How to stop people reposting your videos

You post a Reel on Monday. By Wednesday it's on someone else's page with more views than yours, your handle gone, their caption on top. There's no setting that stops this completely, on any app. What you can do is make your clips harder to take cleanly, make sure people can still tell they're yours when they do get taken, and use the reporting tools the platforms give you. This guide goes through each of them.

Why the corner watermark keeps disappearing

A typical repost starts with a download and a quick edit. The easiest edit is a crop, and a mark in a corner is exactly what a crop removes. On a vertical video, trimming a thin strip off one side or zooming in slightly takes the corner with it, and the video still looks fine.

The other easy edit is covering. A reposter drops a sticker, a caption box or a blur over one small area. A mark that stays in one place only needs to be covered once, and the cover stays put for the whole clip.

On short-video apps, a corner mark has a second problem: the apps draw their own buttons, account name and caption over the bottom and right of the frame. So a bottom-corner mark is often hidden even on your own post. Our safe zone guide shows where each app puts its interface.

What makes a mark harder to take off

Move it

A mark that travels around the frame can't be cropped out without cutting into the video, and it can't be covered with one sticker, because it doesn't stay under the sticker. Blurring it means blurring a path across the whole clip. You can make one with our moving watermark maker.

Tile it

Faint repeats of your name across the whole frame leave no clean area to crop to. On their own, tiles can look busy, so one option is faint tiles plus one clearer moving mark. That's the "Hardest to remove" style in MarkDrift.

Put it near the subject

A mark over a plain wall is easy to paint out. A mark crossing the dish, the product or the dancer is harder, because whoever removes it has to rebuild the detail underneath. If you use a fixed mark, place it where the action is, not in the empty part of the frame.

Vary it a little

Many removal tools rely on a watermark looking the same in every frame. Small, smooth changes in size, angle and transparency over time break that pattern. That raises the effort needed, without making removal impossible.

What a watermark can't do

A March 2026 test published by imagecrush.io found that current AI watermark removers beat both jitter and tiling on still images. That test used photos, and we don't know of a published test like it for moving marks on video, so assume a determined person with good tools can still clean a mark off. Treat a watermark as friction. It stops the lazy repost, and when a clip does get taken with the mark on it, the copy still points back to you.

So don't rely on the picture alone. Put credit in more than one place:

• Say your name or handle out loud in the video, or show it in the first seconds as part of the content. Audio and on-screen text that belong to the story are harder to strip than a logo.
• Put your handle in the caption too. It won't survive a repost, but it helps people who find the original.
• Keep your original files with their dates. If you ever need to prove the clip is yours, the untouched original is your best evidence.

How to report a reposted video

All three big platforms have a copyright report process for original creators. Before you file, check that you really own the rights, including to any music in the clip, and consider whether the other post might be allowed use, such as commentary. TikTok warns that a knowingly false report can make you liable for damages. The steps below were checked on 1 October 2026.

TikTok

TikTok's Intellectual Property Policy suggests contacting the user first. You can then file a Copyright Infringement Report through the online form or in the app, and you'll need to fill in everything the form asks for. The form also lets you ask TikTok to stop future copies of the same video from reappearing, and TikTok says it will use its best efforts to do that when a video is removed after your report. Accounts that infringe repeatedly can be banned.

Instagram

Instagram's copyright help page links to a copyright report form for anyone who believes their work is being used without permission. The same page lists what the report needs to include and what happens after you send it.

YouTube

YouTube takes copyright removal requests from the copyright owner or someone authorised to act for them, such as a lawyer. Per YouTube Help, the usual route is to sign in to YouTube Studio, choose "Content detection" in the left menu, then "New removal request". You can also send the required details by email to copyright@youtube.com.

A simple weekly routine

1. Before posting, run the week's clips through one batch with a moving or tiled mark. The batch page does a whole folder with one setting.
2. Say your handle in each video and repeat it in the caption.
3. Keep the unmarked originals in a dated folder.
4. When you find a copy, save its link, message the account if you want to, and file the platform's copyright report if they don't take it down.

None of this makes you repost-proof. It means the quick copies still carry your name, and you have the originals and the report links ready when a copy needs to come down.

Reposting questions