The Violinist

YouTube Studio is a tool that helps with managing YouTube content tht you've published to your channel.  I was in there yesterday when I  noticed the Copyright section and decided to see what it said.  It suggested I read this long bit about legal this and that and if I agreed to it, then click the button. 

What showed up next surprised me.  People have been taking our videos, exactly as they were published, voice and all, in their entirety, and republishing them on their pages.  YouTube already knew about this, had flagged them, and marked them as 100% copied from our page, which had published the content first.  

What did we want to do about it, YouTube wanted to know?  We could ask for the publisher be given seven days notice to remove the content and if they didn't comply, the video would be removed and they would have a content strike applied against them.  Or, we could have them be removed immediately and a strike immediately put on their channels. 

Oddly, most of the copies had had only a handful of views, so it's not as though the person was gaining much in the way of views or other benefit from reposting them.  The largest views was at thirty-five hundred, and that was an outlier.  

I had to fill out some very legal formal things, saying it was absolutely our content, we had created it and we were the sole owner of the content (which was all true).  This was in case we said someone had copied our content when in actuality we had perhaps copied theirs and they took us to court.   

YouTube then kindly asked if we would prefer in the future should this sort of thing happen again, that they go ahead and automatically remove the offending copy and place a strike on the other channel.  Sure, we said.   It was ever so nice of YouTube to handle all of this for us. 

We are contacted fairly regularly by companies who want to repost our content, saying how they are huge, large groups with millions of followers/subsribers.  One of them even said that they would get full ownership of the material, have exclusive rights to it, and could modify it in any way.   Who would fall for that?  Others aren't that sinister, but still want to make their brand by publishing other people's content instead of making their own.   And that's okay, it's synthesizing information that's similar into a cohesive collection.  

But I don't want to do any of it.  Perhaps we might get some views back to us or additional followers, but we might get nothing, while they get free content.  The stories I've heard make it sound like the latter is more probable.   Besides, we're muddling our way through this so far on our own, why stop now?

The Big Boy Update:  My son went to the grocery store with his father after school.  There was a man playing the violin in the food area and my son was mesmerized.  He asked if he could give the man some money.  When my husband was done shopping my son was still at rapt attention, listening to the classical violinist.  My son has always loved orchestra and classical music.  He asked if he could please give him some of his allowance.  He said he was amazing.  My father let him give some of his money to support the musician.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is going to have to wait in the waiting room while her father and  I have our teeth cleaned tomorrow.  We've never done this with her before.  She will be fine, she just likes to talk and will need to know she has to wait patiently until we get back, and that it won't be that long until we're done.