Its a bit unnerving to lose control (albeit briefly) of your film; especially, when all the appropriate licensing was obtained. Upon upload to YouTube, your media is scanned with proprietary technology to identify reuse of copyright materials. Offending songs flagged by the AdShare service, will receive a 30-day copyright claim on YouTube. The owner of the material is notified and can either take down your video (resulting in a YouTube channel copyright strike), release your video, or flag it with "Includes copyrighted content". The latter could include the addition of ads. Having been personally impacted, I wanted to share how to remediate this issue with efficiency.
Step 1. Hide your problems. When initially uploading YouTube videos, it's best to set them as 'Unlisted'. AdShare will immediately flag the time code containing the media and submit the claim. For us, it was easier to address the issue behind the scenes without bringing this to the film's audience attention.
Step 2. Dispute your claim. The process is very simplistic and documented; however, there are no means for uploading/attaching a license or invoice to your dispute. Instead, I recommend copying and pasting the information from the invoice. Pond5 support suggests also referencing their Royalty License agreement and record which company raised a claim. YouTube Help has two detailed support documents that inform you what to do; however, it’s mostly point/click and fill in text as to why the claim isn’t valid.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6013276?hl=en
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454
Step 3. Contact your music provider. I reached out directly to Pond5 support and included the affected YouTube URL, referenced the song's item number, transaction ID and purchase date. For good measure, I also attached a PDF of the invoice. Remember, that Pond5 must know which company raised the claim. Sadly, this is where you realize how organized your archives are or are not. Pond5 did a great job by immediately contacting AdShare and kept me informed via a support ticket. This is a great example of why you pay a few bucks more for your stock media - it’s all about back-end support.
I was fortunate to have this resolved in less than 24 hours, but YouTube warns it can take up to 30 days for the copyright owner to respond to your dispute. If the owner does not respond in that time window, the claim is dropped. Until then, any viewing restrictions and monetization are suspended. Per YouTube Help, “if you and the claimant both choose to monetize the video, the video will still earn revenue during the dispute process.”
Keep calm and dispute on!
