[Rich Z]

Any of you creating your own videos for YouTube may not be aware of an interesting YouTube policy that I only found out when I noticed that a couple of my recent videos had been flagged with some sort of copyright issue notice. At first I was taken back quite a bit, because all of my videos have been my own content, taken with my own camcorders and processed on my own computers. So how the heck could there be any sort of copyright infringement? Well, I had been adding in some audio clips that are provided by YouTube, but heck I thought they were being offered free and clear as public domain. When you call up the list of audio clips during editing, you will see this text plainly displayed there: "Ad-free and eligible for monetization". I guess I didn't fully understand what that means because DING DONG! Apparently I was wrong thinking they were actually for *free*.

So here's the scoop. You create your video with your camcorder, download it to your PC, process and edit it with your favorite video editor program, upload it up YouTube, and fill in the blanks to describe your video. Right then and there, you've probably got several hours into this effort. So what the heck, you click on the page that enables "monetization". Which means that commercial ads will be displayed over your video, and if you get any clicks on those ads, revenue is shared with you for those clicks. Sounds just dandy, doesn't it? And heck, there is even an option to add in what looks like a free audio clip to your video to spice it up a little bit.

Well get this. When you choose to include one of those what you thought were free audio clips that YouTube provides, the author of that audio clip (granted apparently MOST, but not ALL of them. But don't hold me to this.) gets the ad click revenue from YOUR video, and NOT you. Even though viewers (note that word) are watching the VIDEO because that is what they came to see on YouTube and why they clicked on YOUR video, and the audio clip is nothing really more than just fluff added to the video viewing experience. By adding in that audio clip, you just basically turned over the revenue generating rights for your video to someone else.

Anyway, so what those copyright notices were that I noticed associated with a few of my videos were pretty much a statement declaring "Sorry bub, the audio clip author is staking a claim on any revenue generated for the video clip you created." Not sure why only a couple had that notice and not all that I applied audio clips to, so there is a bunch I am not understanding about what is going on with this YouTube wrinkle.

OK, so I tried to remove the audio clip from one of my video clips with that notice and YouTube slaps me with a "Sorry, you cannot remove the audio from your video". Excuse me? :angry: That's when I started digging into what the heck was going on. So yeah, I just deleted the video and then re-uploaded it. Don't tell ME what I can and cannot do with MY video! But of course, this time without adding the audio clip. And for good measure I went through all of my videos and noted that all but two were marked as being now owned by the audio authors as far as ad sharing revenue was concerned. Fortunately i was able to delete the rest of those audio tracks without issue.

Anyway, not sure how many of you upload videos to YouTube, but I thought you might want to be made aware of this YouTube policy if you also add in those audio clips. Maybe I'm just dumb and didn't catch it, but I think that more than likely MOST people are not aware of this particular GOTCHA!