A little more than one year ago, I uploaded a video showing the construction steps in building my 12″ disk sander (“Building A Disk Sander”). Shortly thereafter, I got a copyright violation warning from YouTube. These aren’t specific about what it is, just say “matched third party content”. I was a bit baffled at first. The only music that is on there was a public domain recording of a piece by Bach, performed by the US Air Force Band. Then I realized that the radio is playing in the background during the last minute or so, while I was demonstrating the sander. So, I pulled the video down, then redid the demo part without the radio on. Uploaded it once again.

All’s well for a few days then sure enough, I get another warning. At this point I had to believe they have made a mistake, so I challenged the decision and a few days later the warning is gone.

Months pass, then out of the blue again, the warning. Seems this video is cursed! Once again, I challenge it and it sits in limbo for more than a month. I then get a notification that the third party rights have been reaffirmed and that the music matched a digital signature from someone, somewhere. Seems the recording I had, that was supposed to be public domain and royalty free, was actually not. So much for trusting the place I got the music from. Yeah, it was free; yeah, I’m cheap and have no justification for complaining about it, since it didn’t cost me anything.

But it did. Because of this, I lost earning rights on that video. This may seem like a small thing (and it is, really), but it’s the kind of thing that bothers me.

The video is being watched for the disk sander, not the music. On the one hand, it doesn’t seem reasonable that someone else should profit from my work, while I get nothing. On the other, it’s a slippery slope that YouTube is on and this way is effective for discouraging the use of copyrighted third party material. The lesson I’ve learned is that I need to be very diligent about researching what I’m using in these videos, and not just take it at face value.

Soon after the last warning, I decided to redo the video again, and went looking for the raw video file. Unfortunately, before my last computer upgrade, I had a hard drive meltdown (this precipitated the computer upgrade) and I thought the files were lost. As it turns out, I was partly mistaken – the backup file was on another smaller drive that I hadn’t reinstalled.

The video is now redone and this time I’m sure the music won’t cause me any problems… fingers crossed!
As for the old one, I’ll leave it there. I wouldn’t gain anything by deleting it – it’s not like the traffic that it is getting now will somehow be transferred to the new one, it doesn’t work that way. On the contrary, deleting it would break links back to this site, and that is never a good thing.