My YouTube account is back!

How to get your account back after it has been suspended or terminated due to three strikes on copyright grounds:

1. Find out who has made the claims – in the email you receive from YouTube
2. Google their website and find their contact details, preferably the Rights department
3. Write them a very nice e-letter saying you are sorry for posting their content and feel bad about it and that you can no longer post and show people your homemade videos and please would they consider withdrawing the claim, thank you kindly
4. Wait, hope, pray (if that’s your thing) and meanwhile open a nice shiny vimeo account
5. Marvel when one of the copyright holders agrees:

Although you don’t have the necessary rights to post any clips of IT Crowd on the web, I will go ahead and reinstate this URL.

6. Whoop
7. Wait some more, while they do what they say, hoping they didn’t forget or quit or go on holiday or change their mind or get too busy for such trivia
8. Receive a message from YouTube:

This content has been restored and your account will not be penalized. For
technical reasons, it may take a day for the videos to be available again.

9. Whoop again
10. Wait a little more (two hours for me)
11. Marvel at being able to log in again!
12. Delete all content that is not entirely your own, in case someone else makes a claim. Say goodbye to all the fine videos you uploaded of Charlie Brooker, Agent Cooper, suicidal penguins, James May in an airship, a grandma being hit by a tennis ball at Wimbledon.
13. Don’t upload anything else not entirely your own ever again unless there is a big change at YouTube, because your account will still have two strikes and will say:

Your account is not in good standing.
You receive copyright strikes when we are notified by a third party that a video of yours infringes their copyright. Accumulation of three strikes may result in the termination of your account.Please visit our Copyright Tips page to learn about copyright. If there are any videos on your account for which you are not certain you have the necessary rights, please delete them now.

14. Whoop one more time
15. Continue on with other more creative activities, wondering whether to use Vimeo or the tainted, newly cleaned, comment and viewful YouTube

My YouTube counter notification form requests were returned, even though I filled them in exactly, and tried the email method to copyright@youtube.com:

We haven’t been able to process your request with the information you have provided us.

Or they were rejected:

Thank you for your counter-notification. Based on the information you have provided, it appears that you do not have the necessary rights to post the content on YouTube. Therefore, we regretfully cannot honor this counter-notification. It has not been forwarded to the original claimant, and we will not be able to restore your video.

So I really recommend writing to the copyright holder.

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Steps stepped 3901