Clipping without permission: when a clip is theft

Before it became an industry paid per thousand views, clipping felt like theft to many creators. In January 2025, a French food creator found a YouTube channel under her name reposting more than a hundred of her videos. At the same moment, other creators were inviting their fans to do exactly that, for the free reach.

What follows retells, in our own words, Myriam Roche's piece published by the French outlet Les Gens d'Internet (in French) on 24 January 2025.

A channel in her name that isn't hers

Food creator Zoé no Gluten was about to launch her YouTube channel when she found her handle already taken. Someone was impersonating her there and reposting all of her videos to more than 11,000 subscribers. On 23 January 2025, she called the person out on Instagram, "strongly" advising them to delete the channel before she took it further.

Her agent, Mélissa Berri, gave the scale: every one of her Reels had been reposted, more than a hundred videos, some reaching 250,000 views. The harm is both financial and reputational, since her audience could believe she was the one reposting. When the article was written, the channel had changed its name, but the videos were still up.

videos reposted without consent

100+

subscribers on the impersonating channel

11,000

views on some of the reposts

250,000

Clip or theft?

Clipping means cutting short videos from YouTubers' or streamers' content. One reader told the site she followed the highlights of Stream For Humanity, a charity stream organised by Amine, entirely through TikTok clips. That is the issue: the clips aren't the originals, their makers use footage they don't own, and some monetise it.

Jimmy Hassa, co-founder of the agency Nouvel Arc, took a stand on LinkedIn. To him, the practice "is clearly a form of intellectual property theft." Every like on a clip is a like lost to the original creator, which skews their stats. He says most of the creators his agency works with are affected, and he called on TikTok to regulate.

Creators who ask for more

Not everyone saw it that way. In December 2024, at an event organised by Webedia, YouTubers ByIlhann and Flamby encouraged their community to reuse their content. For ByIlhann, it is extra visibility.

Le Motif took a more structured route. In January 2025 he launched clip.farm, a platform where creators ask their followers to cut short videos from selected content, with pay for the most-viewed clips. His goal: make clipping available to every creator, whatever the size of their audience.

What changed since

The article ended on a question: should clipping be controlled, and how can creators keep control of their content? Twenty months later, part of the answer came from the market rather than from regulation. Authorised, paid clipping has become an industry, and clip.farm is one of its players (see the clip economy in numbers).

Our take: a repost is not a clip

The article calls what happened to Zoé no Gluten clipping, and that word hides the problem. Nobody cut anything. Her Reels were already short and vertical, and they were reposted whole, in the same format, under her name. That is a copy of a finished video, not a clip of a long one. The distinction matters because the two fail in different ways, and they call for different answers.

Three questions separate them, and none of them needs a lawyer:

• Was anything chosen? A clip picks thirty seconds out of an hour and frames them for a feed: the selection is the work. Reposting a finished short adds nothing, which is also why platforms are least tolerant of it. YouTube's reused content rule refuses to pay for exactly that, permission or not.
• Who does the viewer think they are watching? Taking a creator's name as a channel name turns a copy into impersonation, and that is the part of her story that did the most damage: her own audience could not tell which account was hers.
• Where does the viewer go next? A clip that names and links its source can send people back to it. A repost under the creator's name has nowhere to send them but itself.

Two practical lessons follow from her case. For creators: reserve your handle on every platform before you need it, since hers was taken on the one she was about to launch. For clippers: credit the source in the clip and the caption, and never post under the creator's name; the line between amplifying someone and replacing them runs through those two choices.

The distinction the 2025 article was reaching for still holds. A clip commissioned and paid for by the creator sends the audience back to them. A repost without consent takes it away.

Sources

• Les Gens d'Internet, Myriam Roche, Le clipping, le nouveau fléau des créateurs de contenu, 24 January 2025, in French: read the article. The facts and quotes in the first four sections come from it; translations are ours.
• The last two sections, on how the industry has moved since and how to tell a clip from a repost, are ours.