I see this with a lot of movie reaction/breakdown channels where there seems to be no issues showing anything video related, but they always comment about needing to mute the music in fear of strikes.
On the other hand, I see music reaction channels (with millions of subs) just playing and reacting to the audio like it’s no big deal.
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Generally it’s totally fine and legal to show clips and such of movies. You’ll also find that many of the clips, if not all of them are often from trailers or other publicly released video.
They don’t have to mess with audio for any reason legally but since they often loop background video like 10x in a single review or such you probably don’t wanna hear the same stuff like 10x a video.
The music you hear in a movie doesn’t belong to the people who made the movie, it belongs to the musician. The musician licensed the movie to use the music, but not everybody else on YT. Musicians often have their label seek out and file strikes against others that use their music in ways that don’t benefit the musician. Music reaction, like radio play, benefits the musician, so they treat it differently.
They aren’t muting because they legally have to. They’re doing it because content filters can’t reliably tell the difference between unlicensed music being used in any old YT video and a clip being used from a movie as part of fair use.
A well-researched and edited film review is often a big investment for a YouTube channel that specializes in that kind of content. And they want each of those investments protected, so they can stand for a long time and rack up ad revenue for years to come to keep the channel afloat.
All it takes is a single claim strike for all the potential revenue from that video to vanish. Investment wasted. Even if the hold is cleared on appeal for fair use (not likely), the video tends to significantly underperform for the rest of its life on the platform. The initial boom of channel subscribers coming to check it out was wasted, and it won’t get picked up by the YouTube algorithm to spread and get seen.
Since a single strike on a 10 second clip of music in a 30 minute video essay might potentially strike a video and waste all of the surrounding effort, these kinds of content creators have an incentive to mute the audio to protect their work.
On the other hand, cheap reaction channels that can just sit in front of a monitor and churn this shit out for little cost can just eat the hit if the video is stricken for copyright. They just risk it. If that video gets demonitized, who cares, six more videos are coming out this week anyway. Some of them are inevitably going to be lost along the way. That’s just part of the business model.
As for why they tend to be more brazen with using video rather than audio, simply put, YouTube’s content detection system for audio is a lot harder to fool than its system for detecting video. Asking an AI, “is this song playing in the background of this clip?” is a lot less demanding of it than asking it, “is this video clip taken from a scene from the Avengers?” That kind of thing still tends to be left to human reviewers rather than automated strikes. They’ll only strike your video IF it even gets noticed in the first place, and IF the human thinks it’s actually infringement. Audio is all automatic. Every upload can be scanned, and if the AI finds someone else’s copyrighted audio in your video, automatic strike. Automatic video detection exists, but it’s far less accurate and easier to fool than audio detection.
Sometimes channels do get into trouble when they show too much footage from a movie. When it comes to trailers the studios are less interested in going after youtubers, because trailers are advertisements and it serves their interest to have them spread freely.
If a music review channel is playing an actual song, then whoever owns the rights to that song have decided not to copyright strike people who use it on youtube. There are a lot of bands that have automatic copyright strikes set up. Music youtuber Rick Beato talked about it a few years ago. Some bands will not allow any pieces of their songs to be used on youtube for any reason.
I don’t know as much about how movie studios deal with copyright issues like that, but I have to assume that if a youtube reviewer uses clips from a movie and the video hasn’t been taken down then the studio didn’t care.
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