What works to get through one of the biggest challenges on YouTube from receiving a copyright strike? I will show you exactly how to get through this based on my experience getting through it myself.
#1 DO NOT DELETE THE VIDEO because that also deletes access to this process!
How to successfully remove a YouTube copyright strike
This was my YouTube account for two months in 2015 and still two years later is the most painful experience I have gone through on YouTube..
It was frustrating.
It was difficult.
I was aggravated, because I think at least I have a great YouTube channel that people love, and yet here's what it looked like, with this copyright strike.
My account was in bad standing.
I couldn't upload longer videos.
I couldn't use my external notifications.
I couldn't create a paid channel, do unlisted or private videos.
It was really painful, especially to my ego.
I felt a lot of pain and frustration on account of this, because I have a YouTube channel that people like.
I had at the time millions of views and thousands of subscribers. I was really frustrated to get hit with a copyright strike when I had not even used someone else's copyrighted material.
Here's what my account looks like now.
Everything is back in good standing.
I successfully went through the counter notification process and I got my video restored.
I'm going to show you exactly what to do in order to go through this process successfully, because this process has been the most frustrating thing I went through on YouTube by far. There's nothing I've done that's been so frustrating.
I'm going to take you to the place where you get this email from YouTube. I'll show you the email right now. Do you know how happy I am to receive this email from copyright@youtube.com?
“Hello. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we've completed processing your counter notification. The content has been restored. Your account will not be penalized.”
Now, that seems like a miracle from looking at when my account looked like this before.
It's really not that hard to go through and actually do this.
I'll show you exactly what you have to do starting right now in order to get this done.
Here is the beginning of it.
I got this email and this is where the nightmare all started.
I received this copyright strike email and to keep the person who submitted it private, I'm just showing you the bottom part of the email, which is where the most critical thing you need to do is.
It will show you that your video has been taken down.
It has an awful title like "Copyright Takedown Notice."
Real nasty title!
What you need to do to get your video restored is go down to the bottom of the email where it says, “What to do next.”
If for some reason you don't have this email, when you're in your Status and Features, as you can see right here, there's a submit counter notification button.
You just click on submit counter notification and you go through the process, and submit the counter notification.
Now, with that said, the video I had up on my YouTube channel, the copyright owner actually said there was no copyrighted material in it. They did not cite any actual material that was copyrighted. What they were is frustrated that I'd put up a video that talked about them and that showed up on their search terms for their name, and they hit me punitively with the copyright strike.
Now, that can happen.
If you've got hit with a legit copyright strike where you know you used someone's copyrighted material without their permission, then you risk losing your entire account if you go through the copyright counter notification process.
If you blatantly and knowingly took someone's video completely straight from their YouTube channel and uploaded it directly back to your YouTube channel, you do not want to submit a counter notification unless you're willing to risk losing your whole account and getting sued.
Here's what's going on with the counter notification process.
YouTube took this video down because the person who filed this claim against me said that they were willing to initiate a lawsuit, and that this was their copyright video.
YouTube then took the video down.
If you submit your copyright counter notification, you must give the party that submitted the copyright strike against you everything they need in order to file a lawsuit against you.
This is what you’d get as soon as you go through the process, after you have clicked on the submit counter notification button.
It says, “Dear Jerry Banfield, if we receive no response, your material will be restored to YouTube.”
That's how my material got restored.
Now, why this happened?
I provided the person who submitted this copyright claim with all of my personal information: my email address, my physical address, my full name and my phone number.
I gave them all of that information because the point of doing this process is YouTube sets both parties up to go through a lawsuit.
Now, most of the time that's not going to happen.
The idea of submitting this counter notification is that you give the other party everything they need to file a lawsuit against you.
Submitting a counter notification basically tells the person that submitted the video, “Go ahead and sue me. I didn't do anything wrong.”
You give them all of your information that they would need to go file a lawsuit. If the person who filed it is out of the country, a lot less of a concern of this. But if the person is in the same country as you, or they can have legal presence in that country, and you reasonably expect they could do a good job in court against you, you might not want to go through this process.
In any other scenario, you absolutely want to submit this copyright counter notification as soon as possible. You want to go submit it as soon as possible. What you get is a little tiny thing in here.
You get a little tiny blurb to explain to them exactly what went on. You can see this is a little paragraph I wrote. All you have to do is explain exactly why the copyright notification was wrong and/or why you had the right to use this video.
The profile picture of the guy I talked about in this video was included, so I thought it was a good idea to mention that I had the right to use everything I did under fair use for news reporting.
You can find things like this if you search "fair use for news reporting" in Google. You can search the fair use rule on Wikipedia too. You can read this information and see in what circumstances you have the right to do this.
So you can go through and submit a copyright counter notification, whether you want to reject that they had any right to it at all, or if they may have had copyright to it, but you've used it in a way that it's fair for news reporting.
Another example, this is not legal advice or anything, but just a rough example. You took someone else's video they made and commented on it in a way that's relevant for news reporting.
You took a viral video, and then you commented on it, the same way you might see the news doing, the same way you might see on a TV show.
That's fair use also if you used it for educational purposes. You took a viral video and pointed to several things in the video and said, “Okay, here's where they do this and that's why this video might have got viral.”
That's fair use also.
What you can't do is just take the video verbatim and upload it with the music and all, and then try to say that's fair use.
So what you can do is to learn about fair use a little bit before you go submit your counter notification, but it's really important to go through and submit your counter notification as soon as possible.
That was the main thing I did right.
Almost as soon as I saw this, I went through and submitted my counter notification.
Here's what you need to submit your counter notification.
You need your contact information, your full legal name and the specific URL of the exact video.
Do not delete the video.
You can leave the video up there and it will show like this, and you just want to leave it like this.
Once you've submitted your counter notification, it will look like this and say, "Counter notification pending."
You just leave it like that and you can get to all of this by going to the copyright notices in your account and going to the Support Information on YouTube about this.
That means you'll need all of your personal information as I've shown you earlier. All of your personal information, the URL, you must agree to the following, you must swear that this is exactly what you're saying, and then you give your physical electronic signature.
That's all you have to do to submit your counter notification.
You want to go and do that immediately.
Now, then you get the most challenging part of doing this. Let me show you why it was challenging.
I submitted this and this all started on the date I got that original email.
I'll show you that again, here's how long all of this took.
I got the copyright notice on April 5, 2015.
I got the email confirming my counter notification on April 7, 2015. This was a Sunday, so then two days later, I got the email confirming they’d received and forwarded my counter notification.
Then, on May 22, 2015, I got the email saying my video was reinstated.
I hope the most helpful thing out of this is that it will take patience and that's normal for it to take that long.
I know I was frustrated because when you get this email, when you get the one here from YouTube, it says 10 to 14 business days from today.
Last time I checked, April 7 to May 22 is not 10 to 14 business days, it's a lot longer.
The important thing is that the video was reinstated. As you saw, the penalty was removed from my account.
Going from a place of frustration and getting these emails, over to now where my account is in good standing, the strike was removed.
I think the default seems to be if you go through and do this process, as soon as you get the copyright take down notification, you go in and submit the counter notice with as much relevant information you can have on fair use or on how you own the copyright.
You get your counter notification received email, and then you just play the waiting game.
The other scenario, you can actually get the other party to retract their take down notice.
In the email YouTube sent me, you see that you can also contact the party that removed your video to ask them to retract their take down.
Now, that's not likely to work and that did not work for me.
I had been in communication with the person who initiated this process on my channel prior to them doing this. They did this, and then even though I sent them an email, a Facebook message, a message on another platform, they ignored all of them.
It's worth trying at least to politely request that the other person retract their take down, and that you in return will do something for them, such as delete the video or whatnot.
It's much better if you can get them to retract their take down. That is a much faster option. I will bet lots of times this does happen the same way it happened with me where I actually had some kind of relationship with the person who did this to my account.
They did it knowing it was purely punitive and if you can repair that kind of relationship, you can also get a retract to take down. Otherwise, you may have to sit and wait through all of these steps I showed you here.
You may have to wait nearly two months from the time it happens, but it's worth the wait if you’ve got a YouTube channel that you're using the features on.
It's worth the wait.
I hope this can help you if you're in the middle of a copyright counter notification to understand that it might take a while.
I hope this video's useful for you because I know this was a very challenging thing for me on YouTube, and so I hope this is useful for you in what you're doing with your YouTube channel.
I hope this gives you the courage and the motivation to go through and do that counter notification right now, to get that process started, unless you're in a place where you know you totally just copied the other party and you don't want to actually have any legal repercussions from it.
I hope all of this is useful for you.
Thank you very much for reading this post! If you would like to see the video it was based on, watch below!
Thank you very much to @gmichelbkk for converting the transcription of the YouTube video from GoTranscript into this beautiful post for Steemit, which is much faster to read than the video and has all of the highlights in screenshots!
I appreciate the time you've spent here looking at my nearly two months through the copyright process, and I hope this is useful for you in getting through any copyright take down issues or copyright strikes you have on your account.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield