May 19, 2021 • 54 mins
Over the years, large companies have pressured governments (particularly the US government) to create strict laws that crack down on unauthorized copying and distribution of intellectual property. We look at the good, the bad and the really, really ugly consequences.
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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,
Joathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech, and the other day it
did a high level overview of copyright and fair use
to things that can be confusing to people in general
(00:28):
and people on the Internet in particular. Today we're going
to continue that and talk about some legislation in the
United States that ties into intellectual property rights and copyright
and why things are so ridiculously complicated and in some
cases extreme. Now. Towards the end of the last episode,
I mentioned a video by Tom Scott who explains copyright
(00:51):
in general and YouTube's solution to copyright issues in particular,
and we will definitely come back to that to talk
more about it. But it is good to get into
a bit more background on stuff. So early on in
the days of YouTube, there was a real problem of
people uploading videos that did not belong to them, which
(01:12):
honestly is still a thing that happens today, but now
there are various tools to handle it, and back then
there weren't. It was a different story in the early
days of YouTube. YouTube launched in two thousand five, and
at the time it was not part of Google's empire.
Google would actually purchase YouTube in October of two thousand six,
(01:32):
and in fact, it wasn't even the earliest platform that
allowed users to upload videos. Video had launched in two
thousand four. But YouTube had a couple of things going
for it, one of them being that it was fairly
easy to embed YouTube videos onto other pages. So if
you were creating like a blog and you wanted to
include a video on a blog entry, you could upload
(01:55):
the video to YouTube and then use an embettable player
and put that in your blog page and folks could
see it. This was a huge help if you were
using a blog hosting site that otherwise wouldn't be able
to host your video. Toward the end of two thousand five,
users uploaded copies of a video that Chris Parnell and
Andy Samberg of Saturday Night Live had made, called Lazy Sunday.
(02:19):
The video went viral, but NBC, which had ownership rights
to the video, didn't really want folks watching it on
other platforms. NBC had its own website and would much
rather people go there to watch videos because that's where
NBC could serve up ads and generate revenue from user visits.
(02:40):
But with the video popping up all over YouTube, NBC
didn't have that kind of control or ability to monetize it,
and so the huge and extremely well established media company
reached out to YouTube to make sure that the platform
would take down the videos, which YouTube did, and then
other people uploaded it. YouTube would take those videos down too,
(03:02):
and rents and repeat. Now, we know people upload videos
to YouTube at a rate that's far too fast for
anyone to review them before they go up. Right like
these days, it's more than a hundred hours of content
that are uploaded every single minute. You literally cannot have
enough people to review all the content going up on
(03:25):
YouTube to make sure that you know it all fits standards.
This is kind of stuff that shakes out over time.
So YouTube's general policy was that it would wait to
be told about a video that was violating copyright by
the copyright holder, and then after receiving a d m
c A takedown notice, would go and take down the video.
(03:46):
More about the d m c A in a second. Now,
YouTube included language in its user interface that urged users
not to upload stuff that they didn't actually own, So
you weren't supposed to upload any material that was copyrighted,
or rather any material that you personally did not hold
the copyright for. But users could choose to ignore this.
(04:07):
Some users might have, you know, been pretty ignorant about
the issues of copyrights, so they were doing it without
really understanding. But others might have known, but they just
you know, I didn't care, so they just went ahead
and uploaded it anyway. I mean, NBC is a big company, right,
and the video is a funny video, and YouTube is
(04:27):
where a lot of people were gathering and you could
get a lot of views over on YouTube. You could
upload it and suddenly that video goes viral and so
many people are watching your YouTube channel. But here's another complication.
YouTube did not introduce ads until the summer of two
thousand six. So this meant that YouTube users back in
two thousand five, we're not monetizing their videos because there
(04:51):
was no way to do that, at least not through
YouTube directly. I guess you could conceivably get noticed if
you were uploading interest ing or innovative videos, and you
might land a gig that way, Like it could be
almost like an audition or a demo reel. But there
wasn't really a way to make money directly off of
(05:12):
YouTube in those days, so it wasn't as though people
were uploading an NBC owned video and then they were
making money off of that. So at least there's that right.
Even though the video went viral and got a million views,
there was no monetization, so the person who uploaded it
wasn't like, you know, stealing money or anything like that.
(05:32):
But as we learned in the last episode, you don't
have to monetize something for it to be an example
of copyright infringement. If I took a video that was
owned by someone else and I duplicated it and uploaded
it to YouTube, and even if I had all the
ads turned off for that video, it's still copyright infringement,
even if I'm not making any money off of it. Heck,
(05:53):
it's still copyright infringement even if no one ever sees
that I uploaded the video. I don't have the permission
to copy and distribute the content, period, so it doesn't
matter if folks see it or not, or if I
make money off of it or not. Anyway, NBC was
totally within the company's legal rights as the owner of
that I p to demand that YouTube take down the videos,
(06:17):
and YouTube complied again and again. YouTube complied because of
something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m
c A. And in the last episode I talked about
laws that extended term limits of copyright repeatedly. Remember the
original term for copyright protection was fourteen years, and then
(06:37):
there was an option to renew for a second fourteen
year term, which would give you twenty eight years of
protection total. The US government expanded this repeatedly, and today
the rule is that copyright will last the lifetime of
the author plus an additional seventy years, or for works
that are owned by you know, corporations work for higher work.
(07:00):
In other words, copyright lasts from the year of publication
plus ninety five years, or it lasts from the date
of creation plus one hundred twenty years, whichever expires first.
Because keep in mind, creation and publication are two different things.
Like someone might have written a book in nineteen seventy
(07:21):
that didn't see publication until In that case, you would
look and say, all right, well, we're gonna go from
the date of creation plus one hundred twenty years, because
that expires first. Those are big changes, no doubt about it,
to copyright law. I mean they were huge. They really
push back the date of when copyrighted works are going
(07:41):
to enter the public domain, at which point anyone can
make copies and distribute the works without penalty. But we
covered that in the last episode. So let's talk about
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A.
So in the nineteen nineties, the technological landscape was changing quickly,
and with it, the ability to copy and distribute media
(08:03):
was also changing. While in previous decades, publishers and creators
really only had to worry about large entities potentially copying
stuff on a large scale, more recent technologies began to
make this a possibility for the average person. Now, media
companies were worried that a single person might, say, purchase
(08:25):
an album on compact disc, then they might rip that
disc and copy all the music files to a computer.
Then they might actually use a CD drive and burnable
c d s, and they might put blank CDs into
that drive and then you know, put the ripped files
onto the CD just thus duplicating CDs pretty easily and
(08:48):
relatively quickly. I mean it was fairly slow, but you
could actually get drives that could hold multiple blank CDs
and burn to all of them simultaneously, thus speeding up
the process. Then you might go and dis review those
burned c d s, or you might even sell them
to folks at a you know, a rate lower than
what they would pay if they went to the music store.
(09:08):
And that meant that now there was the potential for
an average person who had access to, you know, a
decent computer two, you know, commit copyright infringement on a
On a slightly larger scale, entertainment companies viewed this as
a potential existential threat, particularly the music industry in the
(09:28):
early days, because really, you know, we've got to keep
in mind, we're still talking about relatively small files and
the grand scheme of things, and music files like raw
audio files are pretty big, but they're not as big
as like a you know, uncompressed high resolution digital movie file.
And here's the funny thing. We would see the music
(09:51):
industry overreact to this in a way that had massive blowback,
and yet other industries would follow very similar pathways when
they faced a comparative scenario themselves a little later on. So,
to paraphrase the great comedian Peter cook. We learned from
our mistakes and we can repeat them almost exactly. The
(10:12):
d m c A itself was the U S law
that was meant to bring the US in alignment with
the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty. World Intellectual Property
Organization or WIPEOH is an organization that tries to align
copyright across different borders. This particular treaty was really necessary
(10:35):
because copyright law is already pretty complicated within a single
country like the US. Now, as you can imagine, it
gets way more complicated when you start comparing it against
other countries. So, like what happens if you have a
work that was created in the United States, like the
cartoons Steamboat Willie. Steamboat Willy by US law receives ninety
(10:57):
five years of copyright protection when it's all said and done.
But over in some other countries copyright protection doesn't last
that long. So does that mean that Steamboat Willie would
be in the public domain over in that country? I mean,
the copyright is registered in the United States, But how
does that How does that work in other countries? How
(11:19):
do other countries recognize that? Anyway? The Whiteoat, as it were,
is the organization that helps get parody among countries. This
particular act focused on the new challenges of the digital age.
One thing that the treaty and then consequently the d
m c A focused on was anti circumvention tools for
(11:42):
copyright protection. So they were looking at the fact that
companies were trying to put in protections to prevent people
from copying stuff without permission. Typically, this was in a
category we would call DRM, or digital rights management. In
case you're not familiar with DRM, it's typically some sort
(12:03):
of protective measure in place that restricts or limits the
ability of a consumer to make a copy of a
piece of digital media. There are a lot of different
ways the companies have created DRM, and some of them
are truly awful. Let's talk about Sony for a second,
because this one was a doozy. In the mid two thousand's,
(12:23):
Sony was the target of some pretty massive criticism because
the company had implemented copy protection measures on compact discs
under the Sony BMG music label. And if you were
to take one of those compact discs and you were
to put it into the optical drive of a computer,
because by the way computers back then, most of them
(12:45):
had optical drives. Well anyway, the boot sequence once the
disc went into the drive would initiate an installation of
two pieces of software that were meant to act as DRM.
But what these pieces of software did was they altered
your computers operating system so that it wouldn't let you
copy the c D bam take that would be music
(13:10):
pirate except um oh. The programs also turned out it
could facilitate malware that could create backdoor access to your computer,
giving hackers potentially the remote control to your PC. Whoop
see daisy. They also were tracking lots of activity. They
were essentially looking to see what you were listening to
(13:31):
and how frequently you listened to it. It was a
big breach of privacy. So how many c d s
actually had this kind of DRM on it. It was
somewhere north of twenty million c ds. And the programs
that the CD installed on your machine were really hard
to identify and hard to remove, which made it much
(13:52):
much worse. And also the programs appeared to have some
code that was lifted from other software, which means ironically
that the copy protection software was itself infringing on someone
else's copyright. Sony would end up getting sued in several
class action lawsuits and eventually backtracked on its approach to
(14:15):
copy protection in two thousand and seven. But yeah, that
was a particularly egregious approach to DRM. Not all DRM
schemes were harmful to this degree, but all of them
did represent problems. See, while fair use isn't always easy
to establish, as I mentioned in the last episode, fair
(14:37):
use is still a thing. You still can make fair
use out of copyrighted material, but if companies put limitations
on how you can access or copy works, the ner
ability to make fair use of a copyrighted work is impacted.
You technically have the right to do something, but you
(14:59):
don't have any way to actually do it. When Congress
was drafting the d m c A, they acknowledged that
this was a problem, and they did it anyway. This
meant that even if your use of copyrighted work was
fair use. So let's say that you took uh some music,
(15:20):
you took some copyrighted music, and you did a critique
where you were explaining the structure of the song. You
were criticizing the use of music and lyrics like it
was a legit academic approach to treating the music but
you had to use the original work itself. Let's say
that it also meant you had to circumvent copy protection
(15:43):
on that digital work to do it. Well, the the
use was fair, right, it falls under fair use, but
you would still get in trouble for actually circumventing the
copy protection. This is kind of like saying, hey, I
got this stuff. It's behind this locked door over here.
You are totally free to use that stuff. There's only
(16:04):
one problem. The only way to get to the stuff
is if you commit breaking and entering, which by the way,
is a crime. But you're still free to use the
stuff as long as you can get to it. But
if you get to it, it shows that you've broken
the law. So have fun. Now you might be able
to tell I am not a big fan of this
part of the d m c A, or most copy
protection schemes for that matter. I find that a lot
(16:27):
of copy protection ends up causing more harm to legitimate
customers and consumers than it does to discourage piracy. If anything,
copy protection often encourages people to use piracy because part
of piracy typically means stripping away d r M, and
(16:49):
it may be that someone wants a copy of you know,
a piece of media that doesn't have DRM on it,
not because they just want to free copy or that
they want to distribute it or anything that they might
just want it because there's no hassle there. They don't
have to deal with the problems of dr M. There
are other issues about copyright that DRM totally interferes with.
(17:12):
One is that you do have the right to make
backups for your own personal use. If you have an album,
like an old vinyl record album, and you wanted to
back that up to cassette tape back in the day,
you totally could do that as long as as long
as it was for your personal use, so that way,
if something were to happen, like you were to you know,
(17:33):
the the record was to be damaged or destroyed in
some way, you would have a backup. That's fine. You
were allowed to make those things, but DRM made it
harder or sometimes impossible to do that, So again it
was a protection that was infringing upon the rights of
the user. Another important part of d M c A
(17:54):
is a section that guarantees safe harbor to service providers,
which was originally can it or to be things like
I s p S Internet service providers. This provision makes
it clear that an I s P is not at
fault for the stuff that people on that I s
P are actually doing. So, in other words, if I'm
logging onto the Internet via earth Link and then I'm
(18:17):
pirating I don't know all of Poison's greatest hits, earth
Link isn't liable for the crime that I am committing.
The Safe Harbor had its own provisions in that the
provider would have to be unaware of my activity. So
in other words, if they knew about it, they should
stop it, but if they don't know about it, they're
not at fault. And also they have to have a
(18:38):
copyright policy in place. They are also supposed to have
a representative that's sort of a point of contact for
media companies to to reach in case of an issue
of copyright infringement that happens across that network. So the
I s P would react if notified that I was
up to no good, and as long as it did that,
(18:59):
then safe Harbor applies. This would later be extended to
web platforms like YouTube. More on YouTube later in this episode.
There were some other provisions that helped layout exceptions and
such for special cases, like when someone needs to do
computer maintenance, and so they might need to make copies
of software in the process, so that way during the maintenance,
(19:21):
if if they had to wipe a computer, they could
reinstall software. Those sort of exceptions were put into the law.
There's also a section in the d m c A
about boat holes as in ships, as in vessels, and
I am not kidding. Title five of the d m
c A is the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act. And
(19:42):
you might say, what the heck is this just you know,
pork that's been added onto an act. Was where we're
big boats getting all up on Congress. It actually was
because at that point, boat hole designs were not covered
under copyright law. They were considered part of the form
and function of boats, so they couldn't they couldn't qualify
(20:03):
for copyright. However, designers wanted a way to protect their
designs from just being copied without their permission. So this
was kind of a way of building in some protection. Now,
when we come back, I'll talk about some instances in
which companies went a little bit ham when they went
after people who seemed to be in flagrant violation of
(20:23):
copyright laws, and how a few different websites truly wreaked
havoc and change the way companies viewed the protection of
intellectual property forever. But first let's take a quick break. Okay,
(20:46):
so the d M c A was really becoming a
thing because of the technology of c ds and computers
that could rip music tracks off of c ds. That
was really the big going concern in the mid nineties.
That was more of a of a thing than digital
files were in general. But by the late nineties we
saw something that would make copying CDs seem tame by comparison.
(21:10):
We saw the rise of peer to peer file sharing
networks and later of torrents. Now, first let's clear up
the fact that peer to peer networks and infect torrents
aren't necessarily a bad thing. They could be used for
all sorts of legitimate purposes. I'll do a quick breakdown
of what peer to peer networks are and how they work.
And it helps if we start with the standard sort
(21:31):
of networks that we think of when we're talking about
the Internet. So when you use, say, um, a web browser,
and you're using your web browser to access a web page,
what's kind of happening on the back end is that
your computer sends a request up through your internet service provider.
That request goes through routers which direct the request to
(21:53):
the proper web server that's hosting the web page you
want to visit. The web server response to that request
and sends back the respective web page data to your
web browser, which then displays it as a web page.
So you can kind of think of this system as
being made up of clients, which would be your computer, or,
(22:14):
more appropriately, in this example, your web browser and servers.
These are the computers that actually host the data that
you get to see on your computer now and appear
to peer network. Every computer that's part of that network
is an equal or a peer to every other computer
on that network. Each computer provides data and resources to
(22:36):
the network. Computer is connected to this network can easily
share the data they have stored on them with all
the other computers on that same network. And typically to
use a peer to peer network, you would download and
install some software that lets you connect to the network itself.
Usually you can designate a specific folder on your computer
(22:58):
as the place where you both download and share files,
which keeps the rest of your computer sequestered from the
peer to peer network, so you're not just sharing everything
peer to peer networks can be used for tons of stuff,
from harnessing the computational resources of a large group of
computers in order to tackle you know, tough computer problems
(23:20):
all the way to distributing software quickly through the network.
But the thing that the entertainment industry in general and
the music industry in particular was focusing on was how
it could facilitate piracy. In the late nineties, we saw
the rise of products like Napster and Khaza and lime
wire and many many others. Napster was the pioneer in
(23:44):
this space. It was a peer to peer networking software
and people were using it largely to pirate music. People
would rip songs from c d s and convert the
audio files into compressed formats like MP three because raw
audio files were just so big and broadband speeds were
not super advanced back in the mid nineties. So then
(24:08):
these compressed files they would store on a shared drive,
they would PLoP onto the peer to peer networks, and
then they would start building out their own collections. They
would offer up the stuff they had and they would
add to their collections from you know, other computers that
were on the network. These services allowed people to search
out rare bootlegs and other recordings that you couldn't just buy,
(24:30):
like stuff that wasn't available commercially. However, it also allowed
people to download tons of music that you could, in
theory purchase, but you know, you just opted to download
them for free, so people pirated music like crazy. This
was also an era where malware was running rampant because
(24:51):
a lot of people could upload or share malware on
their computers that posed as if it were say a
music five l or a software package for like a
game or something. So this was also a buyer beware,
or rather pirate beware era where there was a chance
(25:11):
that that you know, the song you were about to
download was in fact, you know, a virus or some
other form of malware. Now, some people went so wild,
so crazy, they went hug wild in fact, over downloading
music that places like colleges and universities began to ban
access to Napster simply because the Internet traffic from all
(25:35):
the downloading was clogging things up. So this wasn't because
colleges and universities were necessarily being contacted by you know,
big record labels or anything. It was more like, hey,
no one can send an email because everyone over at
five cap of five is downloading the new Britney Spears album.
So they started to shut down access to it. Napster
(25:59):
lawn in nine, but by two thousand it had become
the target of numerous lawsuits, with various acts like Metallica
and music labels and music label industry organizations like the
r I double A all going after the service. The
argument was that the service was overwhelmingly being used as
a way to pirate music on a large scale, and
(26:21):
it was a pretty big scale. Napster had something like
eighty million users at one point. Napster took cases all
the way up to the U. S. Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit. They kept appealing the judgments and
they were trying to argue that the underlying service wasn't
tied directly to music piracy, and the court agreed that
(26:42):
there were valid and legal ways to use Napster, that
the way Napster distributed information on its own wasn't necessarily illegal. However,
the vast majority of traffic across Napster was illegal, so
the court order that Napster developed a system to curtail
(27:03):
the rampant piracy and Napster really couldn't do that. The
problem was such a big one the company just didn't
have the means to tackle it, So Napster shut down
in two thousand one. Now you could argue that if
a company is told, hey, you got to get a
handle on this, and the company says, well, we gotta
shut down because we can't get a handle on it,
that there was a legitimate problem. That doesn't take away
(27:26):
from the fact that the underlying technology that made Napster
work has nothing, you know, inherently to do with piracy.
It can be used for that, but it's not the No,
that's not the purpose of the tech. But it's kind
of hard to argue against the practical results of the
use of that technology. And lots of other services similar
(27:49):
to Napster popped up like they essentially became really popular
after Napster went away, so piracy was still going like gangbusters.
Perhaps one of the biggest reason was that, you know,
there was such a problem with piracy was that it
was legitimately difficult for music lovers to find and purchase
digital music online. There weren't really any viable alternatives to
(28:13):
just stealing it. I mean, some companies were offering up
limited access to their catalogs through their own digital storefronts,
but not very many people were offering up digital downloads
for purchase. It was not easy to find or buy
stuff when Apple launched iTunes in two thousand one. At
that time, iTunes was just a way to rip music
(28:35):
tracks from c d s and have a digital collection
of music on your Apple computer or your iPod or whatever.
But you could not purchase digital songs through iTunes at
all when it launched. It wasn't until two thousand three
that the iTunes music store actually came online, so in
the absence of a legitimate way to purchase music, folks
(28:57):
turned to illegal means to get it. Now, does this
mean that if there had been legal ways to buy
music easily, that piracy wouldn't have been a problem at all.
Probably not. I'm sure that there had been plenty of
people who would still want to try and just get
stuff for free rather than pay for it, But I
bet that piracy wouldn't have been as large of a
(29:18):
problem as it was. The music industry would after numerous
cases of people who had downloaded songs, often coupling their
lawsuits with demands for enormous sums and damages. The goals
seemed to be not to recapture lost revenue, but to
scare the ever love and heck out of would be pirates.
(29:39):
The lawsuits were making examples of people and the message
was you do not want this to happen to you.
You see what it's doing to this person, so you
better not steal any music bucko. So, for example, the
Recording Industry Association of America the r I double A,
they sued more were than eighteen thousand individuals in the
(30:02):
mid two thousand's for illegally sharing music, and in some
cases they sawt truly astronomical damages in that in that endeavor.
So in one case, the r I Double A sought
one point five million dollars and damages against a woman
that the organization said had downloaded and distributed more than
(30:23):
seventeen hundred songs. Now the lawsuit only included twenty four
songs in it, and they were asking for damages of
one and a half million dollars. This was just one case.
By the way, the woman lost that case. She appealed it,
she refused to take a settlement out of court, and
(30:45):
she lost the case multiple times. UM, I actually don't
know what the current status is of that case, because
the last I had heard, she had planned on declaring bankruptcy,
which would get her out of the need to to pay.
The amount that was being asked for at that point
was more than two thousand dollars. There were thousands of
these types of cases, and most of them were settled
(31:07):
out of court. They didn't actually go to trial. But
it was a really effective intimidation tactic, and it was
one that was based largely on faulty logic. So what
do I mean by that, Well, the way the entertainment industry,
and it's not just the music labels, the the film
industry and television industry would do the same thing. The
(31:28):
way they would figure out, you know, how much how
much damage is they would ask for was essentially based
on the idea that really doesn't hold water when you
look into it, and that idea is that each pirated
copy of a piece of media represents a lost sale. So,
in other words, the argument is that if people had
not stolen things, then those same people would have gone
(31:50):
and bought a legitimate copy. So in other words, every download,
every illegal download, represents a lost sale and lost revenue.
But that's just not necessarily true. It's possible that someone
might download a piece of media just out of curiosity alone,
and they have no real desire to own it. That
kind of person would perhaps never have bought a copy
(32:14):
of the media at all. They would have just gone without.
And because we're talking about digital files here, you're not
looking at the physical loss of a product. It's not
like going into a store and shoplifting, you know, c
d s or something. If you did that, while the store,
you know, would be out those c d s, it
wouldn't be able to sell any that those specific CDs
because they would just have been stolen. Digital files, however,
(32:38):
those are things you just copy. You can make an
infinite number of copies of digital files, or at least,
you know, effectively infinite. Obviously you're limited by however much
storage space you have, but you get the idea. There's
no scarcity to digital files. So it's a different matter.
Even the US Government Accountability Office found that the formulas
(32:58):
that the entertainment industry were using when they were trying
to make claims of damages just were not supportable. So
it's not that piracy has no effect on sales. It
definitely has some effect on sales. But it's more that
you can't quantify what that effect on sales is. And
if you can't quantify it, then you can't really assign
(33:20):
a value to losses because it's impossible to say what
the losses were. But for several years in the two
thousands that didn't matter. The r I, double A and
other organizations tried to crack them on piracy hard, and
the industry as a whole earned a pretty ugly reputation
as a result. The courts often found in the favor
(33:42):
of industry, but it meant that, like everyone was looking
at these companies and saying, what the heck are you doing.
You're going after, you know, regular people and demanding these
astronomical damages. What's really interesting to me is that the
solution for piracy wasn't really in these gratuitous lawsuits and damages.
People were still pirrating stuff, it's just that you know
(34:04):
they were doing so running the risk of being one
of the examples that would be brought up in a
court case. And the solution wasn't even in working with
online stores like iTunes, though that did change things quite
a bit. The solution was really the method of delivery
gradually shifting from downloads to streaming, and this was facilitated
(34:25):
by the rise of the smartphone and the improvement of
wireless technologies. Why would you pirate music when practically every
song you have ever heard is available on some streaming platform.
Lots of them are even ad supported and otherwise free
to use, so you don't even have to pay a
subscription to them, so you can listen to these songs
(34:46):
whenever you like, as long as you have an Internet connection.
That is what helped pull back music piracy, and the
fact that the access to the content suddenly became way
easier and there was no reason to run the risk
of being an example. But the improvements in broadband connectivity
(35:08):
would bring with it the chance for people to download
not just music, but also stuff like TV shows and
movies and video games. These groups didn't have to worry
as much in the early days. I mean, video games
kind of did, but they were starting to get so
sophisticated that the you know, the cutting edge video games
of the time were so big most people just didn't
have the band whip to download them in a reasonable
(35:29):
amount of time, so they weren't really considerations. However, once
broadband started catching up that changed. Now, the music industry
had already gone through this whole process, and you would
think that these other industries would have looked at that
and said, all right, well, what worked, what didn't work,
and will follow best practices, But really they mostly doubled
down on going the same route that the music industry
(35:51):
did with pretty similar results. So it's hard to feel
much sympathy for these multibillion dollar media companies versus the
individuals who made downloaded a copy of X Men origins
Wolverine without permission. Companies began lobbying US Congress to once
again create more legislation that would impose harsher penalties on
(36:11):
people illegally downloading content, and more importantly, on ways to
prevent sites that were facilitating these kinds of downloads. The
Pirate Bay, a site that specialized in serving as sort
of a database or almost like a Yellow Pages of
torrent files of various types of media, was constantly in
the news at this time, and the global nature of
(36:34):
the Internet meant that sites like the Pirate Bay, which
was founded in Sweden, which last I checked, is not
in the United States. It meant that they were beyond
the jurisdiction of the US. So you have these big
US based media companies that really wanted to have a
way to shut down this foreign service, and there just
(36:54):
weren't many options. It wasn't like they could target a
YouTube that's based in the United States and make the
man's you know. They could try and target a Swedish company,
but that company is saying like, ha ha, you have
no power here, be gone with you. Moreover, the Pirate
Bay was just one example, and now the possibility of
companies in different parts of the world allowing for the
mass piracy of various types of media was once again
(37:17):
seen as an existential threat. You could make a pretty
convincing argument that the history of modern media is a
series of the industry reacting to something as an existential threat,
because that's kind of what we see here in the
United States. What we saw is a consequence of this
was the proposal of two different but very similar pieces
(37:41):
of legislation, one in the House of Representatives and one
in the U S. Senate. There was the Stop Online
Piracy Act or SOPA, that was the Senate one, and
there was the Protect I p Act or PIPPA, which
was the House of Representatives one. Both of those were
being written around, and the intended purpose of these proposed
acts was to act as protection for I P holders
(38:04):
in the United States from the nefarious doings of overseas entities.
But the solutions were pretty drastic, including the possibility that
you know, these companies could force governments or or demand
for governments to order US based I s p s
to cut off all access to certain sites. In other words,
(38:25):
to tell US based I s p s, hey don't
allow any U r l s from these domains to
be accessible in the United States. So, in other words,
there would be parts of the Internet that US citizens
would not be allowed to access, at least not legally
and not without the aid of something like a VPN
located in another country. Critics pointed out that this approach
(38:49):
would have massive consequences with regard to free speech, and
beyond that, applying the rules would be difficult and uneven.
People envisioned a scenario in which U S I s
p s would have to block access to an entire
domain because of potentially what one blogger posted on a
single blog that was located on that domain. So this
(39:11):
was like a nuclear option that would potentially affect far
more you know, innocent people than it would for those
who were actually perpetrating the alleged crimes. A large collection
of web based companies help protests in early two thousand twelve,
using a blackout on their web pages to inform visitors
of the issue and essentially going dark, and the results
(39:33):
were dramatic. Politicians who had previously expressed support for either
PIPPA or SOPA abruptly reversed course, including people who had
sponsored the bills in the first place. So the two
pieces of legislation were withdrawn from being voted upon the floor. Now,
the reason they were withdrawn is because if Congress had
(39:55):
held a vote and the legislation was voted down, that
would be pretty much the end of that. But by
removing the bills from consideration, the authors of the bills
and their supporters would have some time to work on
it further and potentially reintroduce the bill at a later
date once the political climate changed. So far that hasn't happened.
(40:17):
But when we come back, I'll spend some time talking
a little bit more about copyright and YouTube's specific approach
to handling copyright claims. But first, let's take another quick
break Okay, let's talk about YouTube and copyright now. As
(40:37):
I mentioned, YouTube has a long history with copyright issues,
and for a while, the general approach was that company
would claim a copyright ownership of some or all of
the content that was in a YouTube video, and they
would send a d m C A takedown notice to YouTube,
which then would typically take down the video in question. Uh,
(40:59):
the user or owner of the channel would get a
copyright strike against them, and if you've got three strikes,
the channel would get wiped, the account would be deleted,
all those videos would be removed. Now, ideally, each d
m C A claim would go through a thorough review
by some other party to make sure that the claim
(41:20):
was legitimate. You have to verify that the claimant actually
holds the rights to the i P in question. You
have to determine if the use of any material falls
under the category of fair use, which means that the
inclusion of that material in the video would need to
be proven to be you know, legitimate. And YouTube built
(41:41):
in systems that would let channel owners dispute d m
C A takedown charges, essentially pushing the matter into arbitration
that would then ultimately have to go to court. So
quick overview. Let's say I put up a video. Let's
say I've got some material in there in the video
that belongs to someone else, and I get a d
m C A takedown notice, so YouTube has taken the
(42:03):
video down. I get a copyright strike against me. I
decide to dispute this YouTube sends that back to the
copyright holder, who if they don't respond, then YouTube just
lifts it and the video comes back online. But if
they do respond, then essentially the next step is you
go to court over it. So it wasn't like a
(42:25):
super awesome thing for the individual because court cases are
incredibly expensive um and there were some court cases around
videos containing copyrighted material that helped establish the law around it. So,
for example, in two thousand eight, a U. S. Court
ruled that copyright holders couldn't just send a d m
(42:45):
C a takedown notice unless they first determined that the
use of the material in the video in question fell
under a fair use scenario. Because if it is fair use,
the copyright holder is not supposed to send out the
takedown notice. The key raise there is they're not supposed to.
It doesn't mean that they necessarily held back flash forward though,
(43:07):
Google acquired YouTube in two thousand and six, and then
by two thousand seven started to develop a system that
acted sort of like a digital finger printing system for companies.
So it's a system that could scan videos that have
been uploaded to YouTube and look for patterns in those
videos that matched a database of copyrighted material owned by
(43:29):
you know, each individual large media company. So if there
were a match, well, then you would get a notification saying, hey,
you've got this possible case of someone making use of
your copyrighted material without your permission, and then you could
flag the video. Following that the owner of the I
(43:49):
P and question so big media company, in other words,
would have a few options. They could choose to block
the video completely, which just made it unreachable, or they
could choose to add advertisements to the video, or to
co opt existing advertisements and claim the revenue generated by
the ads for itself. So in other words, yeah, you
can keep your video up. We're going to collect any
(44:12):
money that's generated from the fact that you have this
video there. This was originally called video identification, but later
became known as Content i D. In two thousand eleven,
the system went into effect in earnest, and the result
was that content owners could get revenue from videos that
included their content, or they could order the videos to
(44:33):
be totally removed, but that seemed to be slightly less prevalent.
It does still happen occasionally, but more often than not
people just say no, I'm just happy to take the money.
This approach automates stuff. It removes any human review process,
which also means that no one is really checking to
make sure that the flagged video is actually infringing upon
copyright or that it's not a case of fair use.
(44:55):
So it falls on the channel owner to dispute claims
and to push for reviews. Meanwhile, if you do get
hit with enough flags, you might find your whole channel
shut down and once again, want to refer to Tom
Scott's great video on this subject, titled YouTube's Copyright System
Isn't Broken, The World's is. Scott gives a personal example
(45:17):
of a time when the content I D system totally failed.
So Scott is an independent creator with an impressive following
of more than three point eight million subscribers. He uploaded
a video to YouTube and a TV company in Thailand
took that video incorporated it into a Thai television show
without asking Scott's permission, and then subsequently uploaded that television
(45:42):
show episode to YouTube, which is pretty brazen, but what
happened next was even more so. The company then flagged
Scott's original video. See content idea as a tool that's
really only available to big, established media companies. The average
person does not have access to content i D. So
(46:02):
this TV company used its access to content i D
to flag Scott's original video. In other words, the video
he had made uploaded, and then they subsequently stole and used.
Scott says it took quite a lot of time to
sort it all out and to establish that the video
was in fact his original work, and then it was
(46:24):
the Tie company that was in violation of copyright, not Scott. Now,
content i D is a tool that can be revoked,
so if a company abuses it, there's a chance that
YouTube will remove the company's access to content i D.
Tom Scott himself says in that video that he doesn't
know if that Tie company still has access to content
(46:46):
i D or not, but it is a pretty clear
case where he was very much the one who was
being the victim of abuse that this Tie company was
abusing the content i D tool in the worst way.
That being said, Scott also points out that content i
D works around issues that otherwise would have pretty bleak results.
(47:08):
So because of content i D, a video can stay
up even if it is making what would otherwise be
considered illegal use of someone else's i P. It's just
that this someone else would be the one to benefit
and monetize that video. So for the vast majority of
YouTube users this isn't really that big of a deal
because most of them aren't YouTube partners. Most of them
(47:30):
are not monetizing videos in the first place. For creators
who are monetizing their videos, such as big time let's
play gamers or movie critics or you know, things like that,
it's still very much an issue it if the work
that they're doing does fall under fair use, they have
to appeal to try and get flagged videos unflagged and
(47:53):
to return monetization to their own channels. Another point that
Scott makes is that YouTube's policies can change, and they
have changed, often without any real notice, and the consequences
of those changes can result in massive headaches for channel
owners and for individual users. So, in other words, just
because YouTube's policies are one way today doesn't mean you
(48:16):
can count on them being that same way tomorrow. That
could change the whole game. Let's start wrapping all this up.
The history of copyright in the United States has largely
been one of big consolidated media companies using their substantial
influence to extend copyright protections and restrict the parameters of
(48:38):
fair use, and to seek out harsher punishments for people
and companies that violate the law. It appears as though
we've at least reached a point where companies are no
longer going to push for longer copyright terms. So it
really does seem that Steamboat Willie will in fact finally
enter public domain in twenty twenty four. Why aren't we
(49:01):
seeing yet another push to extend copyright terms. It's largely
because public sentiment is very much against it, and ultimately
politicians do have to depend upon people voting for them
to stay in power. Doesn't really matter how much money
lobbyists drop on them. Ultimately they do have to worry
about that, and the lobbies have largely thrown in the
(49:21):
towel on trying to extend copyright terms. Their money is
better spent at trying to create legislation that makes it
harder for people to share content without permission. That's not
necessarily a great thing either. Those laws frequently have unintended
consequences and they place unfair restrictions on legal rights. But
you know it's it is shifting the issue a little bit,
(49:45):
so we're not likely to see copyright terms get extended
again anytime soon. It's just incredibly unpopular. There are actual
movements to try and reduce the term limits on copyrights
rather than to extend them, to kind of roll the
back a bit and to allow things to enter into
public domain earlier. Tom Scott and his video also talks
(50:06):
about the move to try and get small claims case
courts that would handle things like copyright issues so that
the average person would have a better chance of being
able to pursue a claim of fair use and not
have it be financial burden to do so. Um, that's
(50:27):
the thing. Even if you are in the right, even
if your use of copyrighted material falls under fair use,
you still may have to go to court in order
to actually prove that, and it can be so expensive
that it could ruin you financially. And yeah, you might
(50:48):
be legally in the right, and you might get the
judgment you wanted, but you'd still have to pay all
that money to do it. You know, you're not going
to get a reward for it other than like, oh yeah,
it turns out you didn't break the law. That's not
much of a reward, right, Like, you would still owe
all that money for the court cases. And that's the
(51:09):
real crime here. I was figuratively speaking. It's the real
crime here because it disincentivizes people from pursuing their actual
rights because the system favors these big corporations that have
the money to burn, and you know, worst case scenario
(51:30):
for most of them, they'll settle out of court rather
than pursue an expensive legal case that they might not win.
But that's that's small potatoes compared to what it is
for the individual. So yeah, I agree with Tom Scott.
I do agree that the world's copyright system is broken
because it was designed for a world where large publishers,
(51:54):
or way back in the day, large book printers, we're
trying to carve out a place for themselves and not
have the competition unfairly copy works that they had access to.
And now it's being applied to individuals and it just
is not a good fit. So that's this full discussion
about copyright, fair use and the related issues around it.
(52:18):
Clearly there's a lot more we could go into. I
didn't touch trademark law at all. That gets into more complications. Um,
and there are other you know, there are other subtle
things that we could really dive into, like the ethics
of piracy. Uh. I think in most cases it's not ethical,
But at the same time, it could get very frustrating
(52:39):
for someone if let's say there's a region lock where
you want to access to a certain type of material,
you are fully committed to purchasing it. You would buy
it in a heartbeat if there were a way to
do so, but because of the region lock, you don't
have that opportunity. I could see people turning to piracy
for that, not as a thing that's morally right. I mean,
(53:03):
just because something exists doesn't mean you have a right
to access it, but because there's no other option. Uh.
I've felt that way about there's a British series I
absolutely love. There is no way for me to get
it here in the United States legally. Now I have
not downloaded it illegally, I have not accessed it, you know, illegally. UM.
(53:27):
I keep looking to see if there's ever going to
be a US version that I can purchase, because I'll
do it in a heartbeat. But I can certainly understand
why someone who likes something like that would go to
those links because there are no other options. And as
it turns out, if you create options for people to
get stuff legally, people get stuff legally. Uh. One of
(53:50):
the biggest issues that feeds into piracy is just a
lack of access, which is pretty easy to fix. Enough
of that soap bucks, I am going to climb down
in or else I might fall off. I hope you
enjoyed these episodes about copyright and technology and how it's
all messy, messy, messy. If you have suggestions for things
(54:10):
I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, be
sure to reach out. The best way to do that
is on Twitter handle for the show It's tech Stuff
hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Y Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
(54:32):
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,
Joathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
I love all things tech, and the other day it
did a high level overview of copyright and fair use
to things that can be confusing to people in general
(00:28):
and people on the Internet in particular. Today we're going
to continue that and talk about some legislation in the
United States that ties into intellectual property rights and copyright
and why things are so ridiculously complicated and in some
cases extreme. Now. Towards the end of the last episode,
I mentioned a video by Tom Scott who explains copyright
(00:51):
in general and YouTube's solution to copyright issues in particular,
and we will definitely come back to that to talk
more about it. But it is good to get into
a bit more background on stuff. So early on in
the days of YouTube, there was a real problem of
people uploading videos that did not belong to them, which
(01:12):
honestly is still a thing that happens today, but now
there are various tools to handle it, and back then
there weren't. It was a different story in the early
days of YouTube. YouTube launched in two thousand five, and
at the time it was not part of Google's empire.
Google would actually purchase YouTube in October of two thousand six,
(01:32):
and in fact, it wasn't even the earliest platform that
allowed users to upload videos. Video had launched in two
thousand four. But YouTube had a couple of things going
for it, one of them being that it was fairly
easy to embed YouTube videos onto other pages. So if
you were creating like a blog and you wanted to
include a video on a blog entry, you could upload
(01:55):
the video to YouTube and then use an embettable player
and put that in your blog page and folks could
see it. This was a huge help if you were
using a blog hosting site that otherwise wouldn't be able
to host your video. Toward the end of two thousand five,
users uploaded copies of a video that Chris Parnell and
Andy Samberg of Saturday Night Live had made, called Lazy Sunday.
(02:19):
The video went viral, but NBC, which had ownership rights
to the video, didn't really want folks watching it on
other platforms. NBC had its own website and would much
rather people go there to watch videos because that's where
NBC could serve up ads and generate revenue from user visits.
(02:40):
But with the video popping up all over YouTube, NBC
didn't have that kind of control or ability to monetize it,
and so the huge and extremely well established media company
reached out to YouTube to make sure that the platform
would take down the videos, which YouTube did, and then
other people uploaded it. YouTube would take those videos down too,
(03:02):
and rents and repeat. Now, we know people upload videos
to YouTube at a rate that's far too fast for
anyone to review them before they go up. Right like
these days, it's more than a hundred hours of content
that are uploaded every single minute. You literally cannot have
enough people to review all the content going up on
(03:25):
YouTube to make sure that you know it all fits standards.
This is kind of stuff that shakes out over time.
So YouTube's general policy was that it would wait to
be told about a video that was violating copyright by
the copyright holder, and then after receiving a d m
c A takedown notice, would go and take down the video.
(03:46):
More about the d m c A in a second. Now,
YouTube included language in its user interface that urged users
not to upload stuff that they didn't actually own, So
you weren't supposed to upload any material that was copyrighted,
or rather any material that you personally did not hold
the copyright for. But users could choose to ignore this.
(04:07):
Some users might have, you know, been pretty ignorant about
the issues of copyrights, so they were doing it without
really understanding. But others might have known, but they just
you know, I didn't care, so they just went ahead
and uploaded it anyway. I mean, NBC is a big company, right,
and the video is a funny video, and YouTube is
(04:27):
where a lot of people were gathering and you could
get a lot of views over on YouTube. You could
upload it and suddenly that video goes viral and so
many people are watching your YouTube channel. But here's another complication.
YouTube did not introduce ads until the summer of two
thousand six. So this meant that YouTube users back in
two thousand five, we're not monetizing their videos because there
(04:51):
was no way to do that, at least not through
YouTube directly. I guess you could conceivably get noticed if
you were uploading interest ing or innovative videos, and you
might land a gig that way, Like it could be
almost like an audition or a demo reel. But there
wasn't really a way to make money directly off of
(05:12):
YouTube in those days, so it wasn't as though people
were uploading an NBC owned video and then they were
making money off of that. So at least there's that right.
Even though the video went viral and got a million views,
there was no monetization, so the person who uploaded it
wasn't like, you know, stealing money or anything like that.
(05:32):
But as we learned in the last episode, you don't
have to monetize something for it to be an example
of copyright infringement. If I took a video that was
owned by someone else and I duplicated it and uploaded
it to YouTube, and even if I had all the
ads turned off for that video, it's still copyright infringement,
even if I'm not making any money off of it. Heck,
(05:53):
it's still copyright infringement even if no one ever sees
that I uploaded the video. I don't have the permission
to copy and distribute the content, period, so it doesn't
matter if folks see it or not, or if I
make money off of it or not. Anyway, NBC was
totally within the company's legal rights as the owner of
that I p to demand that YouTube take down the videos,
(06:17):
and YouTube complied again and again. YouTube complied because of
something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m
c A. And in the last episode I talked about
laws that extended term limits of copyright repeatedly. Remember the
original term for copyright protection was fourteen years, and then
(06:37):
there was an option to renew for a second fourteen
year term, which would give you twenty eight years of
protection total. The US government expanded this repeatedly, and today
the rule is that copyright will last the lifetime of
the author plus an additional seventy years, or for works
that are owned by you know, corporations work for higher work.
(07:00):
In other words, copyright lasts from the year of publication
plus ninety five years, or it lasts from the date
of creation plus one hundred twenty years, whichever expires first.
Because keep in mind, creation and publication are two different things.
Like someone might have written a book in nineteen seventy
(07:21):
that didn't see publication until In that case, you would
look and say, all right, well, we're gonna go from
the date of creation plus one hundred twenty years, because
that expires first. Those are big changes, no doubt about it,
to copyright law. I mean they were huge. They really
push back the date of when copyrighted works are going
(07:41):
to enter the public domain, at which point anyone can
make copies and distribute the works without penalty. But we
covered that in the last episode. So let's talk about
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A.
So in the nineteen nineties, the technological landscape was changing quickly,
and with it, the ability to copy and distribute media
(08:03):
was also changing. While in previous decades, publishers and creators
really only had to worry about large entities potentially copying
stuff on a large scale, more recent technologies began to
make this a possibility for the average person. Now, media
companies were worried that a single person might, say, purchase
(08:25):
an album on compact disc, then they might rip that
disc and copy all the music files to a computer.
Then they might actually use a CD drive and burnable
c d s, and they might put blank CDs into
that drive and then you know, put the ripped files
onto the CD just thus duplicating CDs pretty easily and
(08:48):
relatively quickly. I mean it was fairly slow, but you
could actually get drives that could hold multiple blank CDs
and burn to all of them simultaneously, thus speeding up
the process. Then you might go and dis review those
burned c d s, or you might even sell them
to folks at a you know, a rate lower than
what they would pay if they went to the music store.
(09:08):
And that meant that now there was the potential for
an average person who had access to, you know, a
decent computer two, you know, commit copyright infringement on a
On a slightly larger scale, entertainment companies viewed this as
a potential existential threat, particularly the music industry in the
(09:28):
early days, because really, you know, we've got to keep
in mind, we're still talking about relatively small files and
the grand scheme of things, and music files like raw
audio files are pretty big, but they're not as big
as like a you know, uncompressed high resolution digital movie file.
And here's the funny thing. We would see the music
(09:51):
industry overreact to this in a way that had massive blowback,
and yet other industries would follow very similar pathways when
they faced a comparative scenario themselves a little later on. So,
to paraphrase the great comedian Peter cook. We learned from
our mistakes and we can repeat them almost exactly. The
(10:12):
d m c A itself was the U S law
that was meant to bring the US in alignment with
the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty. World Intellectual Property
Organization or WIPEOH is an organization that tries to align
copyright across different borders. This particular treaty was really necessary
(10:35):
because copyright law is already pretty complicated within a single
country like the US. Now, as you can imagine, it
gets way more complicated when you start comparing it against
other countries. So, like what happens if you have a
work that was created in the United States, like the
cartoons Steamboat Willie. Steamboat Willy by US law receives ninety
(10:57):
five years of copyright protection when it's all said and done.
But over in some other countries copyright protection doesn't last
that long. So does that mean that Steamboat Willie would
be in the public domain over in that country? I mean,
the copyright is registered in the United States, But how
does that How does that work in other countries? How
(11:19):
do other countries recognize that? Anyway? The Whiteoat, as it were,
is the organization that helps get parody among countries. This
particular act focused on the new challenges of the digital age.
One thing that the treaty and then consequently the d
m c A focused on was anti circumvention tools for
(11:42):
copyright protection. So they were looking at the fact that
companies were trying to put in protections to prevent people
from copying stuff without permission. Typically, this was in a
category we would call DRM, or digital rights management. In
case you're not familiar with DRM, it's typically some sort
(12:03):
of protective measure in place that restricts or limits the
ability of a consumer to make a copy of a
piece of digital media. There are a lot of different
ways the companies have created DRM, and some of them
are truly awful. Let's talk about Sony for a second,
because this one was a doozy. In the mid two thousand's,
(12:23):
Sony was the target of some pretty massive criticism because
the company had implemented copy protection measures on compact discs
under the Sony BMG music label. And if you were
to take one of those compact discs and you were
to put it into the optical drive of a computer,
because by the way computers back then, most of them
(12:45):
had optical drives. Well anyway, the boot sequence once the
disc went into the drive would initiate an installation of
two pieces of software that were meant to act as DRM.
But what these pieces of software did was they altered
your computers operating system so that it wouldn't let you
copy the c D bam take that would be music
(13:10):
pirate except um oh. The programs also turned out it
could facilitate malware that could create backdoor access to your computer,
giving hackers potentially the remote control to your PC. Whoop
see daisy. They also were tracking lots of activity. They
were essentially looking to see what you were listening to
(13:31):
and how frequently you listened to it. It was a
big breach of privacy. So how many c d s
actually had this kind of DRM on it. It was
somewhere north of twenty million c ds. And the programs
that the CD installed on your machine were really hard
to identify and hard to remove, which made it much
(13:52):
much worse. And also the programs appeared to have some
code that was lifted from other software, which means ironically
that the copy protection software was itself infringing on someone
else's copyright. Sony would end up getting sued in several
class action lawsuits and eventually backtracked on its approach to
(14:15):
copy protection in two thousand and seven. But yeah, that
was a particularly egregious approach to DRM. Not all DRM
schemes were harmful to this degree, but all of them
did represent problems. See, while fair use isn't always easy
to establish, as I mentioned in the last episode, fair
(14:37):
use is still a thing. You still can make fair
use out of copyrighted material, but if companies put limitations
on how you can access or copy works, the ner
ability to make fair use of a copyrighted work is impacted.
You technically have the right to do something, but you
(14:59):
don't have any way to actually do it. When Congress
was drafting the d m c A, they acknowledged that
this was a problem, and they did it anyway. This
meant that even if your use of copyrighted work was
fair use. So let's say that you took uh some music,
(15:20):
you took some copyrighted music, and you did a critique
where you were explaining the structure of the song. You
were criticizing the use of music and lyrics like it
was a legit academic approach to treating the music but
you had to use the original work itself. Let's say
that it also meant you had to circumvent copy protection
(15:43):
on that digital work to do it. Well, the the
use was fair, right, it falls under fair use, but
you would still get in trouble for actually circumventing the
copy protection. This is kind of like saying, hey, I
got this stuff. It's behind this locked door over here.
You are totally free to use that stuff. There's only
(16:04):
one problem. The only way to get to the stuff
is if you commit breaking and entering, which by the way,
is a crime. But you're still free to use the
stuff as long as you can get to it. But
if you get to it, it shows that you've broken
the law. So have fun. Now you might be able
to tell I am not a big fan of this
part of the d m c A, or most copy
protection schemes for that matter. I find that a lot
(16:27):
of copy protection ends up causing more harm to legitimate
customers and consumers than it does to discourage piracy. If anything,
copy protection often encourages people to use piracy because part
of piracy typically means stripping away d r M, and
(16:49):
it may be that someone wants a copy of you know,
a piece of media that doesn't have DRM on it,
not because they just want to free copy or that
they want to distribute it or anything that they might
just want it because there's no hassle there. They don't
have to deal with the problems of dr M. There
are other issues about copyright that DRM totally interferes with.
(17:12):
One is that you do have the right to make
backups for your own personal use. If you have an album,
like an old vinyl record album, and you wanted to
back that up to cassette tape back in the day,
you totally could do that as long as as long
as it was for your personal use, so that way,
if something were to happen, like you were to you know,
(17:33):
the the record was to be damaged or destroyed in
some way, you would have a backup. That's fine. You
were allowed to make those things, but DRM made it
harder or sometimes impossible to do that, So again it
was a protection that was infringing upon the rights of
the user. Another important part of d M c A
(17:54):
is a section that guarantees safe harbor to service providers,
which was originally can it or to be things like
I s p S Internet service providers. This provision makes
it clear that an I s P is not at
fault for the stuff that people on that I s
P are actually doing. So, in other words, if I'm
logging onto the Internet via earth Link and then I'm
(18:17):
pirating I don't know all of Poison's greatest hits, earth
Link isn't liable for the crime that I am committing.
The Safe Harbor had its own provisions in that the
provider would have to be unaware of my activity. So
in other words, if they knew about it, they should
stop it, but if they don't know about it, they're
not at fault. And also they have to have a
(18:38):
copyright policy in place. They are also supposed to have
a representative that's sort of a point of contact for
media companies to to reach in case of an issue
of copyright infringement that happens across that network. So the
I s P would react if notified that I was
up to no good, and as long as it did that,
(18:59):
then safe Harbor applies. This would later be extended to
web platforms like YouTube. More on YouTube later in this episode.
There were some other provisions that helped layout exceptions and
such for special cases, like when someone needs to do
computer maintenance, and so they might need to make copies
of software in the process, so that way during the maintenance,
(19:21):
if if they had to wipe a computer, they could
reinstall software. Those sort of exceptions were put into the law.
There's also a section in the d m c A
about boat holes as in ships, as in vessels, and
I am not kidding. Title five of the d m
c A is the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act. And
(19:42):
you might say, what the heck is this just you know,
pork that's been added onto an act. Was where we're
big boats getting all up on Congress. It actually was
because at that point, boat hole designs were not covered
under copyright law. They were considered part of the form
and function of boats, so they couldn't they couldn't qualify
(20:03):
for copyright. However, designers wanted a way to protect their
designs from just being copied without their permission. So this
was kind of a way of building in some protection. Now,
when we come back, I'll talk about some instances in
which companies went a little bit ham when they went
after people who seemed to be in flagrant violation of
(20:23):
copyright laws, and how a few different websites truly wreaked
havoc and change the way companies viewed the protection of
intellectual property forever. But first let's take a quick break. Okay,
(20:46):
so the d M c A was really becoming a
thing because of the technology of c ds and computers
that could rip music tracks off of c ds. That
was really the big going concern in the mid nineties.
That was more of a of a thing than digital
files were in general. But by the late nineties we
saw something that would make copying CDs seem tame by comparison.
(21:10):
We saw the rise of peer to peer file sharing
networks and later of torrents. Now, first let's clear up
the fact that peer to peer networks and infect torrents
aren't necessarily a bad thing. They could be used for
all sorts of legitimate purposes. I'll do a quick breakdown
of what peer to peer networks are and how they work.
And it helps if we start with the standard sort
(21:31):
of networks that we think of when we're talking about
the Internet. So when you use, say, um, a web browser,
and you're using your web browser to access a web page,
what's kind of happening on the back end is that
your computer sends a request up through your internet service provider.
That request goes through routers which direct the request to
(21:53):
the proper web server that's hosting the web page you
want to visit. The web server response to that request
and sends back the respective web page data to your
web browser, which then displays it as a web page.
So you can kind of think of this system as
being made up of clients, which would be your computer, or,
(22:14):
more appropriately, in this example, your web browser and servers.
These are the computers that actually host the data that
you get to see on your computer now and appear
to peer network. Every computer that's part of that network
is an equal or a peer to every other computer
on that network. Each computer provides data and resources to
(22:36):
the network. Computer is connected to this network can easily
share the data they have stored on them with all
the other computers on that same network. And typically to
use a peer to peer network, you would download and
install some software that lets you connect to the network itself.
Usually you can designate a specific folder on your computer
(22:58):
as the place where you both download and share files,
which keeps the rest of your computer sequestered from the
peer to peer network, so you're not just sharing everything
peer to peer networks can be used for tons of stuff,
from harnessing the computational resources of a large group of
computers in order to tackle you know, tough computer problems
(23:20):
all the way to distributing software quickly through the network.
But the thing that the entertainment industry in general and
the music industry in particular was focusing on was how
it could facilitate piracy. In the late nineties, we saw
the rise of products like Napster and Khaza and lime
wire and many many others. Napster was the pioneer in
(23:44):
this space. It was a peer to peer networking software
and people were using it largely to pirate music. People
would rip songs from c d s and convert the
audio files into compressed formats like MP three because raw
audio files were just so big and broadband speeds were
not super advanced back in the mid nineties. So then
(24:08):
these compressed files they would store on a shared drive,
they would PLoP onto the peer to peer networks, and
then they would start building out their own collections. They
would offer up the stuff they had and they would
add to their collections from you know, other computers that
were on the network. These services allowed people to search
out rare bootlegs and other recordings that you couldn't just buy,
(24:30):
like stuff that wasn't available commercially. However, it also allowed
people to download tons of music that you could, in
theory purchase, but you know, you just opted to download
them for free, so people pirated music like crazy. This
was also an era where malware was running rampant because
(24:51):
a lot of people could upload or share malware on
their computers that posed as if it were say a
music five l or a software package for like a
game or something. So this was also a buyer beware,
or rather pirate beware era where there was a chance
(25:11):
that that you know, the song you were about to
download was in fact, you know, a virus or some
other form of malware. Now, some people went so wild,
so crazy, they went hug wild in fact, over downloading
music that places like colleges and universities began to ban
access to Napster simply because the Internet traffic from all
(25:35):
the downloading was clogging things up. So this wasn't because
colleges and universities were necessarily being contacted by you know,
big record labels or anything. It was more like, hey,
no one can send an email because everyone over at
five cap of five is downloading the new Britney Spears album.
So they started to shut down access to it. Napster
(25:59):
lawn in nine, but by two thousand it had become
the target of numerous lawsuits, with various acts like Metallica
and music labels and music label industry organizations like the
r I double A all going after the service. The
argument was that the service was overwhelmingly being used as
a way to pirate music on a large scale, and
(26:21):
it was a pretty big scale. Napster had something like
eighty million users at one point. Napster took cases all
the way up to the U. S. Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit. They kept appealing the judgments and
they were trying to argue that the underlying service wasn't
tied directly to music piracy, and the court agreed that
(26:42):
there were valid and legal ways to use Napster, that
the way Napster distributed information on its own wasn't necessarily illegal. However,
the vast majority of traffic across Napster was illegal, so
the court order that Napster developed a system to curtail
(27:03):
the rampant piracy and Napster really couldn't do that. The
problem was such a big one the company just didn't
have the means to tackle it, So Napster shut down
in two thousand one. Now you could argue that if
a company is told, hey, you got to get a
handle on this, and the company says, well, we gotta
shut down because we can't get a handle on it,
that there was a legitimate problem. That doesn't take away
(27:26):
from the fact that the underlying technology that made Napster
work has nothing, you know, inherently to do with piracy.
It can be used for that, but it's not the No,
that's not the purpose of the tech. But it's kind
of hard to argue against the practical results of the
use of that technology. And lots of other services similar
(27:49):
to Napster popped up like they essentially became really popular
after Napster went away, so piracy was still going like gangbusters.
Perhaps one of the biggest reason was that, you know,
there was such a problem with piracy was that it
was legitimately difficult for music lovers to find and purchase
digital music online. There weren't really any viable alternatives to
(28:13):
just stealing it. I mean, some companies were offering up
limited access to their catalogs through their own digital storefronts,
but not very many people were offering up digital downloads
for purchase. It was not easy to find or buy
stuff when Apple launched iTunes in two thousand one. At
that time, iTunes was just a way to rip music
(28:35):
tracks from c d s and have a digital collection
of music on your Apple computer or your iPod or whatever.
But you could not purchase digital songs through iTunes at
all when it launched. It wasn't until two thousand three
that the iTunes music store actually came online, so in
the absence of a legitimate way to purchase music, folks
(28:57):
turned to illegal means to get it. Now, does this
mean that if there had been legal ways to buy
music easily, that piracy wouldn't have been a problem at all.
Probably not. I'm sure that there had been plenty of
people who would still want to try and just get
stuff for free rather than pay for it, But I
bet that piracy wouldn't have been as large of a
(29:18):
problem as it was. The music industry would after numerous
cases of people who had downloaded songs, often coupling their
lawsuits with demands for enormous sums and damages. The goals
seemed to be not to recapture lost revenue, but to
scare the ever love and heck out of would be pirates.
(29:39):
The lawsuits were making examples of people and the message
was you do not want this to happen to you.
You see what it's doing to this person, so you
better not steal any music bucko. So, for example, the
Recording Industry Association of America the r I double A,
they sued more were than eighteen thousand individuals in the
(30:02):
mid two thousand's for illegally sharing music, and in some
cases they sawt truly astronomical damages in that in that endeavor.
So in one case, the r I Double A sought
one point five million dollars and damages against a woman
that the organization said had downloaded and distributed more than
(30:23):
seventeen hundred songs. Now the lawsuit only included twenty four
songs in it, and they were asking for damages of
one and a half million dollars. This was just one case.
By the way, the woman lost that case. She appealed it,
she refused to take a settlement out of court, and
(30:45):
she lost the case multiple times. UM, I actually don't
know what the current status is of that case, because
the last I had heard, she had planned on declaring bankruptcy,
which would get her out of the need to to pay.
The amount that was being asked for at that point
was more than two thousand dollars. There were thousands of
these types of cases, and most of them were settled
(31:07):
out of court. They didn't actually go to trial. But
it was a really effective intimidation tactic, and it was
one that was based largely on faulty logic. So what
do I mean by that, Well, the way the entertainment industry,
and it's not just the music labels, the the film
industry and television industry would do the same thing. The
(31:28):
way they would figure out, you know, how much how
much damage is they would ask for was essentially based
on the idea that really doesn't hold water when you
look into it, and that idea is that each pirated
copy of a piece of media represents a lost sale. So,
in other words, the argument is that if people had
not stolen things, then those same people would have gone
(31:50):
and bought a legitimate copy. So in other words, every download,
every illegal download, represents a lost sale and lost revenue.
But that's just not necessarily true. It's possible that someone
might download a piece of media just out of curiosity alone,
and they have no real desire to own it. That
kind of person would perhaps never have bought a copy
(32:14):
of the media at all. They would have just gone without.
And because we're talking about digital files here, you're not
looking at the physical loss of a product. It's not
like going into a store and shoplifting, you know, c
d s or something. If you did that, while the store,
you know, would be out those c d s, it
wouldn't be able to sell any that those specific CDs
because they would just have been stolen. Digital files, however,
(32:38):
those are things you just copy. You can make an
infinite number of copies of digital files, or at least,
you know, effectively infinite. Obviously you're limited by however much
storage space you have, but you get the idea. There's
no scarcity to digital files. So it's a different matter.
Even the US Government Accountability Office found that the formulas
(32:58):
that the entertainment industry were using when they were trying
to make claims of damages just were not supportable. So
it's not that piracy has no effect on sales. It
definitely has some effect on sales. But it's more that
you can't quantify what that effect on sales is. And
if you can't quantify it, then you can't really assign
(33:20):
a value to losses because it's impossible to say what
the losses were. But for several years in the two
thousands that didn't matter. The r I, double A and
other organizations tried to crack them on piracy hard, and
the industry as a whole earned a pretty ugly reputation
as a result. The courts often found in the favor
(33:42):
of industry, but it meant that, like everyone was looking
at these companies and saying, what the heck are you doing.
You're going after, you know, regular people and demanding these
astronomical damages. What's really interesting to me is that the
solution for piracy wasn't really in these gratuitous lawsuits and damages.
People were still pirrating stuff, it's just that you know
(34:04):
they were doing so running the risk of being one
of the examples that would be brought up in a
court case. And the solution wasn't even in working with
online stores like iTunes, though that did change things quite
a bit. The solution was really the method of delivery
gradually shifting from downloads to streaming, and this was facilitated
(34:25):
by the rise of the smartphone and the improvement of
wireless technologies. Why would you pirate music when practically every
song you have ever heard is available on some streaming platform.
Lots of them are even ad supported and otherwise free
to use, so you don't even have to pay a
subscription to them, so you can listen to these songs
(34:46):
whenever you like, as long as you have an Internet connection.
That is what helped pull back music piracy, and the
fact that the access to the content suddenly became way
easier and there was no reason to run the risk
of being an example. But the improvements in broadband connectivity
(35:08):
would bring with it the chance for people to download
not just music, but also stuff like TV shows and
movies and video games. These groups didn't have to worry
as much in the early days. I mean, video games
kind of did, but they were starting to get so
sophisticated that the you know, the cutting edge video games
of the time were so big most people just didn't
have the band whip to download them in a reasonable
(35:29):
amount of time, so they weren't really considerations. However, once
broadband started catching up that changed. Now, the music industry
had already gone through this whole process, and you would
think that these other industries would have looked at that
and said, all right, well, what worked, what didn't work,
and will follow best practices, But really they mostly doubled
down on going the same route that the music industry
(35:51):
did with pretty similar results. So it's hard to feel
much sympathy for these multibillion dollar media companies versus the
individuals who made downloaded a copy of X Men origins
Wolverine without permission. Companies began lobbying US Congress to once
again create more legislation that would impose harsher penalties on
(36:11):
people illegally downloading content, and more importantly, on ways to
prevent sites that were facilitating these kinds of downloads. The
Pirate Bay, a site that specialized in serving as sort
of a database or almost like a Yellow Pages of
torrent files of various types of media, was constantly in
the news at this time, and the global nature of
(36:34):
the Internet meant that sites like the Pirate Bay, which
was founded in Sweden, which last I checked, is not
in the United States. It meant that they were beyond
the jurisdiction of the US. So you have these big
US based media companies that really wanted to have a
way to shut down this foreign service, and there just
(36:54):
weren't many options. It wasn't like they could target a
YouTube that's based in the United States and make the
man's you know. They could try and target a Swedish company,
but that company is saying like, ha ha, you have
no power here, be gone with you. Moreover, the Pirate
Bay was just one example, and now the possibility of
companies in different parts of the world allowing for the
mass piracy of various types of media was once again
(37:17):
seen as an existential threat. You could make a pretty
convincing argument that the history of modern media is a
series of the industry reacting to something as an existential threat,
because that's kind of what we see here in the
United States. What we saw is a consequence of this
was the proposal of two different but very similar pieces
(37:41):
of legislation, one in the House of Representatives and one
in the U S. Senate. There was the Stop Online
Piracy Act or SOPA, that was the Senate one, and
there was the Protect I p Act or PIPPA, which
was the House of Representatives one. Both of those were
being written around, and the intended purpose of these proposed
acts was to act as protection for I P holders
(38:04):
in the United States from the nefarious doings of overseas entities.
But the solutions were pretty drastic, including the possibility that
you know, these companies could force governments or or demand
for governments to order US based I s p s
to cut off all access to certain sites. In other words,
(38:25):
to tell US based I s p s, hey don't
allow any U r l s from these domains to
be accessible in the United States. So, in other words,
there would be parts of the Internet that US citizens
would not be allowed to access, at least not legally
and not without the aid of something like a VPN
located in another country. Critics pointed out that this approach
(38:49):
would have massive consequences with regard to free speech, and
beyond that, applying the rules would be difficult and uneven.
People envisioned a scenario in which U S I s
p s would have to block access to an entire
domain because of potentially what one blogger posted on a
single blog that was located on that domain. So this
(39:11):
was like a nuclear option that would potentially affect far
more you know, innocent people than it would for those
who were actually perpetrating the alleged crimes. A large collection
of web based companies help protests in early two thousand twelve,
using a blackout on their web pages to inform visitors
of the issue and essentially going dark, and the results
(39:33):
were dramatic. Politicians who had previously expressed support for either
PIPPA or SOPA abruptly reversed course, including people who had
sponsored the bills in the first place. So the two
pieces of legislation were withdrawn from being voted upon the floor. Now,
the reason they were withdrawn is because if Congress had
(39:55):
held a vote and the legislation was voted down, that
would be pretty much the end of that. But by
removing the bills from consideration, the authors of the bills
and their supporters would have some time to work on
it further and potentially reintroduce the bill at a later
date once the political climate changed. So far that hasn't happened.
(40:17):
But when we come back, I'll spend some time talking
a little bit more about copyright and YouTube's specific approach
to handling copyright claims. But first, let's take another quick
break Okay, let's talk about YouTube and copyright now. As
(40:37):
I mentioned, YouTube has a long history with copyright issues,
and for a while, the general approach was that company
would claim a copyright ownership of some or all of
the content that was in a YouTube video, and they
would send a d m C A takedown notice to YouTube,
which then would typically take down the video in question. Uh,
(40:59):
the user or owner of the channel would get a
copyright strike against them, and if you've got three strikes,
the channel would get wiped, the account would be deleted,
all those videos would be removed. Now, ideally, each d
m C A claim would go through a thorough review
by some other party to make sure that the claim
(41:20):
was legitimate. You have to verify that the claimant actually
holds the rights to the i P in question. You
have to determine if the use of any material falls
under the category of fair use, which means that the
inclusion of that material in the video would need to
be proven to be you know, legitimate. And YouTube built
(41:41):
in systems that would let channel owners dispute d m
C A takedown charges, essentially pushing the matter into arbitration
that would then ultimately have to go to court. So
quick overview. Let's say I put up a video. Let's
say I've got some material in there in the video
that belongs to someone else, and I get a d
m C A takedown notice, so YouTube has taken the
(42:03):
video down. I get a copyright strike against me. I
decide to dispute this YouTube sends that back to the
copyright holder, who if they don't respond, then YouTube just
lifts it and the video comes back online. But if
they do respond, then essentially the next step is you
go to court over it. So it wasn't like a
(42:25):
super awesome thing for the individual because court cases are
incredibly expensive um and there were some court cases around
videos containing copyrighted material that helped establish the law around it. So,
for example, in two thousand eight, a U. S. Court
ruled that copyright holders couldn't just send a d m
(42:45):
C a takedown notice unless they first determined that the
use of the material in the video in question fell
under a fair use scenario. Because if it is fair use,
the copyright holder is not supposed to send out the
takedown notice. The key raise there is they're not supposed to.
It doesn't mean that they necessarily held back flash forward though,
(43:07):
Google acquired YouTube in two thousand and six, and then
by two thousand seven started to develop a system that
acted sort of like a digital finger printing system for companies.
So it's a system that could scan videos that have
been uploaded to YouTube and look for patterns in those
videos that matched a database of copyrighted material owned by
(43:29):
you know, each individual large media company. So if there
were a match, well, then you would get a notification saying, hey,
you've got this possible case of someone making use of
your copyrighted material without your permission, and then you could
flag the video. Following that the owner of the I
(43:49):
P and question so big media company, in other words,
would have a few options. They could choose to block
the video completely, which just made it unreachable, or they
could choose to add advertisements to the video, or to
co opt existing advertisements and claim the revenue generated by
the ads for itself. So in other words, yeah, you
can keep your video up. We're going to collect any
(44:12):
money that's generated from the fact that you have this
video there. This was originally called video identification, but later
became known as Content i D. In two thousand eleven,
the system went into effect in earnest, and the result
was that content owners could get revenue from videos that
included their content, or they could order the videos to
(44:33):
be totally removed, but that seemed to be slightly less prevalent.
It does still happen occasionally, but more often than not
people just say no, I'm just happy to take the money.
This approach automates stuff. It removes any human review process,
which also means that no one is really checking to
make sure that the flagged video is actually infringing upon
copyright or that it's not a case of fair use.
(44:55):
So it falls on the channel owner to dispute claims
and to push for reviews. Meanwhile, if you do get
hit with enough flags, you might find your whole channel
shut down and once again, want to refer to Tom
Scott's great video on this subject, titled YouTube's Copyright System
Isn't Broken, The World's is. Scott gives a personal example
(45:17):
of a time when the content I D system totally failed.
So Scott is an independent creator with an impressive following
of more than three point eight million subscribers. He uploaded
a video to YouTube and a TV company in Thailand
took that video incorporated it into a Thai television show
without asking Scott's permission, and then subsequently uploaded that television
(45:42):
show episode to YouTube, which is pretty brazen, but what
happened next was even more so. The company then flagged
Scott's original video. See content idea as a tool that's
really only available to big, established media companies. The average
person does not have access to content i D. So
(46:02):
this TV company used its access to content i D
to flag Scott's original video. In other words, the video
he had made uploaded, and then they subsequently stole and used.
Scott says it took quite a lot of time to
sort it all out and to establish that the video
was in fact his original work, and then it was
(46:24):
the Tie company that was in violation of copyright, not Scott. Now,
content i D is a tool that can be revoked,
so if a company abuses it, there's a chance that
YouTube will remove the company's access to content i D.
Tom Scott himself says in that video that he doesn't
know if that Tie company still has access to content
(46:46):
i D or not, but it is a pretty clear
case where he was very much the one who was
being the victim of abuse that this Tie company was
abusing the content i D tool in the worst way.
That being said, Scott also points out that content i
D works around issues that otherwise would have pretty bleak results.
(47:08):
So because of content i D, a video can stay
up even if it is making what would otherwise be
considered illegal use of someone else's i P. It's just
that this someone else would be the one to benefit
and monetize that video. So for the vast majority of
YouTube users this isn't really that big of a deal
because most of them aren't YouTube partners. Most of them
(47:30):
are not monetizing videos in the first place. For creators
who are monetizing their videos, such as big time let's
play gamers or movie critics or you know, things like that,
it's still very much an issue it if the work
that they're doing does fall under fair use, they have
to appeal to try and get flagged videos unflagged and
(47:53):
to return monetization to their own channels. Another point that
Scott makes is that YouTube's policies can change, and they
have changed, often without any real notice, and the consequences
of those changes can result in massive headaches for channel
owners and for individual users. So, in other words, just
because YouTube's policies are one way today doesn't mean you
(48:16):
can count on them being that same way tomorrow. That
could change the whole game. Let's start wrapping all this up.
The history of copyright in the United States has largely
been one of big consolidated media companies using their substantial
influence to extend copyright protections and restrict the parameters of
(48:38):
fair use, and to seek out harsher punishments for people
and companies that violate the law. It appears as though
we've at least reached a point where companies are no
longer going to push for longer copyright terms. So it
really does seem that Steamboat Willie will in fact finally
enter public domain in twenty twenty four. Why aren't we
(49:01):
seeing yet another push to extend copyright terms. It's largely
because public sentiment is very much against it, and ultimately
politicians do have to depend upon people voting for them
to stay in power. Doesn't really matter how much money
lobbyists drop on them. Ultimately they do have to worry
about that, and the lobbies have largely thrown in the
(49:21):
towel on trying to extend copyright terms. Their money is
better spent at trying to create legislation that makes it
harder for people to share content without permission. That's not
necessarily a great thing either. Those laws frequently have unintended
consequences and they place unfair restrictions on legal rights. But
you know it's it is shifting the issue a little bit,
(49:45):
so we're not likely to see copyright terms get extended
again anytime soon. It's just incredibly unpopular. There are actual
movements to try and reduce the term limits on copyrights
rather than to extend them, to kind of roll the
back a bit and to allow things to enter into
public domain earlier. Tom Scott and his video also talks
(50:06):
about the move to try and get small claims case
courts that would handle things like copyright issues so that
the average person would have a better chance of being
able to pursue a claim of fair use and not
have it be financial burden to do so. Um, that's
(50:27):
the thing. Even if you are in the right, even
if your use of copyrighted material falls under fair use,
you still may have to go to court in order
to actually prove that, and it can be so expensive
that it could ruin you financially. And yeah, you might
(50:48):
be legally in the right, and you might get the
judgment you wanted, but you'd still have to pay all
that money to do it. You know, you're not going
to get a reward for it other than like, oh yeah,
it turns out you didn't break the law. That's not
much of a reward, right, Like, you would still owe
all that money for the court cases. And that's the
(51:09):
real crime here. I was figuratively speaking. It's the real
crime here because it disincentivizes people from pursuing their actual
rights because the system favors these big corporations that have
the money to burn, and you know, worst case scenario
(51:30):
for most of them, they'll settle out of court rather
than pursue an expensive legal case that they might not win.
But that's that's small potatoes compared to what it is
for the individual. So yeah, I agree with Tom Scott.
I do agree that the world's copyright system is broken
because it was designed for a world where large publishers,
(51:54):
or way back in the day, large book printers, we're
trying to carve out a place for themselves and not
have the competition unfairly copy works that they had access to.
And now it's being applied to individuals and it just
is not a good fit. So that's this full discussion
about copyright, fair use and the related issues around it.
(52:18):
Clearly there's a lot more we could go into. I
didn't touch trademark law at all. That gets into more complications. Um,
and there are other you know, there are other subtle
things that we could really dive into, like the ethics
of piracy. Uh. I think in most cases it's not ethical,
But at the same time, it could get very frustrating
(52:39):
for someone if let's say there's a region lock where
you want to access to a certain type of material,
you are fully committed to purchasing it. You would buy
it in a heartbeat if there were a way to
do so, but because of the region lock, you don't
have that opportunity. I could see people turning to piracy
for that, not as a thing that's morally right. I mean,
(53:03):
just because something exists doesn't mean you have a right
to access it, but because there's no other option. Uh.
I've felt that way about there's a British series I
absolutely love. There is no way for me to get
it here in the United States legally. Now I have
not downloaded it illegally, I have not accessed it, you know, illegally. UM.
(53:27):
I keep looking to see if there's ever going to
be a US version that I can purchase, because I'll
do it in a heartbeat. But I can certainly understand
why someone who likes something like that would go to
those links because there are no other options. And as
it turns out, if you create options for people to
get stuff legally, people get stuff legally. Uh. One of
(53:50):
the biggest issues that feeds into piracy is just a
lack of access, which is pretty easy to fix. Enough
of that soap bucks, I am going to climb down
in or else I might fall off. I hope you
enjoyed these episodes about copyright and technology and how it's
all messy, messy, messy. If you have suggestions for things
(54:10):
I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, be
sure to reach out. The best way to do that
is on Twitter handle for the show It's tech Stuff
hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Y Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For
more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
(54:32):
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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