Hello Everyone!
As, at this point, we’ve seen tons of chaotic cases when it comes to clearing copyright claims and as sometimes the whole clearing process might seem a bit unclear, I figured to chime in and write my/our perspective on the clearing process as an author and as a person on the other side of the Youtube clearing system + simplified step-by-step guide to clearing YouTube videos which, hopefully, will put many Envato/Elements’ music customers at ease!
Let’s say you got a copyright claim today - what should you do?
Step 1) DO NOT PANIC
I fully understand that receiving a copyright claim might be a stressful experience as your money/earnings are put on hold until the claim has been cleared, however, please do not panic and do not re-dispute the same video several times as this can create worse issues that will need longer to be fixed! A copyright claim is NOT a copyright strike and the difference is that a copyright claim can be disputed several times and a copyright strike is essentially when all of your disputes have been rejected (about 2 times). In our experience, receiving a copyright strike without receiving first a copyright claim happens almost never and the cases when it happens are usually if the owner of the music did it manually and/or if the Youtube system issued one (which, again, happens rarely).
Step 2) Dispute the claim via the YouTube system
This is an easy and direct way to clear a copyright claim and can be done by simply copy/paste the text of the license into the dispute window:
The most common way to get rejected on the first dispute is if you write anything else instead of a license text (unless you are the owner of the music copyright in the video) this includes something in the lines of ‘…I have Elements subscription.’ or ‘…I have a license.’, etc. OR if you are using music from Elements and you copy/paste the same license in multiple of your videos (as 1 Elements License = 1 Youtube video and every new video needs a newly re-generated license even of the same track).
On average, most of the claims are cleared within the first 72h of the dispute submission and please do not follow the next steps if 72h haven’t passed first.
Step 3) 72h have passed since your dispute and the claim is still active
Contact the author of the track in question directly via the contact form on Envato or via author’s email or, if nothing else works, via author’s social media. Your email should have the following information: link to your claimed video, copy of a license (or copy/paste text of the license) and link to your Youtube channel. In most cases, authors (composers, producers) can submit your video for clearing directly. However, in order not to overload the system and authors, again, please wait first for 72h for clearance.
Step 4) Your dispute has been rejected and/or author isn’t responding after 2 days (in total 5 days have passed since your dispute)
Contact the company claiming your video directly (the name of the company can usually be seen under the claim info - for example AdRev, Epic Elite, etc.) - again, your email to the claiming company should have a link to your affected video, a copy of a license and a link to your Youtube channel.
Some companies may ask for further info.
If, however, the name of the claimant company cannot be found, I’d suggest to re-contact the author again and/or Envato support. Wait for several working days for author and/or Envato to reply before re-submitting your new dispute via the Youtube system. My advice is to be patient and persistent at this step as, if your next dispute isn’t accepted, your video may end up being under a takedown and things might be trickier to be fixed (if that happens and at the same time you get ahold of the author/claiming company - your video can still be cleared and everything will still be just fine).
From personal experience, about 98-99% of all claims get cleared/released in Steps #2 and #3 and I would suggest being patient and persistent with contacting authors/claiming companies.
We’ve had a few cases where a customer’s YouTube channel has been taken down due to the customer constantly re-disputing the same wrong information instead of contacting us directly after the first rejection (and a few of these channels have had over 1M subscribers!) - all of them have been restored in the end and customers could continue to have their channels and retain their subscribers and their earnings but it took several weeks of contacting Youtube (from both ours and customer’s sides).
Long story short - do not panic and, if first dispute is rejected or isn’t cleared longer than 72h - contact us (authors/claiming companies) - as in the long run, panic will just create more issues and problems for both sides!
That’s all from me for now, hope this helps!
Yours,
Rafael Krux