May 17, 2021 • 52 mins
No copyright infringement intended. Does that matter? Does it even mean anything? We look at the complicated issues of copyright and fair use.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and I love all things tech. And it has been
a while since I've done an episode about the concepts
(00:24):
of copyright and fair use. And after I keep seeing
the phrase no copyright infringement intended over and over on
places like YouTube and Instagram, I figure it's a good
time to tackle this again. Because people continue to pretend
like copyright infringement only applies under very specific circumstances and
(00:49):
that with just a little bit of verbiage you can
get around it, when really the opposite is true. And
since the Internet and technology allows for more opportunities for
a copyright in fringe mint, and because various governments and
around the world have past legislation to, you know, specifically
tackle copyright infringement, and companies have lobbied endlessly for more
(01:13):
restrictive copyright rules, I think it fits the scope of
tech stuff, particularly since a lot of these laws were
formed in reaction to changes in technology. So first, let's
kind of define what copyright is now. Essentially, copyright guarantees
(01:33):
the creator of a work or an entity that has
been designated by the creator of the work, the right
to profit off of that work, the right to make
copies of that work and then distribute or sell them,
or you know, you just you own that intellectual property.
(01:54):
No one else can come and make copies of it
without your permission. The works in this case range from
the written word to music too, paintings, sculpture, uh to
digital files. I mean, copyright now applies to lots of stuff.
Clearly it didn't apply to all of that in the beginning,
but something that has a vaulved over time. It does
(02:16):
not include inventions. Those are covered under patent law. And
then you also have things like trademarks, which make things
more complicated. I might talk about trademarks and copyright in
a future episode to kind of talk about how those
complicate things, because companies have tried to use trademarks in
(02:36):
order to extend copyright protection. But trademarks last in perpetuity.
Copyright only lasts a certain amount of time, at least
in theory. We'll get to all that. So along with
the right to profit from intellectual property comes with it
protections against others who are taking a work and profiting
(02:57):
off of it without permission. You can see the value
of this concept right away, I imagine. So let's say
you are a musician and you write a song. It
was your work, You create the whole piece, You wrote
the music, and you wrote the lyrics, and you plan
to earn money through this song. Maybe you're going to
(03:19):
record it to some form of media and then sell
copies of the song. So you filed a copyright for
the song, which gives you the exclusive rights to make
copies of it uh in whatever format you like, whether
it's digital files or physical media, or even like sheet music.
You can charge whatever you like for your work, though
(03:42):
obviously if you go bonkers and you ask for a
ridiculously high price, you aren't likely to get a lot
of takers. You also have the protection should someone else
start making copies of your song without your permission. Maybe
they are performing it themselves, in which case they should
secure a license first, or maybe they're taking your original
(04:03):
recording and just duplicating it. So let's say that you
created an MP three file and they just copy the
MP three file endlessly and start either giving it away
or selling it to people. You could sue that person,
and in court you could prove that you hold the
copyright to that piece of music, and assuming the court
(04:25):
agrees with that the copyright is legitimate, you could then
seek damages against the person or entity that made the
unauthorized copies of your work. Music is actually really a
special case because you can have multiple copyrights on the work.
You could have one for the lyrics, then you could
have another for the musical composition itself, and that would
(04:48):
mean that someone who wanted to play your music but
change the lyrics would still potentially be liable for copyright violations.
But we're going to get back to that a little
bit later in this episode, but it is something to
keep in mind. However, Then there are such things as
mechanical licenses. This sets out the rules for stuff like
playing recorded music in particular places. So if you've ever
(05:12):
been to like a restaurant or a theater and you've
heard music being played over the sound system, chances are
that that place of business has paid out a license
fee in order to be able to do that. Intellectual
property rights get pretty complicated. Uh. It also depends upon
(05:33):
the size of the venue I might have to do
a future episode to kind of talk about all the exceptions, because,
as I said, it does get complicated, and in some cases,
if it's a very small venue, uh, they can sometimes
be exempt from having to pay the same sort of
license fees that larger venues have to pay. And part
of the argument there is that the number of people
(05:53):
who would actually experience the music is much smaller because
the venue is smaller. Anyway, in the old days, as
in before the printing press, copyright wasn't really that big
of a thing, Like, there wasn't a big concern for it.
There were predecessors for formal copyright, but truthfully, there wasn't
(06:14):
much occasion to use them because the act of copying
a work involved actually making a copy out by hand,
handwriting the copy of a written work. This was a
painstaking process and not something that could be done on
any sort of scale, and so copyright wasn't as huge
a concern just because infringement itself was not something that
(06:36):
was easy to do. And to that the fact that
much of the world's population was alliterate and there just
wasn't a foundation for copyright infringement to really take hold.
Then a smarty pants named Johann Gutenberg had to go
and invent the movable type printing press, at least the
European version. I should stress that Europe because other parts
of the world are actually further advanced with printing technologies
(06:58):
than Europe was. But this is the one that Western
cultures tend to talk about because we get a little myopic.
But i'll i'll set aside the commentary. So with the
printing press, it became possible to set the type on
the press and then print out sheets one after the
other in relatively quick succession. Now, it still took time
(07:20):
to set the press between pages because you had to
change all the type out right. You had to remove
all the type, set the type again, and then print
the next sheet. So you would typically use the press
to print a bunch of the same sheet in a
row before you would reset the type and move on
to the next sheet. However, you could also use a
(07:41):
single large sheet of paper to set up multiple pages
of text, and so you could divide up the quadrants
of a printing press and change the type up so
that you are actually creating multiple pages per press, and
then you fold the paper in such a way that
that makes all sense. Like if you fold it once
(08:03):
along a vertical line, so you you fold it in
half vertically, um then are along the vertical access, I
should say, then you end up with a folio that
was a single large sheet of paper that would have
one page printed on the left side, one page printed
on the right side. You have a vertical fold in
the middle, and then you can just keep printing those
(08:26):
over and over again, and then you bind a bunch
of those together and you've got a book. Or you
could do a double fold and you could have a quarto,
which would also involve you having to make a cut
along the horizontal line. But then you've got four pages
per sheet, so you could do that and that it
means that with one press you're effectively printing four pages,
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and then you let it dry, you flip it over
and you can print another four pages. Very useful. So
this was these were different ways that you could end
up creating book fairly quickly. The process of publishing became
much faster than with people doing it by hand, but
there wasn't yet a formalized protection in place for the
creator of the works, and at this point, the typical
(09:12):
approach was for an author to receive a flat fee
for their work, which would then go to a book
printer to produce, so the printer would take ownership of
that work from that point forward. Then it was just
a matter of time before other printers would get hold
of the book and start making their own copies. At
least for books that proved to be popular for authors.
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There really wasn't a whole lot of profit in this approach.
William Shakespeare, who you know you could argue, was one
of the greatest English writers, mostly known for his plays
but also his poetry. He never sought out the printing
of his plays. Others would give it a shot. Either
they would try to copy down plays as they were
(09:56):
being performed and then go and print what they had
trans rived, or they would try to get hold of
the sides that actors were using in their roles, or
a combination of the two. It was really only after
Shakespeare's death that his friends got together and did their
best to gather his plays and publish them. Now, based
on what I know about Shakespeare, I suspect the reason
(10:18):
that he did not seek out publication of his works
was that it really wasn't where the money would be
for him. He would get a pay the flat fee
for every play he wrote. But more importantly, he was
a part owner of the theater itself, like the Globe
Theater or the Rose Theater. He was part of the
company that owned the theater, so that meant he would
(10:40):
actually take a share of the box office. So, in
other words, his main goal was to attract crowds to
the theater. That's where the money was. But you can
bet that if there had been serious money in publication
back in those days, Shakespeare would have been all over
it because a quick glance at some of the lawsuits
he was involved with during his lifetime indicates he had
(11:01):
a certain appreciation for the accumulation of wealth. So Shakespeare,
great artist, also a business guy, and had publishing been
a bigger business for the author, he certainly would have
gone that route, I'm sure of it. Now. The printing
press was a truly transformational piece of technology. It became
easier to produce many copies of a work. Book printing businesses,
(11:25):
which would evolve into true publishing houses, began to pop
up all over Europe, and the powers that be, that is,
the Church and the various governments of Europe, viewed book
printers as both an asset and a potential threat. Through
the printers, these organizations could spread information quickly. The Bible
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was a very early candidate for printing, as the Guttenberg
Bible proves and governments could use printing presses to spread
information about laws and declarations and that kind of thing.
But printing presses also meant it was easier to print
stuff that undermined authority. People who had a bone to
pick with the folks who were in charge could potentially
(12:06):
spread their ideas and maybe find sympathetic souls who shared
those same beliefs. So the printing press could enable existential
threats to the power structure. And this is where we
get a predecessor to copyright. Now, this predecessor wasn't so
much about making sure the author of a book was
(12:27):
fairly compensated. Instead, it was more about keeping printing houses
under control. The basic idea was that any business that
wished to print materials had to first secure an official
license from, you know, the government of that region. These
licenses typically meant that a specific printer would be responsible
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for the printing of particular works to the exclusion of
all other printers. So you might say that this one
printer can print this one book, and no other printer
in the region is a allowed to do that, so
they have a monopoly on that specific title. In fact,
they called the monopolies. These agreements would last a set
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number of years, which wasn't too different from the concept
of modern copyrights. If any other printer was found to
produce a work that some other printer had exclusive rights to,
that matter could go to court. But this was all
about the printing houses, not authors. England passed its first
actual copyright law in seventeen. This law changed things quite
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a bit. A publisher would have a fourteen year period
of exclusive rights to publish any new book. Existing books
that the printing house was already printing would enjoy protection
for twenty one years. After that, the author of the
work could choose to renew the copyright if the author
was still alive. Otherwise the work would enter into the
(13:53):
public domain, meaning anyone would be legally allowed to make
a copy of that work or use it in any
way they liked. There were no longer any protections on
that piece of work, and it was available for any
public use. The United States wouldn't get its first true
copyright law until nearly a century later. But let's be fair,
(14:15):
there was no such thing as the United States in
seventeen ten, so I'm gonna cut the young nations some
slack here. The copyright law of the US followed closely
in the footsteps of the Copyright Act of Britain, which
was also known as the Statute of Ann as in
Queen Anne. So the way that the US law worked
was that an author would register their work with the
(14:36):
U S District Court of their particular region, and they
would in return receive an exclusive copyright for fourteen years,
with the option to renew for a second fourteen year period,
and after those twenty eight years, assuming that you actually
renewed your copyright, the work would then enter into the
public domain with the Statute of Ann and the Copyright
(14:56):
Act of seventeen nine in the US or at the
point where authors would get a little more protection and
a chance to benefit more from their own work. It
was no longer the case of a one time flat
fee in every instance. Now, I say authors, but often
we're really still talking about publishers. Here. The publisher retains
the copyright because the copyright allows the publisher to you know,
(15:18):
publish the works. Otherwise the author would have to grant
permission for each printing, you'd have to have a license
for it. It all gets clunky. Right that the author
has exclusive copyright to their work, they have to grant
permission to whichever entity is creating copies of that work.
You often see this reflected today in ways that are
(15:40):
kind of confusing. When you agree to certain platforms, there's
language there that seems to suggest that anything you post
on that platform is that platform's property. But usually the
reasoning for the language is to make sure that the
platform has the necessary permission to display whatever it is
(16:00):
you're posting, because otherwise, every single time you posted, you
would have to have some sort of licensing agreement or
something that would give permission to the platform to actually
display the thing you wrote. It gets pretty complicated now.
The same would be true for most music produced in
the modern era. The copyright isn't necessarily held by the artist,
(16:23):
but by a music label. And it's kind of like
how Thomas Edison made sure that his name was on
every patent produced out of his business. He might not
have had a direct hand in the creation of every invention.
In fact, we know that he didn't have a direct
hand in a lot of them, but he sure as
heck made sure that his signature was on the patent
(16:43):
to every single one, so that he had a right
to each of them anyway. One of the consequences of
all of this is that, to this day, getting the
permission of an author or artist in order to use
their work typically isn't enough. That's because in many cases
that individual creator doesn't actually hold the copyright to the work.
(17:06):
It's more likely that some corporate entity will hold the
copyright on behalf of that creator. So you really have
to get the permission of whatever entity holds the copyright
for any specific intellectual property. In some cases it might
be an individual creator, in other cases it might be
a big company. So let's say if you met an
(17:29):
artist for Disney in a cafe and this artist told you, oh,
it's totally cool if you use they're drawing of a
popular Disney character for something you're doing, that's probably not
good enough because that artist wouldn't even hold the copyright
for that work. Disney would, and copyright laws would evolve
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quite a lot over the following centuries. They expanded to
include more types of works, as well as to allow
for things like licenses, and without these considerations, it might
be illegal to you know, play playback an album without
first getting permission of the music label, which is clearly absurd.
You wouldn't have it where you bought an album, you
(18:12):
went home, and every time you were to play the
album you first had to get permission from the music
label to do that. That just doesn't make sense. But
that's the sort of stuff that actually had to be
codified into law. It's you know, it's not enough to
just everyone agree like, oh well, that's absurd. It actually
had to be written down somewhere and ratified. One of
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the biggest changes to copyright has been how long that
copyright protection lasts. This also ties into how many capitalist
societies treat corporations, which is uh ridiculously in my mind.
So here in the United States in particular, corporations are
treated legally like a person. But if you think about
(18:56):
that's kind of bonkers. More than kind of bonkers, I
should say, people get old, people pass away corporations. Assuming
that they are run well and they provide some sort
of goods or services that people want or need, they
can exist indefinitely. And a corporation that relies heavily on
intellectual property is quite loath to give up that meal ticket,
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and so corporations over the years have lobbied hard to
extend copyright in order to prevent the i P that
they own from falling into the public domain. And then
they can no longer exclusively exploit that i P. They
could still exploit it, they can still sell stuff with it,
just it doesn't stop anyone else from doing the same thing.
(19:43):
Perhaps the most high profile of all these companies was
one that seemed fixated on a particular mouse that I've
already mentioned. I'll explain more after this quick break. Before
the break, I t s that corporations played a huge
(20:04):
part in lobbying Congress to extend the protections of copyright,
and one of those corporations is the Walt Disney Company
and the cultural phenomenon that is Mickey Mouse. The cartoon
Steamboat Willie, which was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, was
released in nineteen twenty eight. Now, at that time, US
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copyright law had a twenty eight year protection limit, which
could then be renewed for a second twenty eight year term,
which would provide a total of fifty six years of
copyright exclusivity to the owner of an i P, but
then the i P would enter the public domain. That
means that if copyright law had remained unchanged since Steamboat Willie,
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Steamboat Willie would have entered the public domain back in
nineteen four. Spoiler alert, As of the recording of this podcast,
Steamboat Willie is not in the public domain yet, so
things did not remain the same. By the nineteen seventies,
the Disney Company was lobbying hard to change copyright laws,
(21:09):
and I want to be clear, they weren't the only ones,
but you frequently hear Disney specifically in regard to lobbying
for copyright law extensions, and it worked. Congress changed the
copyright protection so that copyrights that were held by individual
authors protection would last the lifetime of that author plus
(21:31):
another fifty years. So now we're well beyond guaranteeing the
right of a person to profit off of their work.
Right now, you're saying you're guaranteeing that multiple generations of
an author's family can continue to benefit from the work
of the author. The author will be dead and fifty
years will pass, and until those fifty years are up,
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the estate will continue to benefit monetarily from that author's work,
assuming that you know, people are still buying it. Obviously,
if it falls out of favor and no one's purchasing anything,
then those rights, while they're important, don't actually leverage into
any kind of monetary gain. But this is where I
(22:13):
start feeling a little weird about all this, because I
think it's one thing to want to provide for your family,
right you want to earn money and help contribute to
your family or households well being. But it's another to
create generational wealth that removes the need for future generations
to you know, make any sort of meaningful contribution themselves.
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There are lots of cases where the children of authors
who were incredibly successful, uh have themselves gone on to
do amazing things, which is great. But there are also
cases of people who just kind of, you know, never
bothered to do anything because they didn't really have a
need to. They were all of their needs were already
(22:58):
met because they were earning income on something that their
parents or grandparents or great grandparents had done, and there
never was any need for them to do anything. Uh.
Not super helpful for the general society. Not very healthy
in my mind anyway, for corporations that owned I P.
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It was a different story, right, because corporations don't die,
so you can't say the life of a corporation plus
fifty years. So in this case, the copyright protection extended
the term for works that had been published before nine
to a total term of seventy five years of protection.
Uh the Copyright Extension pushed that that protection of Steamboat
(23:43):
willie to two thousand three because of that, because it
was published in nineteen seventy five years later would be
up to two thousand three. However, in nineteen Congress passed
the Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Sunny
Buno Copyright Term Extension Act after the late congressman and
musician Sonny Bono. Bono had passed away in an accident
(24:04):
while Congress was hashing out this extension bill, so he
was posthumously honored with the title of the the Act.
This act extended the copyright protection for any work published
in nineteen twenty three or later, and the extension meant
that the copyright protection now went from the life of
the author plus fifty years to the life of the
(24:26):
author plus seventy years for those works that were created
by an individual artist, and it meant for works of
corporate authorship, you know, works that like Steamboat Willie from Disney,
they went from having seventy five years of protection to
either ninety five years after publication or one twenty years
from the date of creation, whichever ended earlier. So you know,
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corporate corporations might create something but not yet publish it.
So in some cases you would actually have a shorter
period between time of creation and hundred twenty years then
time of publication in ninety five years. Anyway, any published
work before nineteen seventy eight would get an additional twenty
years of copyright protection, so they went from seventy five
(25:12):
years to ninety five years, and those extra twenty years
meant that Steamboat Willie will now enter public domain essentially
at the beginning of twenty twenty four, unless between now
and then there's yet another change to copyright law, which
seems highly unlikely because there is a large opposition to that.
Since the Copyright Act I've mentioned so far retroactively protected
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any work published after nineteen twenty three, it meant that
we finally saw some published works go into the public
domain beginning in twenty nineteen. So on January one, twenty nineteen,
any copyrighted works that were published in nineteen twenty three,
with a few exceptions that have to do with music
because music is complicated. Otherwise, they entered the public domain
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at that point. This was the first time in twenty
one years in a large collection of works fell out
of copyright protection and into the public domain, only because
of the timing of changes to copyright law in the
United States. So works from nineteen twenty two had entered
the public domain back in nineteen, but then you had
the change to copyright law, and so any works from
(26:18):
nineteen twenty three enjoyed twenty more years of protection because
of that recent extension, and thus they only entered the
public domain in twenty nineteen. That's the difference that a
single year can make. This year in one we saw
works like f Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby go into
the public domain. You can now make as many copies
(26:38):
of The Great Gatsby as you like. You can hand
them out for free, you could charge for them if
you want to. It's public domain. Dr Doolittle's Zoo also
went into public domain this year. Agatha Christie's The Secret
of Chimneys made its exit from copyright protection. The nineteen
twenty five silent film version of been Her, not the
(26:59):
Charlton Heston version, but the silent film version is in
public domain, as is lawn cheneye The Phantom of the Opera.
Also the silent film version of Wizard Oz. Again not
the big musical version, you know, not the follow the
Yellow Brick Road version, but the silent film version of
Wizard of Oz is also in the public domain this year.
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Now that means that if you want to make copies
of lawn Chenese Phantom of the Opera and you want
to distribute those widely, if you want to post the
entire movie on YouTube, you can. You can do it
for free. You could also, you know, sell DVDs of
it if you wanted to. You could. You could have
press DVDs with Lawn Cheney's Phantom of the Opera and
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you could sell them. I don't know if anyone would
buy them, but you could do it. You can do
it here, you can do it there, you can do
it everywhere in the US. Anyway, it is no longer
in copyright. Now, backtracking just a little bit, the printing
press had made copyright protection more or less a necessity
to prevent publishers from pouncing on each other and flooding
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the market with copies of various books. But for a
really long time, copyright was just something that big companies
were mostly concerned with. It was a non factor for
the average person. I mean, it affected us, but we
didn't come into any sort of conflict with copyright protection
because most of us just didn't have access to equipment
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that we would need to replicate an original work. If
back in the mid nineteen twenties you managed to get
your grubby hands on a copy of The Great Gatsby,
you probably didn't have the ability to copy that work
and then sell it to two people yourself, you know,
like undercutting big bookstores or whatever. Publishing houses were protecting themselves,
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but they were doing so mostly from other publishing houses.
The average person was not a threat. So the nature
of copyright law was all about corporate entities protecting themselves
from each other. This, by the a is what kind
of becomes an issue in the modern day, where you've
got the the effect of like a nuclear arsenal, you know,
(29:08):
corporations against each other that could then be aimed against
the individual because the nature of copying has changed, so
there's a disproportionate hardship on the individual because of that.
So over time, various inventions meant more people would have
the ability to create copies of stuff, and these technological
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advancements always came hand in hand with media companies freaking
the heck out about it, which is not an exaggeration.
The invention of technologies like cassette tapes or VHS tapes,
burnable compact discs, and of course digital media all sent
media companies into a tizzy. Each invention prompted the companies
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to object strenuously and to proclaim that should these technologies
fall into the uh hands of the common unwashed masses
like myself, that the era of stuff like film or
television or popular music would all come to an end
and the entire industry would crash down on itself and
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we would then be back to banging rocks together for entertainment.
News Alert. None of that happened, but in the process
we saw lots of other laws passed that expanded copyright
protection by creating a pretty extensive framework for prosecution should
an IP holder discover that someone has copied or distributed
(30:35):
stuff that they hold the rights to without proper authorization.
I will cover more of those in the next episode. Now,
one of the reasons the public domain is important is
that works can have a great deal of relevance and
usefulness many years after they were published. Think of all
the classics that are out there that have stood the
(30:58):
test of time. But if copyright lasted forever, these works
would be under a tight restriction in perpetuity. Public domain
means that eventually these works will become widely accessible. It's
balancing out the benefits that go to the I P
holder against the benefits of society as a whole. All right,
(31:19):
but what about fair use? Okay? So, fair use is
a concept that allows someone to use part of a
copyrighted work that uh without permission in one of several ways.
And it's fairly narrow in its scope, but also kind
of fuzzy at the edges. So it's narrow in scope,
(31:42):
but there are no hard yes or no answers to
this stuff. In general, fair use allows someone to make
limited use of a portion of a copyrighted work for
the purposes of news reporting, research, teaching, or criticism and commentary.
Parody falls into that last category. As well, But we're
gonna come back to that because it's a more specific
(32:04):
approach than just adding funny words to existing music. Fair
use means that you don't have to secure permission from
the copyright holder if you're using a small portion of
that original work in one of these ways. So, for example,
if I were criticizing a film, I could use small
clips of that film during my critique. Let's say I'm
(32:26):
uploading a video to YouTube where I am critiquing a movie.
I can include tiny clips of that film in order
to illustrate specific points of my criticism, and I wouldn't
have to get permission first. The clips I used would
need to relate directly to that criticism. However, I might
want to talk about lighting composition, and I'll use clips
(32:48):
from Robert Egger's film The Lighthouse, because that film had
phenomenal lighting in it. So I'd use those examples to
talk about specific lighting techniques and how they shape storytelling
and what significance they play in the unfolding of the
story of the Lighthouse. But if I were to get
more loosey goosey, my protection of fair use would not
(33:10):
be as solid. Similarly, if I were to use very
short clips of the film in my critique. My argument
of fair use is better supported then if I were
to say, include thirty minutes of the movie surrounded by
like five minutes of criticism. Now, does that mean there's
a specific safe amount of copyrighted material that you can
(33:31):
use without fear of retribution. No. There is a common
misconception that if you use less than say, fifteen seconds
of audio from a source or six seconds or whatever,
that that's small enough to be fair use and no
one's going to come after you. That is just not true.
Or rather, it's it's not a guarantee. Specifically, it's not
(33:53):
a guarantee if you're not using that as some form
of commentary or criticism on the work itself. If you're
using it as like the button to a moment, you know,
like a sound bite or whatever, there's very little support
for a fair use argument there. So if I just
filled up this podcast with sound bites from various films
(34:15):
and music, TV shows and radio spots and stuff like
that without paying a license for all of those things,
I would be flying pretty darn close to the sun,
because unless I'm using those snippets in very specific ways
such as to criticize those original works that the snippets
belong to, or to report on the news of those snippets, Well,
(34:40):
I would be infringing on copyright. That doesn't necessarily mean
anyone is going to come after me. I mean, chances
are for really small stuff, I'd probably be okay unless
my podcast got wildly successful, in which case I could
represent a pretty lucrative target. If the copyright holders looked
at my podcast and said, well, that show is making
(35:01):
x million dollars a year, and a lot of that
popularity we could argue comes from its use of our
intellectual property. We can get a piece of that that
pie like that. That would be the thought process, and
it could actually work in court. So it doesn't mean
I'm bulletproof if I'm just using tiny little clips. It's
(35:22):
not until it goes to court that I really know
if I'm going to have to pay or not. So
fair use isn't a concept that has hard borders to it.
It's all interpretive stuff. And here's the key to all
of it. Fair use is something that gets determined in court. So,
in other words, you can't really use fair use proactively
(35:43):
as a defense. It's a defense that you make if
a copyright holder pursues a claim against you for copyright infringement.
So let's say that I did that critique of the
Lighthouse and the film company A twenty four which released
and distributed the film here in the unit it states.
Let's say that that that company came after me for
(36:03):
copyright infringement, and I would have to defend my use
of those clips in court, and I would have to
cite fair use in that process. Throughout the court proceedings,
I would likely have to prove that the way I
use those clips was in fact to critique the film,
and that the excerpts I used were appropriate and constituted
a relatively small percentage of the overall critique and a
(36:28):
very small percentage of the original film. Courts decide on
a case by case basis if a particular instance is
fair use or not. There isn't a blanket fair use defense.
You gotta go in front of the courts to do it.
And this is what I meant by that nuclear arsenal.
When it comes to companies versus companies, typically you have
(36:49):
lawyers on both sides who are just perpetually employed by
these companies that call each other up and they work
things out, and you might have a licensing agreement or
you I agree to a settlement, but it rarely goes
to court. When it comes to individuals. Most of us
don't have access to that kind of legal defense. So
(37:11):
for us, it's like a massive, well funded company with
high paid lawyers versus the little guy, and it means
that the little guy has to shell out the big
bucks in order to defend themselves against the corporations. Even
if the little guy is totally in the right. If
the the use is inarguably fair use, you don't get
(37:36):
to that decision magically. You have to go to court
for it, and court is expensive. We're going to pause
the conversation right here, take a quick break, and we'll
be right back now. The courts tend to look at
four factors when deciding if any given instance come institute's
(38:00):
fair use. One is the purpose and character of the
use of the original material, including whether the use is
for a commercial nature or is nonprofit and educational. So,
in other words, if I'm making videos where I critique films,
and I include clips of those films in the videos,
and I'm monetizing those critique videos, that can be a
(38:24):
little bit of a strike against me because I'm using
someone else's work in something on my own in order
to make money. That's not a failure rail the gate,
but it does make my argument harder. So it doesn't
mean that a court is going to decide I'm not
engaging in fair use. But in general, if the use
is nonprofit and it's educational, it fits more easily into
(38:48):
the fair use category, and courts tend to be a
bit more forgiving. Then there's the nature of the copyrighted
work itself. In general, it is easier to make a
fair use argument if the thing you're sampling rum is
a non fictional work. Works that are about creative expression,
like novels or movies, have a higher burden of proof
(39:09):
than works that are nonfiction. So, for example, in this podcast,
I will sometimes quote specific sources those are nonfiction sources,
and I quote from them to establish facts. That's easier
to defend as fair use than if I were to include,
say a minute long audio clip from a science fiction
(39:29):
television show that's a work of fiction. It's a work
of creative endeavors that is harder to justify as fair
use unless I'm specifically critiquing the show itself. Then comes
the amount and substantiality of the portion of the copyrighted
work that I used in my critique of The Lighthouse.
If I'm using very short clips that just show up
(39:52):
in my video for like five or ten seconds each
as I talk about lighting techniques, that's easier to defend
as fair use. I'm not showing a signific get part
of the movie. People aren't going to feel like they
saw the entire film by watching my critique. They're just
getting a flavor of what I'm talking about and getting
an understanding of what I mean when I'm critiquing the
use of lighting. If I'm, however, using very long stretches
(40:15):
of the original film, particularly stretches that don't include changes
in lighting, well that's going to be a lot harder
to defend in court. And then there's the effect of
the use upon the potential market for the copyrighted work.
If my derivative work could possibly hurt the sales of
the original by displacing the sales of that original, that's
(40:40):
a problem. And this one is a tricky one, right
because what if I'm not critiquing the technique of a film,
but the quality of a film. And what if I
present a video where I do an extensive tear down
of a movie and I explain how I think it
is not a good film, or I'm arguing that people
shouldn't go see that movie, that it would be a
(41:02):
waste of their time and money. Well, if folks value
my judgment, I could well be said to have a
negative impact on the sales of the original work. However,
generally that would still be protected. However, if I were
to use the original in some way that would make
people want to buy my derivative work or consume it
for free or whatever instead of the original, well that's
(41:26):
harder to defend. So let's say, like in my critique
of The Lighthouse, I included the entire film of The
Lighthouse in my critique. That would be very hard to defend,
not just because I'm using a substantial amount of the
original work, but also the company did argue, Hey, why
would people pay to see our movie if they can
see it for free? Just wrapped up in the context
(41:49):
of this supposed criticism video, the copyright holder it can
make a valid claim that my derivative work would not
exist without the copyrighted original piece, and yet it was
a essentially siphoning sales away from that original piece that
is not protected under fair use. Okay, we've got that
(42:09):
all established. We're gonna make a couple more points before
we wrap this up. Um. So, when it comes to
stuff like music, I mentioned that you can copyright the
musical composition and you can copyright the lyrics separately. One
other thing you can do, however, is copyright individual performances
of a piece of music. So, for example, let's say
(42:31):
that you're making a video and you want to make
use of a recording of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Now
to Joy is part of Beethoven's Symphony Number nine. Beethoven
composed that in the eighteen twenties and it has long
since passed into the public domain. You can use Ode
to Joy in anything you like for free. There's no
(42:52):
one to pay royalties to as far as that's concerned,
or licensing fees. Two. However, that just covers the music itself.
A performance of Oh to Joy will have its own copyright,
which dates to the recording of that piece. So even
though the music is in public domain, a performance likely
(43:14):
is not. Unless you're using a performance of Oh to
Joy the dates from before the nineteen twenties, So you
could perform to Joy yourself in your project, you'd be
good to go. The music is in the public domain,
the performance is yours. You're fine. But if you wanted to, say,
use a recording of the London Philharmonic's performance that they
(43:37):
did sometime in the nineteen nineties of Oh Joy, well,
then you would have to deal with some licensing arrangements
to get the proper permissions to make use of that music.
Because while the musics in the public domain, the performance
is not. Then there are other things to consider as well.
So remember when I said parody is kind of a
special case with fair use. This one gets even more
(43:59):
accomplish catd than other forms. So technically parody falls under
fair use if it falls under the criticism and comment
consideration For fair use, A typical definition of parody is
quote and imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist,
or genre would deliberate exaggeration for comic effect end quote,
(44:22):
But that doesn't automatically mean that it's fair use. For
it to be fair use, that specific parody really needs
to comment upon or criticize the original work that it
is parodying. For that reason, some but not all, of
weird Al Yankovic's parody songs would easily fall under fair use,
(44:43):
and others would be questionable. Now, I mentioned weird Al
because he's the most famous parody artist I can think of,
that probably the one that most people have heard of,
and some of his parodies do tend to target the
original work. So Smells like Nirvana is a parody of
the nerv on a song smells like teen Spirit, and
it's all about critiquing the original song. There are lyrics
(45:06):
of what is this song all about? Can't figure any
lyrics out that comments on the lyrics of the original work.
Other verses poke fun at Kurt Cobain's slurring and mumbling
of words, making it hard to understand what is actually
being sung, So that song parody would probably hold up
under fair use. But then take a song like Foil.
(45:28):
Foil is a parody of Lord's song Royals, So it's
using the music and lyrical structure of Royals. You know,
they change the actual lyrics, but's the same rhyme scheme
and scanshion of Royals. But the song Foil isn't a
commentary on Royals. Instead, it's a comedic song about aluminum foil,
(45:49):
and I'm pretty sure you couldn't make an argument that
it's somehow commenting on the original work, which means that
would be harder to defend as fair use. It's not
a bad song, by the way. This isn't a commentary
on the quality of the parody, but rather whether it
would fall under the consideration of fair use or not. Now,
to be clear, weird Al makes it a practice to
(46:10):
get permission to do his parodies before he does them.
He licenses the songs. In cases like smells like Nirvana,
he might have been able to skip that step, or
more likely his music label would have if they were,
you know, willing to defend any lawsuits that came their
way as a result, But as both a courtesy and
(46:32):
kind of a necessity, he reaches out before recording parodies. Usually, um,
there's at least one version of this where things didn't
work out, though actually there's a couple I can think of,
but I'm gonna mention one in particular. So back in
two thousand six, weird Al Yankovic was working on an
album and he wanted to include a parody of the
James Blunt song You're Beautiful. Yankovic's version was a parody
(46:56):
called You're Pitiful about a middle aged dude who serious
down on his luck. Blunt was receptive and he gave
the go ahead to Yankovic, but as Yankovic's album neared publication,
Blunt's record label, Atlantic Records, reached out to Yankovic's label
and demanded that the song not appear on the album.
(47:17):
And you know, music labels typically hold the i P
for the actual songs of an artist. In this case
is a little more complicated than that. So getting permission
from Blunt, while a good thing, wasn't totally legally binding.
Blunt probably could have pushed back on Atlantic Records about this,
(47:38):
but that's not exactly an easy thing to do when
you're an artist. I mean, you you want to work
with your label. You don't want that to be a
confrontational relationship. And as I mentioned earlier, defending fair use
is expensive because it all goes to that consideration of
a court, and that means lawyers and lawyers have fees,
and so defending an instance as fair use in court
(48:01):
can mean that you're paying thousands or tens of thousands
of dollars in fees just to defend yourself. There's a
financial disincentive to the average person because again, these laws
were made with corporations in mind, big entities that can
afford these kind of things. The average person can't. So
(48:22):
corporations like music labels or publishers have you know, entire
teams of lawyers who do this stuff all the time.
They can put pressure on folks with threats of lawsuits.
And even if those folks are in the right, you know,
even if their works clearly would fall under fair use,
to defend it in court could be way too expensive
(48:43):
for these individuals to afford it. There have been cases
in which people have settled out of court for thousands
of dollars, not because they felt they were legit and
the wrong, but because trying to prove that they were
innocent of infringement was more expensive than settling. It's pretty
darn brutal. Now, what about all those posts and YouTube
videos that say no copyright infringement intended? Those are pretty
(49:06):
much worthless. It's akin to posting on Facebook that you
aren't giving Facebook the rights to your data. That's also
useless because just by signing on to Facebook, and making
an account, you have to agree to Facebook's terms of service.
That kind of supersedes your little post that says you're
not in favor of Facebook using your data. Facebook's responses
too bad, because you agreed to it by being on
(49:28):
the platform. Now that's part of our terms of service.
If you don't want us to take your data, don't
be on Facebook. That's kind of the way that works.
So if you come across a video that says no
copyright infringement intended, or a picture on Instagram that clearly
doesn't belong to the account that posted it, just know
that that phrase means nothing. Intent is not part of
(49:50):
determining whether someone is infringing copyright in the first place.
It doesn't matter what you intend. There's definitely a gradient
when it comes to copyright infringement. Like if I include
half of a music video online, that's copyright infringement. But
if I include the whole thing, that is worse. And
if I monetize the video where I do it, that's
(50:11):
even worse. But even that smallest first example I gave
is still infringing. Doesn't matter whether I think it is
or not. You know, if I can think something's not
a crime, but if legally it's a crime, it doesn't
really matter what I think. There are a lot of
other things I need to say about this, but one
thing I want to sum up with right here before
I close out, and we will pick back up in
(50:32):
the next episode, is that Tom Scott did a great
job exploring the issues of copyright and YouTube in particular,
and I'll look more at YouTube in the next episode.
He did in a video titled YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken?
The World's is and shout out to listener Kat, who
first turned me onto Tom Scott's videos. Scott does what
(50:53):
I do, only he does it with a British accent,
so he's better at it than I am by default. Also,
he's genuinely good at explaining stuff like this, so make
sure you check that out. And we'll come back to
talk more about YouTube and copyright infringement and content i
D and some of the laws that have been passed
after big media companies have lobbied Congress in the United
(51:14):
States that have changed the way information gets shared on
the Internet. We'll also talk about some of the crazy
movements that companies have made against individuals and an effort
to crack down on things like piracy, because all this
is tied up together and it's all a mess. And really,
what it boils down to is that copyright law itself
(51:35):
is in dire need of a full rewrite. But that's
dangerous because the parties that are particularly interested in a
rewrite of copyright law are not looking to make it better.
They're looking to make it last longer. That's it for
this episode. Later this week, we'll pick back up with
(51:55):
more about copyright, fair use and piracy and things of
that nature and talk about the problems that technology have
created for companies as well as the problems companies have
placed upon people and more so. I hope you enjoyed this.
You have any requests for things I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter.
(52:17):
The handle for the show is text Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and I love all things tech. And it has been
a while since I've done an episode about the concepts
(00:24):
of copyright and fair use. And after I keep seeing
the phrase no copyright infringement intended over and over on
places like YouTube and Instagram, I figure it's a good
time to tackle this again. Because people continue to pretend
like copyright infringement only applies under very specific circumstances and
(00:49):
that with just a little bit of verbiage you can
get around it, when really the opposite is true. And
since the Internet and technology allows for more opportunities for
a copyright in fringe mint, and because various governments and
around the world have past legislation to, you know, specifically
tackle copyright infringement, and companies have lobbied endlessly for more
(01:13):
restrictive copyright rules, I think it fits the scope of
tech stuff, particularly since a lot of these laws were
formed in reaction to changes in technology. So first, let's
kind of define what copyright is now. Essentially, copyright guarantees
(01:33):
the creator of a work or an entity that has
been designated by the creator of the work, the right
to profit off of that work, the right to make
copies of that work and then distribute or sell them,
or you know, you just you own that intellectual property.
(01:54):
No one else can come and make copies of it
without your permission. The works in this case range from
the written word to music too, paintings, sculpture, uh to
digital files. I mean, copyright now applies to lots of stuff.
Clearly it didn't apply to all of that in the beginning,
but something that has a vaulved over time. It does
(02:16):
not include inventions. Those are covered under patent law. And
then you also have things like trademarks, which make things
more complicated. I might talk about trademarks and copyright in
a future episode to kind of talk about how those
complicate things, because companies have tried to use trademarks in
(02:36):
order to extend copyright protection. But trademarks last in perpetuity.
Copyright only lasts a certain amount of time, at least
in theory. We'll get to all that. So along with
the right to profit from intellectual property comes with it
protections against others who are taking a work and profiting
(02:57):
off of it without permission. You can see the value
of this concept right away, I imagine. So let's say
you are a musician and you write a song. It
was your work, You create the whole piece, You wrote
the music, and you wrote the lyrics, and you plan
to earn money through this song. Maybe you're going to
(03:19):
record it to some form of media and then sell
copies of the song. So you filed a copyright for
the song, which gives you the exclusive rights to make
copies of it uh in whatever format you like, whether
it's digital files or physical media, or even like sheet music.
You can charge whatever you like for your work, though
(03:42):
obviously if you go bonkers and you ask for a
ridiculously high price, you aren't likely to get a lot
of takers. You also have the protection should someone else
start making copies of your song without your permission. Maybe
they are performing it themselves, in which case they should
secure a license first, or maybe they're taking your original
(04:03):
recording and just duplicating it. So let's say that you
created an MP three file and they just copy the
MP three file endlessly and start either giving it away
or selling it to people. You could sue that person,
and in court you could prove that you hold the
copyright to that piece of music, and assuming the court
(04:25):
agrees with that the copyright is legitimate, you could then
seek damages against the person or entity that made the
unauthorized copies of your work. Music is actually really a
special case because you can have multiple copyrights on the work.
You could have one for the lyrics, then you could
have another for the musical composition itself, and that would
(04:48):
mean that someone who wanted to play your music but
change the lyrics would still potentially be liable for copyright violations.
But we're going to get back to that a little
bit later in this episode, but it is something to
keep in mind. However, Then there are such things as
mechanical licenses. This sets out the rules for stuff like
playing recorded music in particular places. So if you've ever
(05:12):
been to like a restaurant or a theater and you've
heard music being played over the sound system, chances are
that that place of business has paid out a license
fee in order to be able to do that. Intellectual
property rights get pretty complicated. Uh. It also depends upon
(05:33):
the size of the venue I might have to do
a future episode to kind of talk about all the exceptions, because,
as I said, it does get complicated, and in some cases,
if it's a very small venue, uh, they can sometimes
be exempt from having to pay the same sort of
license fees that larger venues have to pay. And part
of the argument there is that the number of people
(05:53):
who would actually experience the music is much smaller because
the venue is smaller. Anyway, in the old days, as
in before the printing press, copyright wasn't really that big
of a thing, Like, there wasn't a big concern for it.
There were predecessors for formal copyright, but truthfully, there wasn't
(06:14):
much occasion to use them because the act of copying
a work involved actually making a copy out by hand,
handwriting the copy of a written work. This was a
painstaking process and not something that could be done on
any sort of scale, and so copyright wasn't as huge
a concern just because infringement itself was not something that
(06:36):
was easy to do. And to that the fact that
much of the world's population was alliterate and there just
wasn't a foundation for copyright infringement to really take hold.
Then a smarty pants named Johann Gutenberg had to go
and invent the movable type printing press, at least the
European version. I should stress that Europe because other parts
of the world are actually further advanced with printing technologies
(06:58):
than Europe was. But this is the one that Western
cultures tend to talk about because we get a little myopic.
But i'll i'll set aside the commentary. So with the
printing press, it became possible to set the type on
the press and then print out sheets one after the
other in relatively quick succession. Now, it still took time
(07:20):
to set the press between pages because you had to
change all the type out right. You had to remove
all the type, set the type again, and then print
the next sheet. So you would typically use the press
to print a bunch of the same sheet in a
row before you would reset the type and move on
to the next sheet. However, you could also use a
(07:41):
single large sheet of paper to set up multiple pages
of text, and so you could divide up the quadrants
of a printing press and change the type up so
that you are actually creating multiple pages per press, and
then you fold the paper in such a way that
that makes all sense. Like if you fold it once
(08:03):
along a vertical line, so you you fold it in
half vertically, um then are along the vertical access, I
should say, then you end up with a folio that
was a single large sheet of paper that would have
one page printed on the left side, one page printed
on the right side. You have a vertical fold in
the middle, and then you can just keep printing those
(08:26):
over and over again, and then you bind a bunch
of those together and you've got a book. Or you
could do a double fold and you could have a quarto,
which would also involve you having to make a cut
along the horizontal line. But then you've got four pages
per sheet, so you could do that and that it
means that with one press you're effectively printing four pages,
(08:50):
and then you let it dry, you flip it over
and you can print another four pages. Very useful. So
this was these were different ways that you could end
up creating book fairly quickly. The process of publishing became
much faster than with people doing it by hand, but
there wasn't yet a formalized protection in place for the
creator of the works, and at this point, the typical
(09:12):
approach was for an author to receive a flat fee
for their work, which would then go to a book
printer to produce, so the printer would take ownership of
that work from that point forward. Then it was just
a matter of time before other printers would get hold
of the book and start making their own copies. At
least for books that proved to be popular for authors.
(09:35):
There really wasn't a whole lot of profit in this approach.
William Shakespeare, who you know you could argue, was one
of the greatest English writers, mostly known for his plays
but also his poetry. He never sought out the printing
of his plays. Others would give it a shot. Either
they would try to copy down plays as they were
(09:56):
being performed and then go and print what they had
trans rived, or they would try to get hold of
the sides that actors were using in their roles, or
a combination of the two. It was really only after
Shakespeare's death that his friends got together and did their
best to gather his plays and publish them. Now, based
on what I know about Shakespeare, I suspect the reason
(10:18):
that he did not seek out publication of his works
was that it really wasn't where the money would be
for him. He would get a pay the flat fee
for every play he wrote. But more importantly, he was
a part owner of the theater itself, like the Globe
Theater or the Rose Theater. He was part of the
company that owned the theater, so that meant he would
(10:40):
actually take a share of the box office. So, in
other words, his main goal was to attract crowds to
the theater. That's where the money was. But you can
bet that if there had been serious money in publication
back in those days, Shakespeare would have been all over
it because a quick glance at some of the lawsuits
he was involved with during his lifetime indicates he had
(11:01):
a certain appreciation for the accumulation of wealth. So Shakespeare,
great artist, also a business guy, and had publishing been
a bigger business for the author, he certainly would have
gone that route, I'm sure of it. Now. The printing
press was a truly transformational piece of technology. It became
easier to produce many copies of a work. Book printing businesses,
(11:25):
which would evolve into true publishing houses, began to pop
up all over Europe, and the powers that be, that is,
the Church and the various governments of Europe, viewed book
printers as both an asset and a potential threat. Through
the printers, these organizations could spread information quickly. The Bible
(11:45):
was a very early candidate for printing, as the Guttenberg
Bible proves and governments could use printing presses to spread
information about laws and declarations and that kind of thing.
But printing presses also meant it was easier to print
stuff that undermined authority. People who had a bone to
pick with the folks who were in charge could potentially
(12:06):
spread their ideas and maybe find sympathetic souls who shared
those same beliefs. So the printing press could enable existential
threats to the power structure. And this is where we
get a predecessor to copyright. Now, this predecessor wasn't so
much about making sure the author of a book was
(12:27):
fairly compensated. Instead, it was more about keeping printing houses
under control. The basic idea was that any business that
wished to print materials had to first secure an official
license from, you know, the government of that region. These
licenses typically meant that a specific printer would be responsible
(12:47):
for the printing of particular works to the exclusion of
all other printers. So you might say that this one
printer can print this one book, and no other printer
in the region is a allowed to do that, so
they have a monopoly on that specific title. In fact,
they called the monopolies. These agreements would last a set
(13:08):
number of years, which wasn't too different from the concept
of modern copyrights. If any other printer was found to
produce a work that some other printer had exclusive rights to,
that matter could go to court. But this was all
about the printing houses, not authors. England passed its first
actual copyright law in seventeen. This law changed things quite
(13:32):
a bit. A publisher would have a fourteen year period
of exclusive rights to publish any new book. Existing books
that the printing house was already printing would enjoy protection
for twenty one years. After that, the author of the
work could choose to renew the copyright if the author
was still alive. Otherwise the work would enter into the
(13:53):
public domain, meaning anyone would be legally allowed to make
a copy of that work or use it in any
way they liked. There were no longer any protections on
that piece of work, and it was available for any
public use. The United States wouldn't get its first true
copyright law until nearly a century later. But let's be fair,
(14:15):
there was no such thing as the United States in
seventeen ten, so I'm gonna cut the young nations some
slack here. The copyright law of the US followed closely
in the footsteps of the Copyright Act of Britain, which
was also known as the Statute of Ann as in
Queen Anne. So the way that the US law worked
was that an author would register their work with the
(14:36):
U S District Court of their particular region, and they
would in return receive an exclusive copyright for fourteen years,
with the option to renew for a second fourteen year period,
and after those twenty eight years, assuming that you actually
renewed your copyright, the work would then enter into the
public domain with the Statute of Ann and the Copyright
(14:56):
Act of seventeen nine in the US or at the
point where authors would get a little more protection and
a chance to benefit more from their own work. It
was no longer the case of a one time flat
fee in every instance. Now, I say authors, but often
we're really still talking about publishers. Here. The publisher retains
the copyright because the copyright allows the publisher to you know,
(15:18):
publish the works. Otherwise the author would have to grant
permission for each printing, you'd have to have a license
for it. It all gets clunky. Right that the author
has exclusive copyright to their work, they have to grant
permission to whichever entity is creating copies of that work.
You often see this reflected today in ways that are
(15:40):
kind of confusing. When you agree to certain platforms, there's
language there that seems to suggest that anything you post
on that platform is that platform's property. But usually the
reasoning for the language is to make sure that the
platform has the necessary permission to display whatever it is
(16:00):
you're posting, because otherwise, every single time you posted, you
would have to have some sort of licensing agreement or
something that would give permission to the platform to actually
display the thing you wrote. It gets pretty complicated now.
The same would be true for most music produced in
the modern era. The copyright isn't necessarily held by the artist,
(16:23):
but by a music label. And it's kind of like
how Thomas Edison made sure that his name was on
every patent produced out of his business. He might not
have had a direct hand in the creation of every invention.
In fact, we know that he didn't have a direct
hand in a lot of them, but he sure as
heck made sure that his signature was on the patent
(16:43):
to every single one, so that he had a right
to each of them anyway. One of the consequences of
all of this is that, to this day, getting the
permission of an author or artist in order to use
their work typically isn't enough. That's because in many cases
that individual creator doesn't actually hold the copyright to the work.
(17:06):
It's more likely that some corporate entity will hold the
copyright on behalf of that creator. So you really have
to get the permission of whatever entity holds the copyright
for any specific intellectual property. In some cases it might
be an individual creator, in other cases it might be
a big company. So let's say if you met an
(17:29):
artist for Disney in a cafe and this artist told you, oh,
it's totally cool if you use they're drawing of a
popular Disney character for something you're doing, that's probably not
good enough because that artist wouldn't even hold the copyright
for that work. Disney would, and copyright laws would evolve
(17:51):
quite a lot over the following centuries. They expanded to
include more types of works, as well as to allow
for things like licenses, and without these considerations, it might
be illegal to you know, play playback an album without
first getting permission of the music label, which is clearly absurd.
You wouldn't have it where you bought an album, you
(18:12):
went home, and every time you were to play the
album you first had to get permission from the music
label to do that. That just doesn't make sense. But
that's the sort of stuff that actually had to be
codified into law. It's you know, it's not enough to
just everyone agree like, oh well, that's absurd. It actually
had to be written down somewhere and ratified. One of
(18:35):
the biggest changes to copyright has been how long that
copyright protection lasts. This also ties into how many capitalist
societies treat corporations, which is uh ridiculously in my mind.
So here in the United States in particular, corporations are
treated legally like a person. But if you think about
(18:56):
that's kind of bonkers. More than kind of bonkers, I
should say, people get old, people pass away corporations. Assuming
that they are run well and they provide some sort
of goods or services that people want or need, they
can exist indefinitely. And a corporation that relies heavily on
intellectual property is quite loath to give up that meal ticket,
(19:20):
and so corporations over the years have lobbied hard to
extend copyright in order to prevent the i P that
they own from falling into the public domain. And then
they can no longer exclusively exploit that i P. They
could still exploit it, they can still sell stuff with it,
just it doesn't stop anyone else from doing the same thing.
(19:43):
Perhaps the most high profile of all these companies was
one that seemed fixated on a particular mouse that I've
already mentioned. I'll explain more after this quick break. Before
the break, I t s that corporations played a huge
(20:04):
part in lobbying Congress to extend the protections of copyright,
and one of those corporations is the Walt Disney Company
and the cultural phenomenon that is Mickey Mouse. The cartoon
Steamboat Willie, which was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, was
released in nineteen twenty eight. Now, at that time, US
(20:25):
copyright law had a twenty eight year protection limit, which
could then be renewed for a second twenty eight year term,
which would provide a total of fifty six years of
copyright exclusivity to the owner of an i P, but
then the i P would enter the public domain. That
means that if copyright law had remained unchanged since Steamboat Willie,
(20:49):
Steamboat Willie would have entered the public domain back in
nineteen four. Spoiler alert, As of the recording of this podcast,
Steamboat Willie is not in the public domain yet, so
things did not remain the same. By the nineteen seventies,
the Disney Company was lobbying hard to change copyright laws,
(21:09):
and I want to be clear, they weren't the only ones,
but you frequently hear Disney specifically in regard to lobbying
for copyright law extensions, and it worked. Congress changed the
copyright protection so that copyrights that were held by individual
authors protection would last the lifetime of that author plus
(21:31):
another fifty years. So now we're well beyond guaranteeing the
right of a person to profit off of their work.
Right now, you're saying you're guaranteeing that multiple generations of
an author's family can continue to benefit from the work
of the author. The author will be dead and fifty
years will pass, and until those fifty years are up,
(21:53):
the estate will continue to benefit monetarily from that author's work,
assuming that you know, people are still buying it. Obviously,
if it falls out of favor and no one's purchasing anything,
then those rights, while they're important, don't actually leverage into
any kind of monetary gain. But this is where I
(22:13):
start feeling a little weird about all this, because I
think it's one thing to want to provide for your family,
right you want to earn money and help contribute to
your family or households well being. But it's another to
create generational wealth that removes the need for future generations
to you know, make any sort of meaningful contribution themselves.
(22:36):
There are lots of cases where the children of authors
who were incredibly successful, uh have themselves gone on to
do amazing things, which is great. But there are also
cases of people who just kind of, you know, never
bothered to do anything because they didn't really have a
need to. They were all of their needs were already
(22:58):
met because they were earning income on something that their
parents or grandparents or great grandparents had done, and there
never was any need for them to do anything. Uh.
Not super helpful for the general society. Not very healthy
in my mind anyway, for corporations that owned I P.
(23:21):
It was a different story, right, because corporations don't die,
so you can't say the life of a corporation plus
fifty years. So in this case, the copyright protection extended
the term for works that had been published before nine
to a total term of seventy five years of protection.
Uh the Copyright Extension pushed that that protection of Steamboat
(23:43):
willie to two thousand three because of that, because it
was published in nineteen seventy five years later would be
up to two thousand three. However, in nineteen Congress passed
the Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Sunny
Buno Copyright Term Extension Act after the late congressman and
musician Sonny Bono. Bono had passed away in an accident
(24:04):
while Congress was hashing out this extension bill, so he
was posthumously honored with the title of the the Act.
This act extended the copyright protection for any work published
in nineteen twenty three or later, and the extension meant
that the copyright protection now went from the life of
the author plus fifty years to the life of the
(24:26):
author plus seventy years for those works that were created
by an individual artist, and it meant for works of
corporate authorship, you know, works that like Steamboat Willie from Disney,
they went from having seventy five years of protection to
either ninety five years after publication or one twenty years
from the date of creation, whichever ended earlier. So you know,
(24:49):
corporate corporations might create something but not yet publish it.
So in some cases you would actually have a shorter
period between time of creation and hundred twenty years then
time of publication in ninety five years. Anyway, any published
work before nineteen seventy eight would get an additional twenty
years of copyright protection, so they went from seventy five
(25:12):
years to ninety five years, and those extra twenty years
meant that Steamboat Willie will now enter public domain essentially
at the beginning of twenty twenty four, unless between now
and then there's yet another change to copyright law, which
seems highly unlikely because there is a large opposition to that.
Since the Copyright Act I've mentioned so far retroactively protected
(25:34):
any work published after nineteen twenty three, it meant that
we finally saw some published works go into the public
domain beginning in twenty nineteen. So on January one, twenty nineteen,
any copyrighted works that were published in nineteen twenty three,
with a few exceptions that have to do with music
because music is complicated. Otherwise, they entered the public domain
(25:56):
at that point. This was the first time in twenty
one years in a large collection of works fell out
of copyright protection and into the public domain, only because
of the timing of changes to copyright law in the
United States. So works from nineteen twenty two had entered
the public domain back in nineteen, but then you had
the change to copyright law, and so any works from
(26:18):
nineteen twenty three enjoyed twenty more years of protection because
of that recent extension, and thus they only entered the
public domain in twenty nineteen. That's the difference that a
single year can make. This year in one we saw
works like f Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby go into
the public domain. You can now make as many copies
(26:38):
of The Great Gatsby as you like. You can hand
them out for free, you could charge for them if
you want to. It's public domain. Dr Doolittle's Zoo also
went into public domain this year. Agatha Christie's The Secret
of Chimneys made its exit from copyright protection. The nineteen
twenty five silent film version of been Her, not the
(26:59):
Charlton Heston version, but the silent film version is in
public domain, as is lawn cheneye The Phantom of the Opera.
Also the silent film version of Wizard Oz. Again not
the big musical version, you know, not the follow the
Yellow Brick Road version, but the silent film version of
Wizard of Oz is also in the public domain this year.
(27:20):
Now that means that if you want to make copies
of lawn Chenese Phantom of the Opera and you want
to distribute those widely, if you want to post the
entire movie on YouTube, you can. You can do it
for free. You could also, you know, sell DVDs of
it if you wanted to. You could. You could have
press DVDs with Lawn Cheney's Phantom of the Opera and
(27:43):
you could sell them. I don't know if anyone would
buy them, but you could do it. You can do
it here, you can do it there, you can do
it everywhere in the US. Anyway, it is no longer
in copyright. Now, backtracking just a little bit, the printing
press had made copyright protection more or less a necessity
to prevent publishers from pouncing on each other and flooding
(28:04):
the market with copies of various books. But for a
really long time, copyright was just something that big companies
were mostly concerned with. It was a non factor for
the average person. I mean, it affected us, but we
didn't come into any sort of conflict with copyright protection
because most of us just didn't have access to equipment
(28:25):
that we would need to replicate an original work. If
back in the mid nineteen twenties you managed to get
your grubby hands on a copy of The Great Gatsby,
you probably didn't have the ability to copy that work
and then sell it to two people yourself, you know,
like undercutting big bookstores or whatever. Publishing houses were protecting themselves,
(28:46):
but they were doing so mostly from other publishing houses.
The average person was not a threat. So the nature
of copyright law was all about corporate entities protecting themselves
from each other. This, by the a is what kind
of becomes an issue in the modern day, where you've
got the the effect of like a nuclear arsenal, you know,
(29:08):
corporations against each other that could then be aimed against
the individual because the nature of copying has changed, so
there's a disproportionate hardship on the individual because of that.
So over time, various inventions meant more people would have
the ability to create copies of stuff, and these technological
(29:31):
advancements always came hand in hand with media companies freaking
the heck out about it, which is not an exaggeration.
The invention of technologies like cassette tapes or VHS tapes,
burnable compact discs, and of course digital media all sent
media companies into a tizzy. Each invention prompted the companies
(29:54):
to object strenuously and to proclaim that should these technologies
fall into the uh hands of the common unwashed masses
like myself, that the era of stuff like film or
television or popular music would all come to an end
and the entire industry would crash down on itself and
(30:15):
we would then be back to banging rocks together for entertainment.
News Alert. None of that happened, but in the process
we saw lots of other laws passed that expanded copyright
protection by creating a pretty extensive framework for prosecution should
an IP holder discover that someone has copied or distributed
(30:35):
stuff that they hold the rights to without proper authorization.
I will cover more of those in the next episode. Now,
one of the reasons the public domain is important is
that works can have a great deal of relevance and
usefulness many years after they were published. Think of all
the classics that are out there that have stood the
(30:58):
test of time. But if copyright lasted forever, these works
would be under a tight restriction in perpetuity. Public domain
means that eventually these works will become widely accessible. It's
balancing out the benefits that go to the I P
holder against the benefits of society as a whole. All right,
(31:19):
but what about fair use? Okay? So, fair use is
a concept that allows someone to use part of a
copyrighted work that uh without permission in one of several ways.
And it's fairly narrow in its scope, but also kind
of fuzzy at the edges. So it's narrow in scope,
(31:42):
but there are no hard yes or no answers to
this stuff. In general, fair use allows someone to make
limited use of a portion of a copyrighted work for
the purposes of news reporting, research, teaching, or criticism and commentary.
Parody falls into that last category. As well, But we're
gonna come back to that because it's a more specific
(32:04):
approach than just adding funny words to existing music. Fair
use means that you don't have to secure permission from
the copyright holder if you're using a small portion of
that original work in one of these ways. So, for example,
if I were criticizing a film, I could use small
clips of that film during my critique. Let's say I'm
(32:26):
uploading a video to YouTube where I am critiquing a movie.
I can include tiny clips of that film in order
to illustrate specific points of my criticism, and I wouldn't
have to get permission first. The clips I used would
need to relate directly to that criticism. However, I might
want to talk about lighting composition, and I'll use clips
(32:48):
from Robert Egger's film The Lighthouse, because that film had
phenomenal lighting in it. So I'd use those examples to
talk about specific lighting techniques and how they shape storytelling
and what significance they play in the unfolding of the
story of the Lighthouse. But if I were to get
more loosey goosey, my protection of fair use would not
(33:10):
be as solid. Similarly, if I were to use very
short clips of the film in my critique. My argument
of fair use is better supported then if I were
to say, include thirty minutes of the movie surrounded by
like five minutes of criticism. Now, does that mean there's
a specific safe amount of copyrighted material that you can
(33:31):
use without fear of retribution. No. There is a common
misconception that if you use less than say, fifteen seconds
of audio from a source or six seconds or whatever,
that that's small enough to be fair use and no
one's going to come after you. That is just not true.
Or rather, it's it's not a guarantee. Specifically, it's not
(33:53):
a guarantee if you're not using that as some form
of commentary or criticism on the work itself. If you're
using it as like the button to a moment, you know,
like a sound bite or whatever, there's very little support
for a fair use argument there. So if I just
filled up this podcast with sound bites from various films
(34:15):
and music, TV shows and radio spots and stuff like
that without paying a license for all of those things,
I would be flying pretty darn close to the sun,
because unless I'm using those snippets in very specific ways
such as to criticize those original works that the snippets
belong to, or to report on the news of those snippets, Well,
(34:40):
I would be infringing on copyright. That doesn't necessarily mean
anyone is going to come after me. I mean, chances
are for really small stuff, I'd probably be okay unless
my podcast got wildly successful, in which case I could
represent a pretty lucrative target. If the copyright holders looked
at my podcast and said, well, that show is making
(35:01):
x million dollars a year, and a lot of that
popularity we could argue comes from its use of our
intellectual property. We can get a piece of that that
pie like that. That would be the thought process, and
it could actually work in court. So it doesn't mean
I'm bulletproof if I'm just using tiny little clips. It's
(35:22):
not until it goes to court that I really know
if I'm going to have to pay or not. So
fair use isn't a concept that has hard borders to it.
It's all interpretive stuff. And here's the key to all
of it. Fair use is something that gets determined in court. So,
in other words, you can't really use fair use proactively
(35:43):
as a defense. It's a defense that you make if
a copyright holder pursues a claim against you for copyright infringement.
So let's say that I did that critique of the
Lighthouse and the film company A twenty four which released
and distributed the film here in the unit it states.
Let's say that that that company came after me for
(36:03):
copyright infringement, and I would have to defend my use
of those clips in court, and I would have to
cite fair use in that process. Throughout the court proceedings,
I would likely have to prove that the way I
use those clips was in fact to critique the film,
and that the excerpts I used were appropriate and constituted
a relatively small percentage of the overall critique and a
(36:28):
very small percentage of the original film. Courts decide on
a case by case basis if a particular instance is
fair use or not. There isn't a blanket fair use defense.
You gotta go in front of the courts to do it.
And this is what I meant by that nuclear arsenal.
When it comes to companies versus companies, typically you have
(36:49):
lawyers on both sides who are just perpetually employed by
these companies that call each other up and they work
things out, and you might have a licensing agreement or
you I agree to a settlement, but it rarely goes
to court. When it comes to individuals. Most of us
don't have access to that kind of legal defense. So
(37:11):
for us, it's like a massive, well funded company with
high paid lawyers versus the little guy, and it means
that the little guy has to shell out the big
bucks in order to defend themselves against the corporations. Even
if the little guy is totally in the right. If
the the use is inarguably fair use, you don't get
(37:36):
to that decision magically. You have to go to court
for it, and court is expensive. We're going to pause
the conversation right here, take a quick break, and we'll
be right back now. The courts tend to look at
four factors when deciding if any given instance come institute's
(38:00):
fair use. One is the purpose and character of the
use of the original material, including whether the use is
for a commercial nature or is nonprofit and educational. So,
in other words, if I'm making videos where I critique films,
and I include clips of those films in the videos,
and I'm monetizing those critique videos, that can be a
(38:24):
little bit of a strike against me because I'm using
someone else's work in something on my own in order
to make money. That's not a failure rail the gate,
but it does make my argument harder. So it doesn't
mean that a court is going to decide I'm not
engaging in fair use. But in general, if the use
is nonprofit and it's educational, it fits more easily into
(38:48):
the fair use category, and courts tend to be a
bit more forgiving. Then there's the nature of the copyrighted
work itself. In general, it is easier to make a
fair use argument if the thing you're sampling rum is
a non fictional work. Works that are about creative expression,
like novels or movies, have a higher burden of proof
(39:09):
than works that are nonfiction. So, for example, in this podcast,
I will sometimes quote specific sources those are nonfiction sources,
and I quote from them to establish facts. That's easier
to defend as fair use than if I were to include,
say a minute long audio clip from a science fiction
(39:29):
television show that's a work of fiction. It's a work
of creative endeavors that is harder to justify as fair
use unless I'm specifically critiquing the show itself. Then comes
the amount and substantiality of the portion of the copyrighted
work that I used in my critique of The Lighthouse.
If I'm using very short clips that just show up
(39:52):
in my video for like five or ten seconds each
as I talk about lighting techniques, that's easier to defend
as fair use. I'm not showing a signific get part
of the movie. People aren't going to feel like they
saw the entire film by watching my critique. They're just
getting a flavor of what I'm talking about and getting
an understanding of what I mean when I'm critiquing the
use of lighting. If I'm, however, using very long stretches
(40:15):
of the original film, particularly stretches that don't include changes
in lighting, well that's going to be a lot harder
to defend in court. And then there's the effect of
the use upon the potential market for the copyrighted work.
If my derivative work could possibly hurt the sales of
the original by displacing the sales of that original, that's
(40:40):
a problem. And this one is a tricky one, right
because what if I'm not critiquing the technique of a film,
but the quality of a film. And what if I
present a video where I do an extensive tear down
of a movie and I explain how I think it
is not a good film, or I'm arguing that people
shouldn't go see that movie, that it would be a
(41:02):
waste of their time and money. Well, if folks value
my judgment, I could well be said to have a
negative impact on the sales of the original work. However,
generally that would still be protected. However, if I were
to use the original in some way that would make
people want to buy my derivative work or consume it
for free or whatever instead of the original, well that's
(41:26):
harder to defend. So let's say, like in my critique
of The Lighthouse, I included the entire film of The
Lighthouse in my critique. That would be very hard to defend,
not just because I'm using a substantial amount of the
original work, but also the company did argue, Hey, why
would people pay to see our movie if they can
see it for free? Just wrapped up in the context
(41:49):
of this supposed criticism video, the copyright holder it can
make a valid claim that my derivative work would not
exist without the copyrighted original piece, and yet it was
a essentially siphoning sales away from that original piece that
is not protected under fair use. Okay, we've got that
(42:09):
all established. We're gonna make a couple more points before
we wrap this up. Um. So, when it comes to
stuff like music, I mentioned that you can copyright the
musical composition and you can copyright the lyrics separately. One
other thing you can do, however, is copyright individual performances
of a piece of music. So, for example, let's say
(42:31):
that you're making a video and you want to make
use of a recording of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Now
to Joy is part of Beethoven's Symphony Number nine. Beethoven
composed that in the eighteen twenties and it has long
since passed into the public domain. You can use Ode
to Joy in anything you like for free. There's no
(42:52):
one to pay royalties to as far as that's concerned,
or licensing fees. Two. However, that just covers the music itself.
A performance of Oh to Joy will have its own copyright,
which dates to the recording of that piece. So even
though the music is in public domain, a performance likely
(43:14):
is not. Unless you're using a performance of Oh to
Joy the dates from before the nineteen twenties, So you
could perform to Joy yourself in your project, you'd be
good to go. The music is in the public domain,
the performance is yours. You're fine. But if you wanted to, say,
use a recording of the London Philharmonic's performance that they
(43:37):
did sometime in the nineteen nineties of Oh Joy, well,
then you would have to deal with some licensing arrangements
to get the proper permissions to make use of that music.
Because while the musics in the public domain, the performance
is not. Then there are other things to consider as well.
So remember when I said parody is kind of a
special case with fair use. This one gets even more
(43:59):
accomplish catd than other forms. So technically parody falls under
fair use if it falls under the criticism and comment
consideration For fair use, A typical definition of parody is
quote and imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist,
or genre would deliberate exaggeration for comic effect end quote,
(44:22):
But that doesn't automatically mean that it's fair use. For
it to be fair use, that specific parody really needs
to comment upon or criticize the original work that it
is parodying. For that reason, some but not all, of
weird Al Yankovic's parody songs would easily fall under fair use,
(44:43):
and others would be questionable. Now, I mentioned weird Al
because he's the most famous parody artist I can think of,
that probably the one that most people have heard of,
and some of his parodies do tend to target the
original work. So Smells like Nirvana is a parody of
the nerv on a song smells like teen Spirit, and
it's all about critiquing the original song. There are lyrics
(45:06):
of what is this song all about? Can't figure any
lyrics out that comments on the lyrics of the original work.
Other verses poke fun at Kurt Cobain's slurring and mumbling
of words, making it hard to understand what is actually
being sung, So that song parody would probably hold up
under fair use. But then take a song like Foil.
(45:28):
Foil is a parody of Lord's song Royals, So it's
using the music and lyrical structure of Royals. You know,
they change the actual lyrics, but's the same rhyme scheme
and scanshion of Royals. But the song Foil isn't a
commentary on Royals. Instead, it's a comedic song about aluminum foil,
(45:49):
and I'm pretty sure you couldn't make an argument that
it's somehow commenting on the original work, which means that
would be harder to defend as fair use. It's not
a bad song, by the way. This isn't a commentary
on the quality of the parody, but rather whether it
would fall under the consideration of fair use or not. Now,
to be clear, weird Al makes it a practice to
(46:10):
get permission to do his parodies before he does them.
He licenses the songs. In cases like smells like Nirvana,
he might have been able to skip that step, or
more likely his music label would have if they were,
you know, willing to defend any lawsuits that came their
way as a result, But as both a courtesy and
(46:32):
kind of a necessity, he reaches out before recording parodies. Usually, um,
there's at least one version of this where things didn't
work out, though actually there's a couple I can think of,
but I'm gonna mention one in particular. So back in
two thousand six, weird Al Yankovic was working on an
album and he wanted to include a parody of the
James Blunt song You're Beautiful. Yankovic's version was a parody
(46:56):
called You're Pitiful about a middle aged dude who serious
down on his luck. Blunt was receptive and he gave
the go ahead to Yankovic, but as Yankovic's album neared publication,
Blunt's record label, Atlantic Records, reached out to Yankovic's label
and demanded that the song not appear on the album.
(47:17):
And you know, music labels typically hold the i P
for the actual songs of an artist. In this case
is a little more complicated than that. So getting permission
from Blunt, while a good thing, wasn't totally legally binding.
Blunt probably could have pushed back on Atlantic Records about this,
(47:38):
but that's not exactly an easy thing to do when
you're an artist. I mean, you you want to work
with your label. You don't want that to be a
confrontational relationship. And as I mentioned earlier, defending fair use
is expensive because it all goes to that consideration of
a court, and that means lawyers and lawyers have fees,
and so defending an instance as fair use in court
(48:01):
can mean that you're paying thousands or tens of thousands
of dollars in fees just to defend yourself. There's a
financial disincentive to the average person because again, these laws
were made with corporations in mind, big entities that can
afford these kind of things. The average person can't. So
(48:22):
corporations like music labels or publishers have you know, entire
teams of lawyers who do this stuff all the time.
They can put pressure on folks with threats of lawsuits.
And even if those folks are in the right, you know,
even if their works clearly would fall under fair use,
to defend it in court could be way too expensive
(48:43):
for these individuals to afford it. There have been cases
in which people have settled out of court for thousands
of dollars, not because they felt they were legit and
the wrong, but because trying to prove that they were
innocent of infringement was more expensive than settling. It's pretty
darn brutal. Now, what about all those posts and YouTube
videos that say no copyright infringement intended? Those are pretty
(49:06):
much worthless. It's akin to posting on Facebook that you
aren't giving Facebook the rights to your data. That's also
useless because just by signing on to Facebook, and making
an account, you have to agree to Facebook's terms of service.
That kind of supersedes your little post that says you're
not in favor of Facebook using your data. Facebook's responses
too bad, because you agreed to it by being on
(49:28):
the platform. Now that's part of our terms of service.
If you don't want us to take your data, don't
be on Facebook. That's kind of the way that works.
So if you come across a video that says no
copyright infringement intended, or a picture on Instagram that clearly
doesn't belong to the account that posted it, just know
that that phrase means nothing. Intent is not part of
(49:50):
determining whether someone is infringing copyright in the first place.
It doesn't matter what you intend. There's definitely a gradient
when it comes to copyright infringement. Like if I include
half of a music video online, that's copyright infringement. But
if I include the whole thing, that is worse. And
if I monetize the video where I do it, that's
(50:11):
even worse. But even that smallest first example I gave
is still infringing. Doesn't matter whether I think it is
or not. You know, if I can think something's not
a crime, but if legally it's a crime, it doesn't
really matter what I think. There are a lot of
other things I need to say about this, but one
thing I want to sum up with right here before
I close out, and we will pick back up in
(50:32):
the next episode, is that Tom Scott did a great
job exploring the issues of copyright and YouTube in particular,
and I'll look more at YouTube in the next episode.
He did in a video titled YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken?
The World's is and shout out to listener Kat, who
first turned me onto Tom Scott's videos. Scott does what
(50:53):
I do, only he does it with a British accent,
so he's better at it than I am by default. Also,
he's genuinely good at explaining stuff like this, so make
sure you check that out. And we'll come back to
talk more about YouTube and copyright infringement and content i
D and some of the laws that have been passed
after big media companies have lobbied Congress in the United
(51:14):
States that have changed the way information gets shared on
the Internet. We'll also talk about some of the crazy
movements that companies have made against individuals and an effort
to crack down on things like piracy, because all this
is tied up together and it's all a mess. And really,
what it boils down to is that copyright law itself
(51:35):
is in dire need of a full rewrite. But that's
dangerous because the parties that are particularly interested in a
rewrite of copyright law are not looking to make it better.
They're looking to make it last longer. That's it for
this episode. Later this week, we'll pick back up with
(51:55):
more about copyright, fair use and piracy and things of
that nature and talk about the problems that technology have
created for companies as well as the problems companies have
placed upon people and more so. I hope you enjoyed this.
You have any requests for things I should cover in
future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter.
(52:17):
The handle for the show is text Stuff H s
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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