I bumped right up to a youtube copyright infringement issue on the very first few youtube videos I uploaded.
This video contains content from… , who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds
That’s what I saw on my third video a few hours after uploading it on youtube.
After a few seconds in a ‘what the…’ limbo I got back up and realized that I had used a background music that of course is copyrighted. I remember having used Kelly Clarkson’s ‘My life would suck without you’. And then I realized how stupid of me to have not thought about youtube copyright infringement issues before uploading.
I thought that it was alright to use any kind of music because a lot of youtube videos have background music from current popular artists. And they don’t get flagged down for youtube copyright infringement issues. Questions, questions. Nowadays, when you have questions, you go right up to google for answers. And what better source of solutions would there be than an entity which owns youtube…Google.
I wanted to know a way around this youtube copyright infringement problem specifically regarding a video’s accompanying music. Here’s a couple of ways around it.
3 Ways Around Youtube Copyright Infringement
- Use Your Own Music
To avoid copyright problems with youtube, the best technique would be to use your own music. But this of course is useful only to musicians, or people who have a knack for composing original music. That would leave 91% of us behind and in the dark. And uh, I just made that statistics value up. - Use free / public domain music
So, for those who can’t compose their own music, the only apparent solution would be to use other people’s music. Thankfully, there are the so called public domain music and there are musicians who generously give their music freely to others. An initial cursory search gave me the following sites:
http://www.publicdomain2ten.com/
http://www.mp3jackpot.com/
http://mkk2ten.com/
The first two sites above are sources for old music that is already in the public domain and thus are copyright-free. If you don’t mind using really old music (1922 and earlier), then these sites will provide your needs. The other 2 are sites offering music created by modern-day musicians who gave permission for anyone to use their music as they please. You can search for more sites like these online. I’m sure there are countless others out there. - Change the music’s speed or pitch
This must be what other folks are using in their videos with popular music in their backgrounds. How else can they post videos with Jason Mraz singing in the background?The trick is to change the music’s tempo, or pitch, or speed by a very small amount that’s not very noticeable to human ears but is very apparent to the music bots that youtube or other audio monopolizers are using.
You can use your favorite audio editting software. If you don’t have one, you can download a free one that works pretty much like the pricey audio editting software out there. It’s called Audacity. If you have even just a little aptitude for tinkering with music software, you can download audacity here.
Here’s a video showing you how to change tempo, pitch, or speed of a sound file.
Do you know of any other ways to get around youtube copyright infringement issues?
NOTE: The best methods would be the first 2 methods stated above. Obviously, the third method still is a violation of the original artists’ copyright, even if passes through youtube’s filters.