Declaration of rights

I’ve purchased a Music Video from Rotor, what are my rights?

When you purchase a music video from Rotor, we grant you full ownership of that video, subject to the conditions described here. Your ownership of your video includes the right to claim authorship of the video, to post your video online and otherwise distribute it without restriction or attribution, and to monetise your video however you wish.

Music videos purchased from Rotor use media from two sources:

• the audio, images, and videos that you provide by uploading to our website; and
• videos and images from Rotor’s stock library.

You must ensure that your use of your purchased music video is consistent with your rights to any audio, images, or videos which you provide. For example, if you want to distribute your purchased music video, you must already have the right to distribute the audio and any images or videos which you uploaded and which are used as part of the purchased music video.

Kanisi Ltd. (Rotor’s corporate entity) retains full and sole ownership of the stock clips made available through our site. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive and non-transferable license to use these clips as elements of your purchased music video. You may not redistribute, or offer for resale, our stock footage in any form other than as an excerpt of your purchased music video, and for the purposes of promoting your music.

Examples of permitted uses

• You may post your purchased music video anywhere you wish (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)
• You may monetise, sell, and license your purchased music video as you wish.
• You may publish excerpts of your purchased music video, provided that these are for the purpose of promoting your music.

Examples of prohibited uses

• You may not extract Rotor stock clips from your purchased music video for reuse.
• You may not publish excerpts of your purchased music video that consist solely of Rotor stock footage, unless these include the associated audio and are for the purposes of promoting your music.

Understanding claims made against your music video

Blocks because of ownership restrictions

If you have registered your music for ContentID via your label, distributor, or multi-channel network, this may result in claims against your own uploads of your music video. In this scenario, you have assigned management of distribution and rights enforcement to your label or other commercial partner, and the platform will not recognise that you also have the rights to upload that music independently. For example, your label may have registered your track for monetisation on YouTube and Spotify, and if you then upload your track separately to your personal Instagram or Facebook, there is a chance it will be blocked for ownership restriction, even though you have written, produced and performed the track entirely by yourself. This is actually an example of the system working correctly: you have asked your distributor to protect your song from being redistributed (and potentially monetised) by anyone else, and they have taken steps to do so on the platform in question.

Blocks because of global licensing restrictions/limitations

Some social media platforms may block you posting your music video for global licensing reasons. This is not the same as copyright infringement; for example, the platform may not have the necessary licenses for certain markets. In this case your video may be available in some countries but blocked or restricted in others.

Blocks because of copyright infringement

This could be due to a number of scenarios. It may be that:

• someone else has claimed ownership of your music, either acting on your behalf (e.g. your label) or otherwise;
• some of the media (music, video, animation, etc) that you uploaded to Rotor to include in your music video infringes on another rightsholder; or
• another Rotor user has established an ownership claim on their Rotor music video, and their video uses some of the same Rotor stock footage as your music video.

Unfortunately, the content ID systems used on most of the large online video platforms are not sophisticated enough to distinguish that second and third scenario from wholesale, actual infringement. As a result, derived works such as your purchased music video (and any others that include stock image media, Creative Commons media, and other shared sources) sometimes get caught in the net.

What should I do if my video gets flagged for copyright infringement on a social media platform?

We cannot offer any guarantee that your music video won't be flagged by another user. We are unable to intervene during ContentID disputes, as these are exclusively between the original uploader (you) and the account holder who is disputing ownership of your video. The ‘declaration of rights’, above, establishes that you have the right to publish and monetise your music video, and we suggest that you provide this to the platform as evidence of your ownership of your video.

With respect to content claims concerning the stock clips specifically, every Rotor user has non-exclusive rights to those clips to the extent that they are used in that user’s purchased videos. No Rotor user can claim ownership or copyright of them. This means that you are not permitted to file a copyright claim or initiate a dispute against anyone else on the basis that they have used a Rotor stock clip in one of their videos. This also means they cannot file any copyright claim or dispute against you on the basis that your video uses a Rotor clip which features in one of their punchased videos.

We understand that many users have concerns regarding their videos potentially being flagged or disputed on the major online platforms. In our experience, it doesn't matter what software or platform was used to make the video: once posted on any social media platform (YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, etc), anyone can initiate a dispute at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. The dispute resolution process is often automated, favouring the claimant by default, with a slow appeals process.

What Rotor is doing to help reduce issues

Rotor has contacted Facebook and YouTube in an effort to have their systems recognise our ownership of our stock clips and have appropriate, licensed uses be recognised and exempted from disputes between users. This is not a service which these platforms offer, but there are a number of stock libraries and media providers facing similar issues, and we hope that their systems evolve into something more sophisticated as more and more users become content creators and derived works become more common.