What you need to know
- Creators will no longer be required to pull an entire video off YouTube in the event of a ContentID copyright infringement.
- Assisted Trim is an easy-to-use tool that will trim the infringing sections out of videos without re-uploading.
- Assisted Trim will help fight demonetization and prevent video statistics from being thrown off.
One of the biggest frustration points of posting videos to YouTube is the rampant copyright strikes that happen any time music, movies, or games are found in the video. While this doesn't happen with every single song or other copyrighted type of media, I've had plenty of my own personal videos get flagged for copyright infringement simply because I had music playing in the background. Previously, the only option for creators was to completely remove the video from YouTube, edit the infringing content out, and re-upload it back to the platform.
That's a lot of work for what seems like a simple edit, but YouTube's editing tools have always been lacking quite a bit in this regard. Thanks to a new update to content creator tools on YouTube (discovered via 9to5Google), the new Assisted Trim tool will help you automatically trim out the infringing sections of your video without having to take the whole thing down and start over again. That's a massive improvement to a system that, otherwise, would have your original video demonetized or would have had forced you to completely start that view count over because you had to reupload the video.
YouTube announced this feature last week in a support post, and it's going live today for everyone. Ever since the launch of the latest suite of YouTube creator tools, YouTube has been working to make the vast amounts of statistics and information regarding its videos more accessible and actionable for creators. Having to pull down a video and lose any viewing statistics associated with the original upload wasn't just painful for analytics, it was also painful for the paychecks that might come from a well-performing video.
Issues regarding demonetization have been rampant on the platform since it became the world's largest streaming service (that's basically the entire decade), so it's great to see YouTube finally addressing something that's been needed for a very long time. Being able to quickly be able to remove a piece of the video that's been identified as copyright is extremely important for any creator, no matter the size of the channel.
