YouTube quietly celebrated Independence Day this week by previewing a new feature that uses AI to help creators declare their independence from copyright infringement.
One of the most annoying parts of streaming or making YouTube videos for a living is when copyrighted music accidentally sneaks into your videos. If you don’t catch it in time, you could lose all the money that video is making and get in trouble with YouTube itself.
Sometimes it’s to detect piracy. Often it’s to catch people who stumble upon a licensed song in a video game or in the background of their vlog. For live videos, failing to mute the audio quickly enough could demonetize the stream’s archive, while creators making edited videos may have to spend hours painstakingly isolating a song from the rest of their work.
YouTube has had a “Delete Song” tool in beta for a while now, but the company wasn’t proud of its effectiveness. Now, it’s updating the feature with a new AI algorithm that will scan a video for copyrighted music and give creators two options.
Delete the song will use AI to attempt to intelligently cut out only the offending music while leaving the rest of your audio intact, while Mute all sounds will work as a fallback to mute a video for the duration of a copyrighted song.
As YouTube promises better performance with the updated tool, one company support page he says it “might not work if the song is too difficult to delete,” hence the need for a fallback solution.
Unfortunately, Erase Song is only available once a video has been the subject of a copyright claim, meaning it cannot be used proactively. To access it, go to the summary page of your copyright claim and click Select action in the lower right corner of the screen. Click on Delete the songSo choose Delete the song (yes, again) to use AI to intelligently remove only the requested audio. Otherwise, click Mute all sounds in the claimed segments if you’re not sure what the AI can do. You can preview your edited video before finalizing your claim, and if you mute all audio in a claimed segment, you can either use the suggested timestamps or customize your own.
YouTube’s support page states that “if all claimed audio can be disabled, the Content ID claim will be removed from your video,” meaning creators can use this system to avoid having to argue with a representative.
Erase Song joins other similar tools like Replace Song, which lets creators replace a copyrighted song with royalty-free music, and Trim Out Segment, which simply removes the copyrighted portion of a video in its entirety.
