How to Stop, Prevent or Catch people that copy my youtube videos and reuses them for their own purpose?

Jungle Explorer

Jungle Explorer

I Love YTtalk
I know we are in the same boat. We work hard to make videos to upload them to our channel so that WE get credit for our work, and maybe a little compensation. But we all know that anyone can download our content and reuse it. Now, youtube has a way to find our content that is "reused" on someone else's channel and warn us and give us the chance to report it if it is unauthorized. But what about the rest of the WEB? What's to stop people from taking our videos, cutting it up and using it as their own? How can I go about find my own work that has been done this way?
 
Hi again, JE, and good to see you again.

One way, though very labour-intensive, is to Google Search either your video titles and/or your video thumbnails. There are video sites out there which are nothing but entire scrapes of the whole YouTube site under a different name. The only way to stop these from posting your content would be to file a DMCA Takedown with the host of the site (the hosting company that owns the server the site is on). If you find your videos under another name on a different video site, say VIMEO or DailyMotion, you can file the equivalent of a free-form DMCA Takedown with the site admin.
 
There isn't a great deal that can be done to detect it after content has been stolen but there are a few things you can do to discourage the theft in the first place:

  • In order to discourage them and/or to make it easier to prove it's your work is to put a faint watermark on the video or have your branding somewhere in the video. Example, if you're doing a vlog sitting in your room, you could put a physical sign behind you on a bookshelf with your channel name and logo. It will make potential thieves think twice and they'll probably move on to other "less risky" targets. Likewise, if you're doing screen recordings of some sort, put your channel name and logo in the footer for the full duration of the video.
  • You can also mention (audibly) the name of your channel at the beginning, middle and end of the video. Thieves won't want to steal videos that mention a channel name that doesn't match their own channel.....
  • Put a clear / stern copyright message in the video description saying something along the lines of "Copyright belongs to XXXXX. This content must not be reproduced in any form for any reason blah blah blah" - Of course if a thief really wants to steal your video, he/she will do it anyway, but if they see that copyright message that leaves no doubt that they do NOT have permission, then some of them will probably move on to other easier targets.
  • If you have a website and you want to protect text articles and images, there are various solutions for preventing "copy-paste" of text and download of images. Here is an example for Wordpress sites - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-content-copy-protector/
 
I was thinking of maybe embedding a watermark in my videos. My issue is that I do product reviews for Chinese products. Some of these companies think that because I did a product review of their product, they own my video and can use the footage however they want. Now, obviously, I like it when people share my youtube video link or embed it. That is good and generates more traffic for my channel. The problem is they want to download it and put it or part of it on their own sites and stuff. That does not help my channel or make me any money. They even have the nerve to ask me for the original files in some cases. I tell them that if they want a royalty-free video they can use however they want, they have to pay me $75 an hour plus expenses to produce it. So far, no bites.

I think embedded watermarking is the only way. Audio can be replaced. Copyright statements can be ignored. But it is really hard to erase an embedded watermark out of a video. My only concern is that by doing so, will it cause irritation to my viewers. I would like to see some examples of other channels that do this to get some creative ideas about how to go about this.
 
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