If you use a third-party song in your video, monetization is turned on automatically but not for you. Your logic falls down when you understand YouTube's ad sys

If you use a third-party song in your video, monetization is turned on automatically but not for you. Your logic falls down when you understand YouTube's ad system. An ad can run on your video in any number of circumstances, monetized or not. I am directly impacted by this due to my work to educate folks about proper, safe drone usage given media mischaracterization and fearmongering (like that recent Audi ad) about drones. All of my videos are artistic in nature and work to educate the public on the positive, market-generating usages of drones, such as aerial filmmaking, land survey, search and rescue, and other uses. Your comment smacks of lacking all of the context around FAA enforcement against drone fliers in recent years, and rushing to defend an agency that has burned all positive relationships it ever had with the hobbyist industry, both drones and otherwise. The FAA has repeatedly missed deadlines to get its shit together, and is on track to miss another that was set by Congress for the end of this year. In the meantime, they've devoted their resources to pursuing drone fliers in court (and losing, quite dramatically, on taxpayer dollars) and sending toothless cease and desist notices like this. Nobody with an ounce of common sense can possibly conclude what you have, that a YouTube ad suddenly makes the flight commercial. If a private pilot records the view out of his cockpit window and then puts ads on the video on YouTube, he's not suddenly a (potentially unlicensed) commercial operator. It follows that this action is just another excuse for the FAA to harass drone pilots and people attempting to build a multi-million dollar industry in the United States. Nothing about this is sane, and the FAA is repeatedly demonstrating that it's happy to service those with money and who can make noise in government -- the sudden (and rapid) creation of the certification exemption program for law enforcement after DHS started flying Predators over the border, for example -- while pinching the rest of us in court. You shouldn't make any attempt to defend the FAA; most people (me included) who really want to make something of UAS are already looking to other nations and have begun operating under more progressive regulatory schemes.