Streamers
3 Things You Need to Know About Intellectual Property and Licensing
2 mins read
As a someone who streams, you sometimes have to deal with copyright strikes when using licensed content in your streams. Your streams will suddenly be stopped, muted, or your videos will either be demonetized or taken down entirely after you stream. Worse, you might even be banned from the streaming platform if you get strikes repeatedly. While it may be tedious to learn EVERY line of law in relation to copyright, there are at least some basic aspects you need to know to avoid strikes in the future.
Licensed Music in Games and Videos
The most usual copyright strikes that happen are due to the use of licensed music when playing games or watching videos during streams. License holders have a way of tracking if a song is being used in monetized content, which is why some games have “streamer mode” options within their options. If you’re playing a game or video that has music within it, make sure to turn it down, or talk over the music so that you won’t get a strike. Remember that if songs are used in any monetized manner, you would need to buy the rights for it or secure a license to use it on your streams.
Copyrighted Images
When creating content, especially thumbnails, you have to be careful when dealing with copyrighted images. If you need to place images in your content, make sure to use stock/royalty-free pictures to avoid any legal disputes, or better yet purchase the necessary license to use the images.
Some sites have a library of images you may use for a minimal fee. You may want to check these instead of finding yourself in trouble for using a licensed image wrongly. Alternatively, you may also explore content with Creative Commons licenses, which allows artists and corporations to share content freely to others without legal repercussions.
Purchasing Rights
If you REALLY need to use certain licensed content in your streams, you may directly negotiate with the artists or their licensors instead in order to purchase the rights. The more established an artist is, the more you would usually need to invest. You should also check if something is already in the public domain, which means the duration of the copyright for that licensed content has already elapsed, so it may be freely used for your content.
These are just the basics of using copyrighted content. There’s a lot more you can read on in your own time and note as well that there might be varying degrees of enforcement of these depending on your country, but these basic tips should be enough for you to navigate safely around content legalities for starters.