Collective Copyright Management

Songwriters and composers become members of collecting societies to collect royalties from use of their works. Collecting societies monitor performances and distribution of the works on radio, television, in public venues, and online.

Collecting societies typically operate in a particular country and enter into a web of reciprocal deals with collecting societies in other countries. These deals determine how royalties earned in one country are paid to the appropriate songwriters and composers in another. In this way, a Brazilian songwriter might collect royalties when a cover band plays her song in a pub in London, or a fan shares an online video in which he covers it as well.

So how do collecting societies affect you as a YouTube user? If you’ve ever received a notice indicating that one of your videos may include copyrighted content administered by "Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society," or “one or more music publishing rights collecting societies,” it means that YouTube's Content ID system identified one or more musical compositions within your video to which a portion of the rights may be administered by a collecting society. A link to this notification will also appear in your Video Manager, next to the uploaded video.

If you receive a notice like the one above and believe your video was matched to copyrighted content by mistake, first, listen again. Is there music in the background? Was someone singing or playing a cover version of a song? These are uses of a copyrighted work that often require royalties be paid to the songwriter or composer. If you are certain that no copyrighted content is included in your video, intentionally or unintentionally, you can dispute the match by clicking "I believe this copyright claim is not valid" on the copyright notices page of your account. A link to this page can also be found next to the affected video in http://www.youtube.com/my_videos.

For additional information please read our article about Content ID, and how it works.