Youtube is flagging my content! - Why & What to do about it

If you've used descript stock media and YouTube is flagging your videos for copyright issues, here's why it's happening and what you can do about it. When you upload a video to YouTube, it goes through this process. This page probably looks familiar to you. What's happening is YouTube's system is scanning the video for copyrighted content, mostly music, but it could also be detecting video or portions of video matching another video inside YouTube's Content ID system. Now, the issue is, when using Descript's stock media, it sometimes gets flagged by YouTube for copyright violations. So it's crucial to know that not all descript media can be used commercially. Here's descript's help page about what can and cannot be used commercially. The first point here is for unsplash, which is inside of your media bin, go to Images, then unsplash. And these images, as it says here, are free and can be used for most commercial, personal and editorial projects. The second point is for Giphy GIFs. These are under the GIF heading. These cannot be used commercially, so avoid these in your projects. That's my general guideline with those. And then the third point is that all other video stock photos, stock illustrations, backgrounds, music and sound effects may be included into works that you create, including most commercial, personal and editorial use. And then below that, they have links to Unsplash and giphy's terms, so that you can dive deeper into those if you wanted. But here's the thing that I see a lot of my clients run into, which is that their videos are still mistakenly getting flagged for copyright violations. So descript included this blue box here saying how to avoid copyright strikes. And basically they have this short form which I'll leave links to in this page in the description, but you can fill it out, and by doing so, it'll prevent YouTube from mistakenly flagging your content for copyright claims or strikes. And to fill it out, you just need to give it three pieces of information. It only takes 20 seconds. Basically, you need to give it your channel ID, your user ID, and both of those can be found under your advanced settings inside of YouTube. And then the third piece is the email address for your account. You hit Submit and it'll say, sorry for the inconvenience, but the issues are usually resolved within 30 minutes. And it also tells you in the future, you can be sure to avoid this issue by using the Publish to YouTube feature that's included in Descript, which, by the way, I did a video about how that works a couple days ago. I'VE kept this intentionally high level because, well, I'm not a lawyer, and this gets into the realm of copyrights and royalties, and it's not always black and white. But in summary, don't panic if you get a YouTube copyright warning when you're using descript integrated stock media. The system makes mistakes, and you can avoid those by knowing which content is okay to use or not, by filling out the form I showed you, and by publishing directly to YouTube from the descript app. And if you have any doubts, if you're uncomfortable using descript stock footage, there's a workaround. You can always pay for the license for content that you use. There's plenty of great services for doing that, and there's even free services available online. Most people don't know about this, but YouTube has its own audio library that can be found inside of your YouTube studio, and they have a huge library of music and sound effects that you can use on any of your videos. As always, this is all I do. I'm here to help you learn descript. Check out my website to see the rest of my services.