Creators fret over losses due to copyright infringement

YouTube removes the content on being notified by copyright holders, terminates the accounts of repeat offenders

- Pratishtha Bagai

Rising incidents of copyright infringement are hurting the ability of social media influencers to monetize their content. These influencers are concerned not only about losing ad revenue, but also channel memberships where users pay to watch exclusive content on YouTube.

Samay Raina, who has 5.4 million subscribers on YouTube, went viral with his recent intellectual property 'India's got latent' that garnered more than 150 million views. In fact, according to YouTube's year-end report, globally, there have been over 1.5 billion views of videos related to Samay Raina in 2024.

To leverage the show's popularity, Raina decided to upload some episodes and additional content related to the show behind a paywall, starting at ₹59 a month.

However, some notorious users re-uploaded the content for free on YouTube and other platforms, much to Raina's disappointment.