About GuardMyVideos & me

GuardMyVideos is my project: I design it, build it, fix it when it breaks, and answer when you write in. On paper it's my sole trader business in England (Ellan Duncan t/a GuardMyVideos). So you're not dealing with a huge team or a chatbot pretending to care — it's me and a small UK business doing its best.

I try to be straight with people: what the product can and can't do, where the limits are, and when something's on me to fix. If anything feels off or confusing, tell me — I actually read contact@guardmyvideos.com and I use it to patch bugs and make the experience better.

I watch a lot of YouTube. Over time I kept seeing the same patterns in search: videos that were clearly riding someone else's idea, sometimes almost beat-for-beat, while the person who put in the real work got lost in the noise. It bothered me more than I expected. I kept thinking about the time that goes into scripting, recording, editing — and how rough it must feel to have someone else profit off that graft.

I'm not here to pretend I can fix the whole internet. But I wanted to offer something solid and repeatable: a way to surface likely copies, keep a record, and get a ranked view when titles get tweaked, footage gets re-cut, or the copycat mirrors your delivery. One score will never tell the whole story. I built this to respect how messy and human the problem actually is.

My day job world is IT operations — keeping systems and services running, dealing with the unglamorous middle of the IT industry. I've got a broad IT background, and the bit I genuinely love is improving processes: finding the friction, tightening how work flows, and stopping people from burning hours on the same tedious steps.

That's the lens I brought to this. Hunting copies by hand is exactly the kind of work that doesn't scale — it's exhausting and easy to get wrong. I want you to spend less of your life searching and more of it making the thing only you can make.

It's a tool for YouTube creators who want to know whether their stuff might have been copied or re-uploaded elsewhere on the platform. You give it a video to anchor on; it looks for candidates and runs analysis across titles, descriptions, tags, transcripts, and narration-style signals. You get ranked results you can read and decide what to do with — not a verdict from on high.

I'm not a lawyer. This isn't a law firm. The numbers are pointers, not proof — use them to decide whether to dig deeper, file through YouTube's tools, or talk to someone qualified if you need that.

I have to be honest about constraints too. YouTube's API quota caps how much searching and fetching any app like mine can do. And YouTube doesn't allow the kind of downloading that would be needed for the kind of deep, standalone voice analysis I'd love to offer in an ideal world. I work inside those rules and squeeze what I can from the signals we're allowed to use. I still hope this saves you time and gives you a clearer picture than you'd get scrolling alone.

There's a free trial so you can try it on shared infrastructure, and Pro if you want to keep going — full history, channel scanning, PDF reports, higher daily limits. If you're on Pro, you can plug in your own YouTube Data API key so heavier use hits your quota instead of everyone else's. That's part of how I keep the lights on fairly.

For prices, limits, and legal wording: Pricing, Terms of Service. For data and privacy: Privacy Policy.