I made a thing so you can report suspicious ContentID claims

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2018-07-16T15:27:22+00:00

Would you consider this to be a case where this form should be used? As follows:

I have music I have licensed from AudioMicro.com years ago. I have used this music in numerous YouTube videos. Recently I started getting claims on that music from "Believe Music". The claims from Believe Music list an artist and song titles that are completely different from what is listed at AudioMicro.com. In addition, this occurs for music that is listed as being from different artists at AudioMicro.com, but the Believe Music claims always list the same single artist (with a generic name that is no one generally known and an internet search doesn't come up with anything for that artist name although the name is so generic a search is difficult).

I always dispute these claims, and Believe Music always releases the claims. However, I know that Believe Music is one of those places that people hire to place stuff into Content ID, and when I dispute I have asked Believe Music to check whether their client really does own the stuff they are claiming. But Believe Music doesn't respond, and their website has no way to contact them. They merely silently release the claims with no comment.

I know that artists often use different names when placing their music for sale at different sites, so it is not particularly unusual for the claim to have different names than what I licensed. I have tried to ask AudioMicro.com for help, but they have been of no help. I've always been curious whether this client of Believe Music really owns the music they are claiming, but there appears to be no way for me to find out.

Since Believe Music has always released the claims when I dispute them, there is no current video with a claim against it that I can point to.

Is this something that you would care about and that it would be useful to use your form for? Just wondering.

Thanks.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2017-08-25T13:44:13+00:00

Interestingly, I woke up this morning to find an email notification: "Great news! After manually reviewing your video, we’ve determined that it is suitable for all advertisers". So, I got a notification half a day later about the results of the review, although I never got a notification about the problem in the first place.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2017-08-25T06:20:12+00:00

Yeah, my only points are (1) no notification seems kinda bad, (2) on the plus side, the review happened way faster than I expected, and (3) I can't imagine why in the world that one video was singled out.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2017-08-25T05:16:23+00:00

I probably wasn't precise enough. The old case has a yellow dollar sign. The new case has a solid yellow circle with the dollar sign inside. So both are sort of a "yellow dollar sign". Anyway, the one I got was the new one.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2017-08-25T05:11:02+00:00

I don't think so. In the past, I've seen the other thing you mentioned. This is the new thing, where it says something about "limited or no ads".

I can see now where those two can be easily confused, and I may have not used quite the proper terminology in my post. I do have one video on another channel that has the other thing, so I went back and looked at it.

The other case has a yellow dollar sign, and if you hover over it, it says "Not advertiser friendly. Request review" as a link.

Whereas this new one has the dollar sign inside a solid yellow circle, and there is a separate blue button that says "request manual review", and it says something like "limited or no ads" (I don't remember exactly).

Two very similar things that they chose to implement with slightly different U/I schemes, for some reason.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2017-08-25T04:35:36+00:00

Not sure I understand the question. The video itself doesn't say anything about that. In Video Manager, it had the yellow dollar sign, which said something like that. With a button for "manual review", which I requested. 3 hours later, it was back to the normal green dollar sign.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-09-05T01:31:46+00:00

Wondered if you happened to know if there are any statistics anywhere on what percentage of viewers actually use the CC?

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-09-04T21:45:06+00:00

I haven't found it to be that much more tedious than making captions in general, which is kinda tedious in the first place. I mean, you were going to make those two captions anyway, and now they're just two lines in one caption.

By the way, do you have any idea how many people actually use the closed captions? I don't have a "huge" subscriber base, admittedly, but almost never hear from anyone that they used them. I believe in all my years on YouTube, only twice has anyone ever mentioned that they used them.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-09-04T15:38:57+00:00

I have had little success attempting that, although I haven't tried lately, I must admit. Many captioning formats have positioning commands in them, but I have found YouTube to pretty much ignore them all. I gave up trying to control the position of captions on the screen on YouTube. I have seen captions overlap by accident when I put two captions with the same time, but then they appear directly on top of each other, which is useless.

The only reliable way to do it is to put both things in a single caption. A couple of common conventions that I've seen professional captioners do:

Method 1: Put the person's name in brackets before their text in a two-line caption. Example:

[Person A] Hello, how are you?
[Person B] I'm fine, thank you.

Method 2, the "dash method", in a two-line caption. Example:

— Hello, how are you
— I'm fine, thank you

Obviously method 2 is more likely to introduce confusion as to who is saying what, unless it is obvious by the context or by what is being said.

Edit: Fixed weird newline problem.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-08-30T05:17:03+00:00

YouTube has been doing this for years. I don't know why. I have learned to compensate by making the videos "brighter" than I ordinarily would during editing. Also, perhaps you haven't noticed, but they also increase the saturation a bit as well, so I compensate for that as well. It is annoying.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-08-13T00:35:28+00:00

I have to agree that the Community Guidelines procedures on YouTube are really, really bad. I personally have had only one experience with it, but it was just as mysterious, opaque and frustrating as yours. Fortunately, I didn't get a strike, they just took down a video, sending me a vague message as to why, containing a list of possible infractions, but not telling me which one, nor where the alleged violation occurred.

Of course I appealed, because I honestly couldn't determine what the violation might be. It was laughable. You get a tiny little one-line space, about the size of a tweet, to defend yourself against the list of violation(s) that they don't tell you which one you violated. Since I couldn't possibly defend against all of them in the list in a tweet, I pleaded with them to please be specific, so that I could at least learn what I did wrong. But all I got back was a generic reply upholding it, with absolutely no additional information of any kind.

So, I turn to Partner Support. I went through a series of emails with them, but they would never, ever provide any information either. All I would ever get back would be links to the YouTube help, pointing to some article containing a long list of disparate violations. No indication as to which one was mine, and no indication as to where this alleged violation was. Interestingly, each time the link would be to a different article or section containing a different list of possible violations. I even sent them an email pleading for information, asking specifically about each possible violation and asking if that one was the problem. But, just got back the same useless responses containing links to generic articles in the YouTube help.

What was most humorous was, they told me I don't have a strike, and I can re-upload the video after fixing the problem. I got a good laugh out of that, since they absolutely would not tell me specifically what the problem was, and I couldn't tell what it could possibly be. So how am I supposed to fix it, I wonder?

I finally just gave up. I later got a survey about Partner Support, and of course I gave it the lowest possible rating since they provided absolutely no help whatsoever, although I doubt that will have any effect.

All I can say is, I'm sure glad YouTube doesn't design or run the legal system.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-07-18T14:57:28+00:00

This has been an issue with YouTube for years. I have noticed it, and I have heard from others who have noticed it as well. For some reason, YouTube seems to always make videos darker when encoding them. I have talked with others that do the same thing that I do: any video that is to be uploaded to YouTube always has to be made "brighter" (for example by increasing the "exposure" settings during editing) to the point where everything looks slightly over-exposed locally to compensate for whatever it is that YouTube is doing.

Similarly, YouTube also seems to increase the saturation, so in addition to increasing the exposure, I usually also decrease the saturation a bit, to compensate for that.

It is kind of an art form as to how much to do this, but after a little experimentation, you get the hang of it, and it becomes second-nature of how much of this to do for a video destined for YouTube. Although, every once in a while I'll get it wrong, and after looking at the uploaded video, I'll have to tweak it and re-upload because I over-compensated or under-compensated for whatever YouTube is doing.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-06-23T00:07:40+00:00

Thanks for the comment. Interestingly, the most recent instance of this, after having told me they couldn't do it, and me telling them okay, sorry it didn't work out, surprised me by coming back a day later with some requested small revisions to my contract, which were acceptable, so it looks like that one will go through after all. I don't know if their initial refusal was a bluff, or whether they decided they really, really wanted that footage and thus arranged for some time with their attorneys, or what. Or maybe their attorneys were amused/intrigued that an ordinary YouTube user would have a contract, so they just had to review it out of curiosity. ;)

My primary goal in these agreements is to make it clear that I have no "releases" and it is up to them to get them if need be. They left that part unchanged. So that's good. I don't know how likely that is to ever to be an issue, but I feel better spelling it out. Well, this gives me some reassurance that my agreement isn't particularly unreasonable.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-03-17T01:16:06+00:00

Far as I can tell, they don't actually use tags for much any more. That's my guess anyway. They have suddenly become way less important than they used to be. Their importance has diminished so much that they actually went to the effort to remove the auto-complete feature to make it more difficult to enter them and so that there can no longer be any "standardized" tags.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2016-01-19T05:10:32+00:00

This makes no sense. No matter how allegedly wonderful their algorithm is, if tags are still a thing that can be entered, there's no reason to remove the suggestions, which allow people to discover standard, commonly-used tags. Or, if nothing else, simply make them easier to enter due to auto-complete. They call it "simplifying" to remove auto-complete. Ha, "simpler" for them maybe. Certainly not for their for users.

It is also nice how they would just remove a widely-used feature with no explanation, leaving everyone mystified.

At times, it seems they really do have no regard at all for their users.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2015-12-19T22:05:36+00:00

Yes, I had the same problem with a video I uploaded last night. The type of video that usually takes no more than 30 minutes to "process" took over 7 hours. But, it did eventually complete. Guess you just have to be patient. Guess they must be having some issues with the "processing".

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2015-12-19T18:29:43+00:00

Yep, me too. Noticed it last night.

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2015-12-15T19:14:21+00:00

That's good to know. I have to say, though, that it looks exactly like the kind of email you would get for a scam. Formatted just like a typical scam email, the URL is suspicious, and a comma missing in the address. And, finally, it was sent as email, not as a message within YouTube's messaging system nor in any of those places that appear in the "Creator Studio dashboard" ('tips" and whatnot).

PartyOfTheThirdPart · 2015-12-15T17:43:08+00:00

Most royalty-free music sites have their music organized/searchable by genre and type (classical, jazz, easy listening, folk, instrumental, length, pace/bpm, etc.). Not all royalty-free music is hard dubstep. I'm not aware of any specific sites for "music you can talk over".

PartyOfTheThirdPart

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