Copyright Claim YouTube

What is a copyright claim on YouTube?

A copyright claim on YouTube is an automatic notice generated when Content ID matches your upload against a video, or a segment of a video, already registered by a rights holder. Depending on the owner's settings, the claim can block, monetize or track your video.

A claim is not a strike

Copyright claims affect videos, but they usually don't affect your channel or account. A copyright strike is a different thing: it comes from a valid copyright removal request, a legal takedown notice, and it lands on the channel. Content ID is a tool YouTube built; removal requests are defined by law.

One video can carry several claims at once, from different claimants and on different segments. A claim can also apply in one country while the same video stays unrestricted in another.

What a claim does to your video

The copyright owner picks the policy. A copyright claim can:

• Block the video from being viewed

• Monetize the video by running ads on it, sometimes sharing revenue with the uploader

• Track the video's viewership statistics

Any of these actions can be geography-specific. For videos longer than 3 minutes, a tracked or monetized video stays viewable on YouTube with the active claim on it — monetize is the most common policy on music claims, and ads can run before the video or during it if the video is longer than 8 minutes. Shorts of 1–3 minutes are the exception: an active claim blocks them regardless of the policy.

How to check a claim in YouTube Studio

Sign in to YouTube Studio, open Content in the left menu, click the filter bar and choose Claims. Hover over Claims in the Restrictions column, then click See details to see the claimant and the exact segment. Claimed Shorts sit under the Shorts tab.

From there you have 4 options:

• Leave it as is — keep the claim on the video and change your mind later

• Remove the claimed content — erase the song, trim out the segment, or replace the song with a track from the YouTube Audio Library

• Share revenue — available if you're in the YouTube Partner Program and the music in your video is claimed

• Dispute the claim — only if you hold all the necessary rights, your use is a copyright exception such as fair use, or the video was misidentified

After you dispute, the claimant has 30 days to respond; if they don't, the claim expires and is released from your video. If they reject the dispute you may be able to appeal, and the claimant then has 7 days. Giving credit, owning a copy of the song and choosing not to monetize are not valid reasons to dispute. We walk through the practical steps in our guide on how to fix a copyright claim on YouTube.