Hi Dave. I know you’re a YouTuber, so I figured you’d know: is there any wan to retract a copyright strike complaint against someone in YouTube?
The good news is that yes, there is a way to retract a copyright strike in YouTube. But before I show you with my own AskDaveTaylor YouTube channel as an example, a brief explanation: Videos that we YouTubers upload to the site are considered our intellectual property. Reasonable enough. But there are people who will download someone else’s video and then upload it as their own content. Worse, some of them then have ads on video content that was never theirs in the first place. Ads or not, however, it’s clearly illegal, unethical and, well, uncool to be publishing someone else’s content without permission.
To make it easier for us YouTube creators, the site has a tool that actually analyzes and compares all video content to see if there are duplicates. It’s so smart that if someone downloads my video and then embeds it in a longer video of their own, I’ll get a notification about that too, so it’s not just 100% duplicates. Quite a processing task, actually, but somehow it works.
When it finds these dupes it notifies the YouTube channel owner and gives us a chance to issue what’s known as a “copyright strike” against that particular channel. Generally, that includes YouTube immediately deleting that video but the bigger issue is that YouTube also has a “three strikes and you’re out” rule so if someone is snagging content illegally they can find their channel demonetized or even shut down. Fairly dire, but stealing content is pretty ungood too. The mail they get is the dreaded “Copyright Infringement Notification”.
And so your request: Occasionally you might issue a YouTube copyright strike against a video just to realize – perhaps because they emailed you – that it’s not a violation and that you previous agreed to let them post it on their channel too. Oops! With that 3-strike rule, obviously a retraction is pretty important! So let’s see how you can do that…
Start by going to your YouTube Creator Studio page – youtube.com/dashboard usually gets you there – and look for “Submit Retraction” as an option on the “Video Manager” menu on the left:
As you might expect, choose “Submit Retraction” and you’ll see a list of all copyright strikes you’ve submitted to the system against other YouTube channels. They’ll look like this:
In the above you can see that the claim has been processed: the video has been removed which is why there’s no thumbnail shown. But what if I realized that the YouTube channel Wireless Portable Speaker is authorized to share my video content and I just plain forgot about it?
To retract a copyright strike, all you need to do is check the box on the left side, then, above all of these listings, you’ll see this:
Look down the page to ensure that just the video copyright strikes you want to actually retract are selected, then click on “Retract Claims“. It’ll confirm, that’s what you really want to do:
Yes? You sure? Then click “OK” and it’ll be withdrawn from the system. You’ll get an email confirmation too:
And that’s all there is to the process. Now, go create some more content! 🙂