The internet offers anyone and everyone endless opportunities to express their creativity. You can share your ideas, your stories, your projects, or whatever else you create for the whole world to see. However, for every creator sharing their original ideas, there’s also someone out there waiting to take your content and use it as their own.

Here’s how to protect your content’s copyright.

Use a watermark on your videos.

One of the easiest ways to protect your content’s copyright is to simply add a watermark in the bottom of your videos. Include your channel name or logo in a nondescript font along the lower edge of the video. Make sure it stays for the entire duration of the video.

Utilize YouTube’s Copyright Match tool.

You may have been subject to a copyright claim from YouTube’s Content ID system. If you’ve used music, clips, images, etc. that are under someone else’s copyright, then the owner can ask to take your video down.

However, large companies aren’t the only ones whose copyright YouTube seeks to protect. Creators can utilize the Copyright match tool, which automatically searches for reuploads of your original content.

Make sure you’re respecting others’ copyright as well.

As previously mentioned, many content creators get hit with copyright claims from YouTube’s Content ID system. Getting too many strikes can really hurt your channel. Even one can take any revenue from a video and redistribute it to the copyright owner.

Therefore, it’s extremely important that you respect others’ copyright as well. Stick to using copyright-free background music, images, etc. If you want to use something that’s copyrighted, find out how to get a license to use it.

Copyright was designed to protect people’s original ideas. Use a watermark and YouTube’s Copyright Match tool to protect your videos while also respecting other creators’ and companies’ copyrights.