Adding Copyright Data to video files in bulk

[TCM]

I had a recent run-in with a copyright claim (YouTube) against some video I shot of the moon in the night sky. A German soccer organization filed a claim against me saying that the video clip was theirs. The moon didn't look like a soccer ball, it looked like the moon, and the background noise wasn't a soccer game - in fact the only background noise was my diesel heater running (we were camped and it was a chilly night so, why not run my heater) and a little lens noise as it retracted. Nonetheless, I had to go through quite a lot to win this claim, including providing the entire video that the clip had been taken from, and this got me thinking that I'd be smart to somehow embed data in the videos I shoot, and that has led me to EXIFTOOL after it was suggested by a viewer of my YouTube channel. So I'm now trying to determine if I can create a drag and drop type setup where I can bulk process the hundreds of videos that I shoot that then get edited into the masterpieces that get posted to YouTube (being sarcastic against myself).

Is this something that can be done using EXIFTOOL? I hopefully would have a simple drag and drop scenario that would output the files back to their same location with no changes other than having added a copyright meta data line to the EXIF. I'm outside of my wheel house with this so anyone's help would be very appreciated.

[Phil Harvey]

Adding copyright information with ExifTool is easy.  The problem is that YouTube may strip metadata from a video.  However, you can try it out.  Another complication is trying to figure out where to put it.  Here is a command that will put it in a bunch of locations -- you can see which ones (if any) are preserved when uploading to YouTube, and which one is displayed by whatever video player you use:

exiftool -keys:copyright="test1" -userdata:copyright="test2" -itemlist:copyright="test3" -xmp:rights="test4" test.mp4

If you can find something that works, creating a drag-and-drop application to do what you want in bulk is easy.

- Phil

[TCM]

Phil thank you for jumping on my question and providing me with this option(s). If I'm unable to preserve the EXIF  once the YouTube brain does its thing to the uploaded video, then at least I would have a source video that has the copyright data embedded in it.
As I'm typing this fallback option, it occurs to me that it could be argued that I added the copyright data AFTER I 'stole' the clip from its true owner, so I'd need to have the data date locked somehow that showed the copyright info was embedded on xx/xx/2023. I'm obviously one of those people that creates 'what if' scenarios so I'm going to stop going down this path and start by testing your solution and see what YT does with the copyright data that we add using your suggestion.
Thank you again Phil and I'll update this thread with my progress.

[TCM]

Well, I'm even less adept at this than I thought. I thought that I added these commands to the ExifTool executable name itself. The original downloaded tool is named exiftool(-k), so I (wrongly I've found) thought that I renamed that executable:

exiftool -keys:copyright="test1" -userdata:copyright="test2" -itemlist:copyright="test3" -xmp:rights="test4" test.mp4

replacing "test1", "test2" etc with the copyright data that I wanted to insert (in my case, the name of my youtube channel). So I did that and then attempted to rename the executable with that line of commands - and Windows gave me an error (...you can't use any of the following characters in your filename...).

So, how do I add the line of commands to ExifTool? I've done some searching but all of the reading I find seems to assume that the user is already knowledgeable on how to add the commands.

Adding copyright information with ExifTool is easy.  The problem is that YouTube may strip metadata from a video.  However, you can try it out.  Another complication is trying to figure out where to put it.  Here is a command that will put it in a bunch of locations -- you can see which ones (if any) are preserved when uploading to YouTube, and which one is displayed by whatever video player you use:

exiftool -keys:copyright="test1" -userdata:copyright="test2" -itemlist:copyright="test3" -xmp:rights="test4" test.mp4

If you can find something that works, creating a drag-and-drop application to do what you want in bulk is easy.

- Phil

[Phil Harvey]

If you need to use illegal characters in the name then you must either make a shortcut or a batch file for the command.  The colon is a special character in Windows file names, so I would recommend making a shortcut.  The options may be added to the "Target" property of the shortcut.

- Phil