Chris Landa is the co-founder of SuperBam, a creator-first rights management company.
YouTube has recently announced new tools designed to give creators more control over their likeness, monetization, and identity. But at the very same time, creators using unlicensed content are facing the highest copyright strike risk in the platform’s history.
And on YouTube, a strike isn’t a slap on the wrist; it’s an existential threat. Takedowns can wipe out your channel, associated channels, and years of accumulated work.
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The standard advice from many top creator-economy lawyers is “just license or create everything,” which sounds simple enough. But it ignores the fundamental truth of YouTube: the platform was built on using third-party IP, and that dynamic will never disappear. To understand why the screws are tightening now, you have to understand how we got here.
Why content ID exists
Content ID has always lived in the tension between creators and rightsholders. It gives studios and labels the power to monetize, block, or remove unauthorized usage, tools creators understandably bristle at. But it has also been the backbone of YouTube’s growth and survival.
Rewind to 2006. Google had just acquired YouTube, and lawsuits from Paramount and other major studios were mounting. Hollywood was furious about rampant piracy and the near-total lack of control over how their content was circulating.
Google’s strategic answer was Content ID, a system that promised studios, We’ll detect your content. You decide whether to monetize it, block it, or remove it. Before the modern creator economy existed, this was revolutionary. It brought rightsholders into the ecosystem, gave them new revenue streams, and laid the groundwork for what became an unofficial licensing economy where creators could use the clip, and rightsholders would collect the revenue and be able to assert their rights.
This system is one of the main reasons YouTube survived, legally and commercially. Without it, the platform would likely have been sued out of existence.
So why are strikes increasing now?
For many years, there was a stable equilibrium: rightsholders benefited financially, and creators benefited creatively. That balance is now breaking, and the biggest disrupter is Shorts.
Shorts is the most transformative product change YouTube has made since the watch-time algorithm, but it has also become the breaking point for rightsholders for several reasons:
- A massive volume of unlicensed clips is uploaded daily
- Claimed Shorts don’t generate revenue for rightsholders
- The sheer volume has overwhelmed Content ID’s economic incentive
In the long-form era, rightsholders tolerated unauthorized use because monetization made it worthwhile. In the Shorts era, they increasingly earn less from the same behavior. When the economics stop making sense, rightsholders pivot away from monetization and toward enforcement.
This is why we’re now seeing a rise in manual strikes, takedowns, and stricter zero-tolerance policies. Rightsholders feel buried under a tidal wave of unlicensed micro-content, and they’ve started hitting the brakes.
What this means for creators now
“Just license or create everything” is sound legal advice, but practically incomplete. Traditional legal processes move slowly. YouTube’s automated systems move instantly. And the longer a legal dispute drags on, the lower the odds of a favorable outcome.
Creators today need to understand three things simultaneously:
- The legal framework
- Copyright, fair use, licensing, derivative use
- The platform mechanics
- Claims, disputes, escalations, policies and policy enforcement
- The operational risk
- How your editing choices, story formats, and workflows trigger detection, and whether fair use is actually a viable defense for your specific use case.
Relying only on legal pathways or only on platform knowledge is no longer enough. The creators at the highest risk are the ones who don’t understand how YouTube’s internal systems behave or how to navigate them when something breaks.
I’ve personally been brought in by legal teams after they spent months hitting a wall, only to resolve the issue within weeks by understanding YouTube’s internal processes. That’s not a criticism of lawyers–far from it. It’s a reflection of how different YouTube’s technical and operational systems are from traditional legal environments.
The new reality: Know your risk profile
If you’re a creator using any third-party material, or even if you aren’t, you need to understand:
- What types of 3rd party content you use (licensed or not)
- How frequently you use them
- How YouTube’s systems interpret that usage
- If you can pivot from third party content to original content, which lessens risk
- How rightsholders interpret the usage
- Whether your formats are carry risk
- How your channel would fare if a strike landed tomorrow
- How you would respond to issues using both product knowledge and legal guidance
Even creators who never use unlicensed third-party content need to understand this landscape. I’ve overseen teams responsible for millions of claims, and I’ve also seen creators struck accidentally, or maliciously, by other parties that led to a full-on panic spiral instead of a focused, strategic response.
This isn’t fearmongering. It’s operational hygiene.
The creators who thrive in the next era won’t be the ones who avoid all risk at all costs. They’ll be the ones who understand YouTube deeply enough to navigate it strategically, while making sure they’re legally protected.
The copyright environment on YouTube is shifting quickly. The creators who understand both the legal landscape and the internal machinery of the platform will be the ones who survive and scale.
Chris Landa is a media and creator-economy strategist who advises AI-native and traditional media companies on entering the Creator Economy, with a focus on creator-led growth, content strategy, and emerging media models. He is a co-founder of SuperBam, a creator-first rights management company, and previously worked at Footballco, where he contributed to platform development and digital content strategy.
