties. For a small business, this can be a killer – our YouTube earnings were slim to begin with. There’s little to no support from YouTube either, you’re basically left with a limited amount of disputes to file at one time against massive corporations. Who do you think is going to win? It isn’t David this time.
Someone with a lot more nous than us when it comes to YouTube is game critic Jim Sterling, host of the popular, ad-free Jimquisition series and various Let’s Plays. He produces content every day, which makes him more susceptible to flags, legitimate or not.
After noticing something odd with his copyright claims, Jim decided to put his findings to the test.
And it worked.
It’s really simple: just use different media from game publishers/developers unrelated to the topic of your video. When more than dispute is filed from one of these companies, it causes a clash, making it impossible for YouTube to make a decision on who is in the right. Nobody wins and Jim is able to keep his show free of ads as he intended.
As Jim explained in the video:
“You may have noticed this week’s video had footage from Metal Gear Solid V, Grand Theft Auto V, and Beyond: Two Souls in it,” Sterling said. “Now, there’s a reason for that. The reason is Nintendo. Because I’m talking about a Nintendo game this week, I’ve used Nintendo game footage, and that means Nintendo will attempt to monetise this video even though the point of the Jimquisition is to be ad-free, thanks to your lovely help on Patreon.
“I figured every time I talk about Nintendo, I’m going to throw in other stuff that gets flagged by Content ID, and just watch the corporations battle it out.”
He explained further in an exchange with Kotaku:
“I can confirm it works. It’s worked several times before. WMG tried to monetise the video for the Erasure music, but couldn’t because Nintendo and Take-Two had set their ContentID in this particular case to Not Monetised.
“I discovered this by accident a few months back when competing claims from Sony and Konami meant no ads ended up running on my video. Pretty good workaround for someone trying to keep my series ad-free, even if it means you have to actively try and ‘infringe copyright’ to exercise your fair use rights.”
Jim. Fucking. Sterling. Son.
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