This news agency has found a niche business model—turning copyright claims into a revenue stream.
Asian News International (ANI) now scans the digital wilds, slapping copyright claims on every tiny teeny clip of theirs that YouTubers would have clipped to build their content. The copyright bounty hunters inside the agency are now aggressively forcing YouTubers to cough up anything between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 18 lakh.
The weapon of choice is copyright strike, which when fired thrice in a row could force YouTube to shut down the channel immediately.
The latest story by Ayushi Kar explains how the agency has quietly adopted a new strategy to punitively leverage YouTube’s copyright policies in India to generate revenue – forcing YouTube creators to buy expensive year-long licences from them to revoke the copyright strike.
They might have used only seconds-long clip to build their content, but ANI is slapping them with exorbitant costs regardless of fair-use exemptions granted under the copyright laws in India and across the world.
What allows YouTubers to use ANI video clips is the legal principle called fair use or “fair dealing” under the Indian Copyright Act. Under this, copyright rule shouldn’t apply if the YouTuber takes a paragraph from a story or a few seconds long audiovisual excerpt and uses it to make something substantively new.
While ANI might be following a business it understands to be legal and fair, the episode has raised larger concern about copyright laws and the fair use rights in India by content producers.
But for many genuine content creators, the real backstabber is YouTube itself. When it comes to enforcement of copyright claims, YouTube tends to play it safe in India—better to take content down than risk wading into legal trouble.
The fair-use doctrine is given a short shrift by YouTube, which swiftly takes down content accused of violating copyright, long before the fairness of its use is ever truly examined.
This is arguably the first case to come out in public about any major news outlet enforcing copyright claims against YouTube creators in the space of news and political satire. The only major instance of copyright claims filed by a legacy media organisation was the 2021 defamation and copyright violation case brought by India Today against Newslaundry for a satire roasting its anchors, and sought damages worth Rs 2 crore.
Read the full story here: ANI Finds Business Niche In Copyright Claims Against YouTubers