Every audio and video upload destined for Apple Podcasts passes through Disctopia's Copyright review before it reaches Apple. This is required for two reasons:
- Apple's content terms — Apple holds the show owner responsible for the rights to all material delivered through their API. We do the first-pass check so problems get surfaced before Apple sees them.
- Your protection — Catching a potential third-party clip before it goes to Apple is much better than having Apple pull the show after the fact.
Our review runs on every episode bound for the Apple Podcasters Program (premium subscriber-only) and every Apple Podcast Video upload. Each upload gets a risk score out of 100 that maps to one of three verdicts.
The three verdicts
✅ Pass (low risk)
The review didn't detect anything that looks like third-party copyrighted content. Your episode continues to Apple immediately, no further action needed.
You'll see this for the vast majority of original content — your own voice, original music you produced, public-domain material, licensed library music, etc.
⚠️ Confirm required (moderate risk)
The review flagged something that might be third-party content (a snippet of a song, a clip from a movie, etc.) but isn't confident enough to block. We pause delivery and surface the flagged material to you in Disctopia so you can confirm your rights.
What you'll see in My Library: the Apple platform icon on the affected episode row shows a tooltip:
Clicking the row opens the Confirm your rights to publish on Apple dialog:
The dialog gives you:
- The overall risk score (0–100) — how confident the review is that something is third-party
- The specific match — what the audio, video, or transcript matched against, and a per-match confidence score
- The exact date reviewed
- A rights-confirmation checkbox covering audio, video, music, and artwork
- A Confirm & send to Apple button (disabled until you check the box) and a Cancel button
What to do:
| Situation | What to click |
|---|---|
| You own the material (your own song, your own clip) | Check the box → Confirm & send to Apple |
| You licensed the material (royalty-free library, paid sync, etc.) | Check the box → Confirm & send to Apple |
| You have fair-use grounds (commentary, criticism, parody) and have reviewed the use | Check the box → Confirm & send to Apple |
| You're not sure where the clip came from | Cancel — re-edit the episode to remove the clip, then re-upload |
| The match is a false positive (your dog barking ≠ a Drake song) | Check the box → Confirm & send to Apple — the confirmation is your attestation of rights, regardless of what the fingerprint matched |
Once you confirm, your rights-confirmation is logged with your user ID + a timestamp, and the episode is sent on to Apple.
📝 What we keep: We retain the rights-confirmation record for 7 years along with the SHA-256 hash of the original audio, the match details, and the risk score. We do not keep your original upload after delivery to Apple. If Apple or a rights holder later asks us about a specific episode, we can show that you (the show owner) confirmed rights — we never speak to the underlying content claim, only to the chain-of-custody record.
🛑 Block (high risk)
The review is highly confident the upload contains substantial copyrighted material it has no record of you owning or licensing (typically risk score 80+). We do not send it to Apple. The episode is held in your library with a Blocked tooltip on its Apple icon.
What you'll see:
- An in-app notification
- The episode row's Apple icon tooltip reads Blocked — copyright
- Clicking through opens the review dialog with the same risk score + match details as the Confirm dialog — but the only options are Edit & resubmit or Delete. The rights-confirmation checkbox is not available.
What to do:
- Edit & resubmit — Replace or remove the flagged section in your audio/video editor, then re-upload.
- Delete — Trash the upload entirely.
⚠️ Block verdicts cannot be confirmed past. If you believe a Block is a false positive (very rare — Blocks only fire on high-confidence matches), contact Disctopia support and our team will review the specific match with you.
What the review checks
Every upload runs through three checks in parallel:
- Audio fingerprinting against a commercial library of music recordings and trailers — this is what caught "Midnight Drive — The Interstate Collective" in the screenshot above
- Speech-to-text of any spoken-word portions, scanned for verbatim matches to copyrighted scripts/books we have on file
- Visual scan (Apple Podcast Video only) for known footage and on-screen brand marks
The overall risk score is the most conservative of all three checks. A clean audio scan + a flagged video frame = an overall Confirm required or Block verdict, driven by whichever match was highest confidence.
How the risk score maps to verdicts
| Risk score | Verdict | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 0–29 | ✅ Pass | Delivered to Apple immediately |
| 30–79 | ⚠️ Confirm required | Held until you confirm rights in the dialog |
| 80–100 | 🛑 Block | Not sent to Apple. Edit or delete. |
The scoring boundaries can shift a few points either way as we tune the model — the reason we show you the exact numeric score is so you can tell the difference between a borderline 32 and a clear 68 when deciding whether the match is genuinely worth reviewing.
What this is not
- ❌ Not a guarantee — A Pass verdict doesn't mean the content is legally cleared. It means our review didn't see anything obviously copyrighted. You, the show owner, are still responsible for the rights to your content.
- ❌ Not a substitute for legal advice — If you're unsure whether your use of someone else's material is fair use or properly licensed, talk to a lawyer.
- ❌ Not used for advertising or model training — Disctopia does not use your audio to train models for anyone else. The fingerprints and transcripts are used only for the copyright check on your upload.
Why this only applies to Apple-bound content
Apple's API license requires the host platform (Disctopia) to "use commercially reasonable efforts" to keep infringing material off the delivery pipeline. Free RSS episodes don't go through Apple's API (Apple pulls them from your public RSS feed directly), so those aren't reviewed by us. Premium audio and Apple Podcast Video both travel through Apple's delivery API and are subject to the review.
Other distribution destinations (Spotify RSS, your direct Disctopia listeners, etc.) are unaffected by this check.