September 30, 2009 • 26 mins
Copyright strictly prohibits people from using and benefitting from other people's creative work, while creative commons is a bit more flexible. Tune in as Jonathan and Chris discuss copyright and creative commons in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Cammeray,
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technologies? With
tech Stuff from how stuff looks dot com. Hello everybody,
and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette,
and I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot com.
(00:22):
Sitting across from me again as usual, is senior writer
Jonathan Strickland. Hi, and I just like to thank all
the people who downloaded and or streamed this podcast. Excellent.
That's very nice of you. Yes, I'd also like to
thank our guest producer, Matt Frederick, amazing musician, member of
Lines and Scissors. Matt, and I know you would do
(00:43):
nothing to ever interrupt us in our podcast, isn't that true?
Matt's nodding yes. And you finished the Beatles rock band
in one day. He did finish the Beatles rock band
in one day. He played the drums on expert all
the way through. Excellent. Yeah, alright, so uh at atually,
you know, the Beatles were We're recently rumored to be
(01:04):
coming to iTunes store and and they didn't. And actually
they've they've they've been people have been waiting for this
to happen, and there's a reason why they haven't come
out yet with the digital versions of their songs. What
would that be, That would be copyright copyright, Now here's
a sticky situation. Now. Of course, copyright does not just
fallen under the realm of tech stuff. Technically, many of
(01:26):
our our sister podcasts could cover this topic. But copyright
does hold a special place within the field of technology
because things like the Internet have made it very easy
to distribute information on a scale much larger than what
could be achieved on one zone previously. Correct. Oh yes,
I mean the idea of copyright goes back a very
(01:46):
very long time. And uh it was only recently really
in the twentie and or you know, twenty first centuries
that copyright has been extended to amazing links. I mean,
in the United States, the current length of copyright is
the death of the author plus seventy years, right, and
if it's an anonymous work or pseudo anonymous work, work
(02:09):
for higher these works go ninety five years from the
year of its publication, so you know, when you can't
necessarily identify the author years from when it was published.
That's a long time. And there are various organizations that
are responsible really for pushing copyright to these extremes. Yeah,
and really it's it's not In most cases, it's not
(02:30):
the author and it's not like the government is concerned
about it. It's more like the publisher. Yeah, or giant corporations. Well, yeah,
I can think of one in particular. Yes, I know you. Actually,
the the corporation I think you're thinking of is generally
given credit for I just won't say it's a Mickey
mouse operation. Yeah. Okay, So but copyright it does, it
(02:53):
does h cover, It protects works for a very long time.
And what does it protect it from, you might ask, Well,
I mean people want to uh, they come up with
these neat ideas, and they're able to sell lots and
lots of copies of these ideas to other people who
want to read about them or watch them or listen
to them. Um. And and that's understandable. But it's those
(03:14):
people who um want to share those with other people
and maybe not you know, paid. Right. So well, let's
let's use a specific example because this is getting kind
of vague. So let's say that you've published a book
and you've called the book, uh, the heaving bosom So
you've got The Heaving Bosom. It's your it's your Bodice
(03:36):
ripper romance novel, and you're really excited about it. Okay, Um,
so you've you've gone and you've published it. And then
someone comes out with a book called The Heaving Boobs.
What you're coming up with? This? How AT's saying? How
about keeping abreast of the situation? So they come up
with a book called Keeping Abreast of the Situation? And
(03:58):
Chris has actually left the room. Do you want to
go back? And we're gonna keep going, all right? Cool?
Keeping a breast of the situation. And it turns out
that the book is word for word the same as
The Heaving Bosom. Now this would be a problem obviously,
because you, as the author of The Heaving Bosom, you
are do the the rewards that come as a result
(04:19):
of selling this work. Yes, And what's really irritating is
that book is two dollars cheaper than my book and
is out selling it now that it's cheaper because someone
else can get the same content for less, right, So uh, now,
what copyright does it gives the person who published the
book originally? In this case, you who have published The
Heaving Bosom a legal recourse too to pursue a claim
(04:42):
against someone who has violated that copyright. And so you
can protect your intellectual property so that it remains yours
and uh, and that way it prevents other people from
capitalizing on your work, and then you know you wouldn't
see anything from that, right, I mean, that's that's the
whole basis of copyright. It's not a bad thing on
its own. In fact, it's very important. Anyone who's a
(05:04):
creator wants to be able to protect his or her
own work, at least to some extent. Now, copyright that
that takes effect as soon as you create something, Yes,
as soon as it is fixed a fixed work. You
do not have to send a form into the federal government,
although you can. That's that's registering your copyright. Yeah, you know,
(05:24):
you don't have to register a copyright to hold a copyright,
right if you if you write a blog post and
hit the published button, that's copyright you. Yeah, the same
thing for any kind of written work, musical work, any
any sort of recorded work, even an image, you can copyright. So, uh,
anything that you produce creatively, assuming that that's created through
(05:47):
your own work. It's not something that's derived from something else,
you hold the copyright to it. Yes, Now, not everyone
agrees with these rules. I mean some people are a
little bit more lenient. Some people say, hey, you know,
I created this song and I want to share it
with all my friends on the internet and wanted you
to remix it and cut it up and do whatever
you want to with it. And I want to hear
(06:07):
what you what you do with it, and so what
do you do in that case? I mean, that's not
covered in the in the you know US code, right,
copyright law doesn't doesn't cover for this. It's it's very inflexible.
I mean, things are under copyright and you're either violating
it or you're not. And it's getting more inflexible, right, Yeah,
even things like fair use. People bring up the concept
(06:27):
of fair use. Fair use is incredibly difficult to prove. Yeah,
fair use is um fair use is a very contingent
situation for it's it's so hard to define. Yeah, I
mean the thing is with fair use, you are allowed
to use some of something and something else. Like for example,
(06:48):
say you're writing a book, a nonfiction book, and you
would like to put a a quote from someone else's
book in there. Well, you're allowed to do that, but
the thing is it has to be of a certain
layng and it has to be what they call transformative,
which means, you know, if you want to put half
a paragraph of somebody's book in to illustrate your point
and illustrated as Hey, this is something that Mr Smith
(07:10):
wrote about and I think it's an incredibly important thing,
and you said it off as a quote. You're probably
not going to get sued for that. Now, if you,
you know, lift the entire paragraph and don't change a word,
then that's not you're not really transforming in anyway. You're
you know, and that's that's actually what the transformative part
is what gives the right to people like weird Al
who want to do a parody. He often takes pretty
(07:32):
much the same song, maybe changes it into a different key,
and then adds new words to it. Well, he's transformed
it into a new song by doing that, So technically
he would not have to ask permission, although we should
point out that he does. Yes, he always does. He
does ask permission though technically under the rules of fair
use he doesn't have to, but he he takes that
extra step, So good on you. Weird. Al Yeah. Now,
(07:55):
specifically Section one oh seven of the Copyright Code, uh
it stay that it sets out four factors to be
considered and determining determining whether or not a particular use
is fair. And here are the four things. The purpose
and character of the use, including whether such uses of
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. Nonprofit is
(08:16):
generally considered better if you're trying to argue fair use.
The nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality
of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work
as a whole, So how much you create on your
own and how much you actually cite from other works,
and the effect of the use upon the potential market
for or value of the copyrighted work. In other words, yeah,
(08:39):
In other words, if if if you include this in
your work and somehow that impacts the sales of the
original work, that's a bad thing. That's say, are Unless
it impacts it in a positive way, like it makes
people go out and buy some other book, that's okay.
But if you if people say, hey, I don't need
to buy the original book because I can get enough
of it out of this system here, that's bad. And
(09:01):
um uh. And again, you know Paulett was talking earlier
about you know, you don't if you get to a
certain length a certain amount of material that might violate
fair use. Here's another problem. That length is not defined. Nope,
there is no definition to how many words you can
use or how much, how even a percentage of the
content that you can use before you violate fair use.
(09:23):
It's a case by case basis. Yep. And that's a
that's a problem because it's going to be up to
a judge to decide this. I mean, you know, if
you if you write a two hundred and sixty three
page book and you use a paragraph out of somebody's work,
that's really not that substantial all things considered. Of course,
your lawyer is going to have to prove that. However,
(09:44):
if you write a half page long poem and two
thirds of it is somebody else's that's really an awful
lot of it. Yeah. So let's but let's say that
you have created a work and you want to be
able to distribute this as widely as possible. And you know,
before the Internet, you really only had two options. You
(10:06):
had an option of going with some sort of publication corporation.
So either you know, a like a corporate publisher right exactly,
like they're publishing novels or or it's a music publisher whatever,
whatever a kind of art you're creating, you would have
to go to to a major publisher to get widespread distribution. Yeah,
like you're you've got an agent and they sign you
to a deal. Not a self publisher right now. That's
(10:29):
your other choice, as you go to a self publisher
also known as vanity press from people who are writing uh.
And in this case, you would pay the publisher directly
to publish these books, and then you would try and
sell them. The problem with that, of course, is that
your distribution is usually pretty limited with vanity publishing. First
of all, it's limited by your budget, because you're the
one paying to have all these books or CDs pressed
(10:51):
or whatever. Uh. And then of course it's limited by
however widespread you can you can get the word out
for people to actually purchase this stuff. It's limited by
how far how much gas you have in your tank,
and how many bookstores there are in your neighborhood. Now,
I'm sitting here with one musician across the table from me,
and another one staring holes in the back of my head.
And uh and both of them, I as, I'm sure,
(11:12):
are very familiar with the concept of self publishing. So
the Internet gives people a new opportunity to distribute their
work in a much more wider scale than they ever
could on their own without it. So you can upload songs,
you can upload an entire novel if you wanted to,
(11:33):
and you can distribute it any way you like. Now,
some people they want to foster a creative spirit on
the Internet. They want their work not just seen by
people who enjoy it, but they want people to take
their work and transform it. Perhaps. Uh, you know, a
musician may want we want to encourage people to remix
(11:55):
his or her songs. Um and And the problem with
copyright is there's no all recourse for you to do this.
What you have to do is create a license agreement. Now,
license agreements if you you know, there's if you're just
going for a specific one, you pretty much have to
hire a lawyer and work with the lawyer to hash
out a license agreement that's that fits both your your
(12:18):
needs and the person who wants to license the work.
You know, what would be really cool, what's that would
be really cool if there were like a template and
you could you know that somebody had created you know,
somebody like a legal expert, and they could say, well,
you know what, if you want to license it this way,
go with option A. If you want to license it
another way, go with option B. And options C, D, E,
(12:40):
n F are also available if you want to make
parts of it available for people to use, or if
you want to restrict it completely. In fact, that is
such a good idea that other people have had it. No, yes,
that's the birth of the creative commons. So creative commons
is a way of licensing work so that you can
tell people what what you do and do not want
(13:02):
folks to do with the stuff you've created. And um,
it's not the same as copyright. It's it's really it's
really uh kind of a supplement to copyright. It's an
idea that this tells people what you want them to
be able to do, uh, whether or not you want
them to be able to take your work and then
add to it or or you know, transform it in
(13:22):
some way. It also gives people the guidelines they need
to follow in order to do that. Because one of
the aspects of Creative Commons is that you know, you
you may want to make sure people attribute the original
work to you so that people can trace back all
the way to the source of the original material. So
attribution is very important in creative Commons. Uh, that's part
(13:45):
of the license. So if people you know, decide to
try and use create works that are licensed under Creative Commons,
one of the things they're supposed to do is attribute
the original work. And there their guidelines specifically on how
things need to be attributed. A lot of these left
up to the creator. Um, you know, whether they want
to be uh mentioned by name or by a handle
(14:06):
or both. Um, whether or not you know, you should
include a website as well, that kind of thing, and uh.
And this covers all sorts of creative material like books,
short stories, music, images, uh not software software you you
could technically covered under Creative Commons, but the the people
(14:27):
who drafted Creative Commons um suggest that you don't do that. Well,
there are other options for that too, write exactly. That's
that's one of the that's one of the reasons they
suggest that you shouldn't use Creative Commons for software because
there are other choices out there that are better. YEP. Now, UM,
creative commons actually hasn't been around for a terribly long time. Actually,
(14:51):
at the twenty one century UH creation, UM, the Center
for the Public Domain had a lot to do with it,
and there were a lot of people involved it. UM.
You know, probably the most recognizable name as UH Lawrence Lessig,
who's UH lawyer and has been cited very very frequently
as an expert in UH and copyright and other related
(15:16):
and licensing and all sorts of related things. He's UH,
he's an author and UM a lot of a lot
of times. UM, you know, he gets asked about the
these weird situations because you know, before the digital age,
really copyright was a lot easier to pin down, and
now there are all these methods of distribution that are
(15:37):
causing the corporate organizations headaches. Um. There are all sorts
of other UH contingencies like bands wanting to allow you
to have access to their pro tools files to go
ahead and make changes to the original songs without you know,
even taking the finished tracks. I mean, these things are
(15:58):
are things that would have been unthinkable just a few
years ago. So it's important that that creative commons licensing
and UH and public domain licensing overall is becoming more
robust because it's enabling people to fiddle around with it
a little bit more. And the funny thing I think
about the licensing issues is that, um, some of the
(16:21):
corporations are starting to loosen up a little bit and
allow authors and other artists to you know, distribute these
things more freely, like for example, nine inch Nails making
their files available um and uh, authors like Corey Doctoro
making entire books available for a short time, um, you know,
(16:43):
online for free. And then you know, of course what
they're finding out is it sells more copies of the
actual protected copyrighted work. Right. Yeah, I've I've seen people
who publish books and music under the Creative Commons do
quite well. That Jonathan Colton does very well with his
musician and uh, you know, the the important thing to
(17:05):
remember is that Creative Commons doesn't stop anyone from selling anything. Um,
you can. You can license your work under Creative Commons
and still sell it for a profit. There's nothing stopping
you from doing that. In fact, that's that's not the
purpose of Creative Commons. It's really to give you options
so that people know what they can and can't do
with your work. Um. It really comes down to to
(17:27):
the key terms what they call the key terms of
the Core Suite of Creative Commons licenses. Sweet. Yeah, so
attribution is one of those. We already mentioned that. So
that's letting people, you know, know that they need to
mention your name in regards to the work you created
before they do anything with it and their share alike.
(17:47):
And that allows other people to uh, create, distribute, or
distribute derivative works, but only under the same share alike license.
So if you make a derivative and make a distribution
of that, then you have to let other people share
to write. In other words, let's say that you take
a song and you remix it. You can't tell people, hey,
(18:09):
don't take this remix and remix that. Yeah, my remixes copyright. Now,
you can't do that. No, it has to fall under
the same the same parameters as the work that you
took in the first place. There's non commercial, which of
course means that you're not able to use the work
in any way that would um you know, and essentially
you can't use it in a way to make money.
(18:29):
You can't use it for commercial uses. This one's really
tricky because let's say that you have a song that
you really like that has been published under the Creative
Commons license, and you should be able to play that
song on your website like you want to, and you
know you're gonna attribute it and everything. But let's say
that you also have advertising site and you get money
(18:50):
from the ads. Now, even if the ads are not
directly associated with the song, there does there's a gray
area there the site is actually being used for a
commercial purpose, using it to make money. Yeah, and if
the song can be if you know, if you were
to say, well, the song is part of that the
song is part of the reason why people are visiting
the site, then therefore those songs part of the reason
why you're making money. That may or may not fall
(19:11):
under the non commercial umbrella. It's it's a gray area.
That's one of the more difficult ones to define. The
final one is no derivatives. This is where you let
people copy it, display it, distribute it, but they can't
make derivative versions, remixes or anything like that. Yeah, if
you write a song and want to change the layer
and somebody else wants to, you know, you publish it
(19:33):
under this license. Somebody else wants to, you know, rewrite
the second verse, they can't do it because it's verbatim.
You have to be the same way. Now, Let's say
that you publish something and you put it under the
Creative Commons License, and then later on you decide that
you want to change that. Okay, here's the problem. Yeah,
here's the problem. You can't really do that because it
(19:56):
violates the whole idea of the Creative Commons license in
the first place. Let's say that you've allowed people to
make remixes of your songs for uh, for three months.
You know, I've got this one song under the Creative
Commons license, and you you had had it so that
people could use the share like and then you decide,
you know what, I don't I don't really want that
to happen anymore, and I change that. Well, that kind
of violates the whole spirit of Creative Commons. So you
(20:18):
can't really do that. For one thing, how do you
prove someone got hold of your song after you changed
the parameter of your agreement If someone got hold of
your son from before they got it under the Creative
Commons license that said that they could share it if
they got it after then they said that, you know,
they couldn't share it anymore. Um, you can't really prove that.
(20:39):
It's really hard to to prove. Hey, I got a
hold of this digital copy back when you said it
was okay, Uh, not after you said it wasn't okay.
So if you're gonna publish something under creative commons, just
keep in mind that it's it's pretty much a switch
that stays on once you flip it on. It doesn't
mean you can't again, doesn't mean that you can't sell
(21:00):
things and make money off of them. It just means
that the conditions that you agreed to at the beginning
are you're pretty much stuck with those. And it seems
like since it's a legal agreement then it should conceivably
hold up in a court of law. Right, But again,
when you're talking about using creative commons, um this again
as a supplement to copyright law. If if you are
(21:22):
the owner of the work, uh, then you're going to
be using your your copyright as the basis of your argument,
not creative commons necessarily. And now if you're the person
being accused, you might be using creative commons as your protection, saying, look,
this work was licensed under creative commons. I followed the
parameters I attributed. I didn't use it for commercial purposes exactly.
(21:44):
So therefore, since I'm covering up under the license, there's
no there's no h substance to the complaint. Um. That
would be the defense on the person who is using
the work. You, as the person who created the work,
you would rely upon copyright law and the copyright itself. UM.
And again, like we said, if you create a work,
it's under copyright if you register it. That kind of
(22:05):
helps if you're defending your copyright in court. Not that
you can't defend a copyright in court without registering. You can,
it's just more difficult. It's easier to defend a copyright
if you've registered it. It also tends to make people
think twice because it just it carries with it a
certain kind of gravitas, because it's official. You just wanted
(22:28):
to use the word gravitas because it sounds heavy. It's
the secret word for today. Everybody's scream good pewee Harman Vans.
All right, then I don't really have a lot more
on Yeah. The one other thing I will mention that
just a tiny thing is that you can actually do
(22:50):
search searches for Creative Commons material, which is very handy
if you, let's say that you've got a podcast. You know,
you're an amateur podcaster, and you're not making any money
off of the podcast, and you want, you know, a
really cool song to play in the background of your podcast.
You can go through Creative Commons and find stuff published
under Creative Commons. Um you can do searches in different
(23:12):
uh using the Creative Commons as a as a one
of the parameters of your search and find music that
other people wrote that they'll be more than happy for
you to use it as long as you again follow
the rules. You know, you attribute it, you don't use
it for commercial purposes. So that's another benefit is that
it helps you find resources that you can't produce on
(23:34):
your own to to make your own work that much
more attractive. Yep. And as a matter of fact, if
you're a Firefox browser fan, then there is a plug
in that you can use and added to your search listings.
You know, any stuff. Okay, Well, now I am done. Okay,
then then let's move on to the listener mail. Nice
(24:00):
list listener mail comes from John and John says, hey, guys,
I just recently started listening to your podcast great Stuff.
I was listening to the Augmented Reality one and recalled
that some work had been done at my alma mater,
the University of North Dakota School of Engineering and Mind's
Mechanical Engineering Department. I remembered that some people had used
augmented reality to play pac Man and Doom. Couldn't find
(24:22):
a link, but it was done in Australia. Very cool stuff.
Keep up the good work, John's thanks John. Yeah, augmented
reality has been one of those things that people, you know,
creative minds, find really cool things to do with augmented reality.
I always think of the very simple stuff like looking at,
you know, a restaurant scenes review, but there are so
many other applications, and of course we only went into
(24:44):
one or two of them. People who find ways to
create augmented reality games awesome. So if any of you
have any comments, questions, criticisms that sort of thing, you
can email us. Our email address is tech stuff at
how stuff works dot com. Um, you can learn all
about copyright at how stuff works dot com. I encourage
you to do that because it's one of those really
(25:06):
complicated things that can really affect all of us, especially
if we use the web a lot. And remember tech
Stuff Live. We do a tech stuff Live show one
pm Eastern every Tuesday. You can go to the tech
stuff blog over on how stuff Works dot com. Check
it out. Chris and I desperately try to inform you
(25:27):
of the technology news of the week, and we do
it with amazing special effects provided by Matt Frederick of
Lions and Scissors. And I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
Remember give us great reviews on iTunes because we like that,
and we will talk to you again really soon for
(25:50):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the new tech stuff blog now on the House
Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Cammeray,
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technologies? With
tech Stuff from how stuff looks dot com. Hello everybody,
and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette,
and I'm an editor here at how stuff works dot com.
(00:22):
Sitting across from me again as usual, is senior writer
Jonathan Strickland. Hi, and I just like to thank all
the people who downloaded and or streamed this podcast. Excellent.
That's very nice of you. Yes, I'd also like to
thank our guest producer, Matt Frederick, amazing musician, member of
Lines and Scissors. Matt, and I know you would do
(00:43):
nothing to ever interrupt us in our podcast, isn't that true?
Matt's nodding yes. And you finished the Beatles rock band
in one day. He did finish the Beatles rock band
in one day. He played the drums on expert all
the way through. Excellent. Yeah, alright, so uh at atually,
you know, the Beatles were We're recently rumored to be
(01:04):
coming to iTunes store and and they didn't. And actually
they've they've they've been people have been waiting for this
to happen, and there's a reason why they haven't come
out yet with the digital versions of their songs. What
would that be, That would be copyright copyright, Now here's
a sticky situation. Now. Of course, copyright does not just
fallen under the realm of tech stuff. Technically, many of
(01:26):
our our sister podcasts could cover this topic. But copyright
does hold a special place within the field of technology
because things like the Internet have made it very easy
to distribute information on a scale much larger than what
could be achieved on one zone previously. Correct. Oh yes,
I mean the idea of copyright goes back a very
(01:46):
very long time. And uh it was only recently really
in the twentie and or you know, twenty first centuries
that copyright has been extended to amazing links. I mean,
in the United States, the current length of copyright is
the death of the author plus seventy years, right, and
if it's an anonymous work or pseudo anonymous work, work
(02:09):
for higher these works go ninety five years from the
year of its publication, so you know, when you can't
necessarily identify the author years from when it was published.
That's a long time. And there are various organizations that
are responsible really for pushing copyright to these extremes. Yeah,
and really it's it's not In most cases, it's not
(02:30):
the author and it's not like the government is concerned
about it. It's more like the publisher. Yeah, or giant corporations. Well, yeah,
I can think of one in particular. Yes, I know you. Actually,
the the corporation I think you're thinking of is generally
given credit for I just won't say it's a Mickey
mouse operation. Yeah. Okay, So but copyright it does, it
(02:53):
does h cover, It protects works for a very long time.
And what does it protect it from, you might ask, Well,
I mean people want to uh, they come up with
these neat ideas, and they're able to sell lots and
lots of copies of these ideas to other people who
want to read about them or watch them or listen
to them. Um. And and that's understandable. But it's those
(03:14):
people who um want to share those with other people
and maybe not you know, paid. Right. So well, let's
let's use a specific example because this is getting kind
of vague. So let's say that you've published a book
and you've called the book, uh, the heaving bosom So
you've got The Heaving Bosom. It's your it's your Bodice
(03:36):
ripper romance novel, and you're really excited about it. Okay, Um,
so you've you've gone and you've published it. And then
someone comes out with a book called The Heaving Boobs.
What you're coming up with? This? How AT's saying? How
about keeping abreast of the situation? So they come up
with a book called Keeping Abreast of the Situation? And
(03:58):
Chris has actually left the room. Do you want to
go back? And we're gonna keep going, all right? Cool?
Keeping a breast of the situation. And it turns out
that the book is word for word the same as
The Heaving Bosom. Now this would be a problem obviously,
because you, as the author of The Heaving Bosom, you
are do the the rewards that come as a result
(04:19):
of selling this work. Yes, And what's really irritating is
that book is two dollars cheaper than my book and
is out selling it now that it's cheaper because someone
else can get the same content for less, right, So uh, now,
what copyright does it gives the person who published the
book originally? In this case, you who have published The
Heaving Bosom a legal recourse too to pursue a claim
(04:42):
against someone who has violated that copyright. And so you
can protect your intellectual property so that it remains yours
and uh, and that way it prevents other people from
capitalizing on your work, and then you know you wouldn't
see anything from that, right, I mean, that's that's the
whole basis of copyright. It's not a bad thing on
its own. In fact, it's very important. Anyone who's a
(05:04):
creator wants to be able to protect his or her
own work, at least to some extent. Now, copyright that
that takes effect as soon as you create something, Yes,
as soon as it is fixed a fixed work. You
do not have to send a form into the federal government,
although you can. That's that's registering your copyright. Yeah, you know,
(05:24):
you don't have to register a copyright to hold a copyright,
right if you if you write a blog post and
hit the published button, that's copyright you. Yeah, the same
thing for any kind of written work, musical work, any
any sort of recorded work, even an image, you can copyright. So, uh,
anything that you produce creatively, assuming that that's created through
(05:47):
your own work. It's not something that's derived from something else,
you hold the copyright to it. Yes, Now, not everyone
agrees with these rules. I mean some people are a
little bit more lenient. Some people say, hey, you know,
I created this song and I want to share it
with all my friends on the internet and wanted you
to remix it and cut it up and do whatever
you want to with it. And I want to hear
(06:07):
what you what you do with it, and so what
do you do in that case? I mean, that's not
covered in the in the you know US code, right,
copyright law doesn't doesn't cover for this. It's it's very inflexible.
I mean, things are under copyright and you're either violating
it or you're not. And it's getting more inflexible, right, Yeah,
even things like fair use. People bring up the concept
(06:27):
of fair use. Fair use is incredibly difficult to prove. Yeah,
fair use is um fair use is a very contingent
situation for it's it's so hard to define. Yeah, I
mean the thing is with fair use, you are allowed
to use some of something and something else. Like for example,
(06:48):
say you're writing a book, a nonfiction book, and you
would like to put a a quote from someone else's
book in there. Well, you're allowed to do that, but
the thing is it has to be of a certain
layng and it has to be what they call transformative,
which means, you know, if you want to put half
a paragraph of somebody's book in to illustrate your point
and illustrated as Hey, this is something that Mr Smith
(07:10):
wrote about and I think it's an incredibly important thing,
and you said it off as a quote. You're probably
not going to get sued for that. Now, if you,
you know, lift the entire paragraph and don't change a word,
then that's not you're not really transforming in anyway. You're
you know, and that's that's actually what the transformative part
is what gives the right to people like weird Al
who want to do a parody. He often takes pretty
(07:32):
much the same song, maybe changes it into a different key,
and then adds new words to it. Well, he's transformed
it into a new song by doing that, So technically
he would not have to ask permission, although we should
point out that he does. Yes, he always does. He
does ask permission though technically under the rules of fair
use he doesn't have to, but he he takes that
extra step, So good on you. Weird. Al Yeah. Now,
(07:55):
specifically Section one oh seven of the Copyright Code, uh
it stay that it sets out four factors to be
considered and determining determining whether or not a particular use
is fair. And here are the four things. The purpose
and character of the use, including whether such uses of
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. Nonprofit is
(08:16):
generally considered better if you're trying to argue fair use.
The nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality
of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work
as a whole, So how much you create on your
own and how much you actually cite from other works,
and the effect of the use upon the potential market
for or value of the copyrighted work. In other words, yeah,
(08:39):
In other words, if if if you include this in
your work and somehow that impacts the sales of the
original work, that's a bad thing. That's say, are Unless
it impacts it in a positive way, like it makes
people go out and buy some other book, that's okay.
But if you if people say, hey, I don't need
to buy the original book because I can get enough
of it out of this system here, that's bad. And
(09:01):
um uh. And again, you know Paulett was talking earlier
about you know, you don't if you get to a
certain length a certain amount of material that might violate
fair use. Here's another problem. That length is not defined. Nope,
there is no definition to how many words you can
use or how much, how even a percentage of the
content that you can use before you violate fair use.
(09:23):
It's a case by case basis. Yep. And that's a
that's a problem because it's going to be up to
a judge to decide this. I mean, you know, if
you if you write a two hundred and sixty three
page book and you use a paragraph out of somebody's work,
that's really not that substantial all things considered. Of course,
your lawyer is going to have to prove that. However,
(09:44):
if you write a half page long poem and two
thirds of it is somebody else's that's really an awful
lot of it. Yeah. So let's but let's say that
you have created a work and you want to be
able to distribute this as widely as possible. And you know,
before the Internet, you really only had two options. You
(10:06):
had an option of going with some sort of publication corporation.
So either you know, a like a corporate publisher right exactly,
like they're publishing novels or or it's a music publisher whatever,
whatever a kind of art you're creating, you would have
to go to to a major publisher to get widespread distribution. Yeah,
like you're you've got an agent and they sign you
to a deal. Not a self publisher right now. That's
(10:29):
your other choice, as you go to a self publisher
also known as vanity press from people who are writing uh.
And in this case, you would pay the publisher directly
to publish these books, and then you would try and
sell them. The problem with that, of course, is that
your distribution is usually pretty limited with vanity publishing. First
of all, it's limited by your budget, because you're the
one paying to have all these books or CDs pressed
(10:51):
or whatever. Uh. And then of course it's limited by
however widespread you can you can get the word out
for people to actually purchase this stuff. It's limited by
how far how much gas you have in your tank,
and how many bookstores there are in your neighborhood. Now,
I'm sitting here with one musician across the table from me,
and another one staring holes in the back of my head.
And uh and both of them, I as, I'm sure,
(11:12):
are very familiar with the concept of self publishing. So
the Internet gives people a new opportunity to distribute their
work in a much more wider scale than they ever
could on their own without it. So you can upload songs,
you can upload an entire novel if you wanted to,
(11:33):
and you can distribute it any way you like. Now,
some people they want to foster a creative spirit on
the Internet. They want their work not just seen by
people who enjoy it, but they want people to take
their work and transform it. Perhaps. Uh, you know, a
musician may want we want to encourage people to remix
(11:55):
his or her songs. Um and And the problem with
copyright is there's no all recourse for you to do this.
What you have to do is create a license agreement. Now,
license agreements if you you know, there's if you're just
going for a specific one, you pretty much have to
hire a lawyer and work with the lawyer to hash
out a license agreement that's that fits both your your
(12:18):
needs and the person who wants to license the work.
You know, what would be really cool, what's that would
be really cool if there were like a template and
you could you know that somebody had created you know,
somebody like a legal expert, and they could say, well,
you know what, if you want to license it this way,
go with option A. If you want to license it
another way, go with option B. And options C, D, E,
(12:40):
n F are also available if you want to make
parts of it available for people to use, or if
you want to restrict it completely. In fact, that is
such a good idea that other people have had it. No, yes,
that's the birth of the creative commons. So creative commons
is a way of licensing work so that you can
tell people what what you do and do not want
(13:02):
folks to do with the stuff you've created. And um,
it's not the same as copyright. It's it's really it's
really uh kind of a supplement to copyright. It's an
idea that this tells people what you want them to
be able to do, uh, whether or not you want
them to be able to take your work and then
add to it or or you know, transform it in
(13:22):
some way. It also gives people the guidelines they need
to follow in order to do that. Because one of
the aspects of Creative Commons is that you know, you
you may want to make sure people attribute the original
work to you so that people can trace back all
the way to the source of the original material. So
attribution is very important in creative Commons. Uh, that's part
(13:45):
of the license. So if people you know, decide to
try and use create works that are licensed under Creative Commons,
one of the things they're supposed to do is attribute
the original work. And there their guidelines specifically on how
things need to be attributed. A lot of these left
up to the creator. Um, you know, whether they want
to be uh mentioned by name or by a handle
(14:06):
or both. Um, whether or not you know, you should
include a website as well, that kind of thing, and uh.
And this covers all sorts of creative material like books,
short stories, music, images, uh not software software you you
could technically covered under Creative Commons, but the the people
(14:27):
who drafted Creative Commons um suggest that you don't do that. Well,
there are other options for that too, write exactly. That's
that's one of the that's one of the reasons they
suggest that you shouldn't use Creative Commons for software because
there are other choices out there that are better. YEP. Now, UM,
creative commons actually hasn't been around for a terribly long time. Actually,
(14:51):
at the twenty one century UH creation, UM, the Center
for the Public Domain had a lot to do with it,
and there were a lot of people involved it. UM.
You know, probably the most recognizable name as UH Lawrence Lessig,
who's UH lawyer and has been cited very very frequently
as an expert in UH and copyright and other related
(15:16):
and licensing and all sorts of related things. He's UH,
he's an author and UM a lot of a lot
of times. UM, you know, he gets asked about the
these weird situations because you know, before the digital age,
really copyright was a lot easier to pin down, and
now there are all these methods of distribution that are
(15:37):
causing the corporate organizations headaches. Um. There are all sorts
of other UH contingencies like bands wanting to allow you
to have access to their pro tools files to go
ahead and make changes to the original songs without you know,
even taking the finished tracks. I mean, these things are
(15:58):
are things that would have been unthinkable just a few
years ago. So it's important that that creative commons licensing
and UH and public domain licensing overall is becoming more
robust because it's enabling people to fiddle around with it
a little bit more. And the funny thing I think
about the licensing issues is that, um, some of the
(16:21):
corporations are starting to loosen up a little bit and
allow authors and other artists to you know, distribute these
things more freely, like for example, nine inch Nails making
their files available um and uh, authors like Corey Doctoro
making entire books available for a short time, um, you know,
(16:43):
online for free. And then you know, of course what
they're finding out is it sells more copies of the
actual protected copyrighted work. Right. Yeah, I've I've seen people
who publish books and music under the Creative Commons do
quite well. That Jonathan Colton does very well with his
musician and uh, you know, the the important thing to
(17:05):
remember is that Creative Commons doesn't stop anyone from selling anything. Um,
you can. You can license your work under Creative Commons
and still sell it for a profit. There's nothing stopping
you from doing that. In fact, that's that's not the
purpose of Creative Commons. It's really to give you options
so that people know what they can and can't do
with your work. Um. It really comes down to to
(17:27):
the key terms what they call the key terms of
the Core Suite of Creative Commons licenses. Sweet. Yeah, so
attribution is one of those. We already mentioned that. So
that's letting people, you know, know that they need to
mention your name in regards to the work you created
before they do anything with it and their share alike.
(17:47):
And that allows other people to uh, create, distribute, or
distribute derivative works, but only under the same share alike license.
So if you make a derivative and make a distribution
of that, then you have to let other people share
to write. In other words, let's say that you take
a song and you remix it. You can't tell people, hey,
(18:09):
don't take this remix and remix that. Yeah, my remixes copyright. Now,
you can't do that. No, it has to fall under
the same the same parameters as the work that you
took in the first place. There's non commercial, which of
course means that you're not able to use the work
in any way that would um you know, and essentially
you can't use it in a way to make money.
(18:29):
You can't use it for commercial uses. This one's really
tricky because let's say that you have a song that
you really like that has been published under the Creative
Commons license, and you should be able to play that
song on your website like you want to, and you
know you're gonna attribute it and everything. But let's say
that you also have advertising site and you get money
(18:50):
from the ads. Now, even if the ads are not
directly associated with the song, there does there's a gray
area there the site is actually being used for a
commercial purpose, using it to make money. Yeah, and if
the song can be if you know, if you were
to say, well, the song is part of that the
song is part of the reason why people are visiting
the site, then therefore those songs part of the reason
why you're making money. That may or may not fall
(19:11):
under the non commercial umbrella. It's it's a gray area.
That's one of the more difficult ones to define. The
final one is no derivatives. This is where you let
people copy it, display it, distribute it, but they can't
make derivative versions, remixes or anything like that. Yeah, if
you write a song and want to change the layer
and somebody else wants to, you know, you publish it
(19:33):
under this license. Somebody else wants to, you know, rewrite
the second verse, they can't do it because it's verbatim.
You have to be the same way. Now, Let's say
that you publish something and you put it under the
Creative Commons License, and then later on you decide that
you want to change that. Okay, here's the problem. Yeah,
here's the problem. You can't really do that because it
(19:56):
violates the whole idea of the Creative Commons license in
the first place. Let's say that you've allowed people to
make remixes of your songs for uh, for three months.
You know, I've got this one song under the Creative
Commons license, and you you had had it so that
people could use the share like and then you decide,
you know what, I don't I don't really want that
to happen anymore, and I change that. Well, that kind
of violates the whole spirit of Creative Commons. So you
(20:18):
can't really do that. For one thing, how do you
prove someone got hold of your song after you changed
the parameter of your agreement If someone got hold of
your son from before they got it under the Creative
Commons license that said that they could share it if
they got it after then they said that, you know,
they couldn't share it anymore. Um, you can't really prove that.
(20:39):
It's really hard to to prove. Hey, I got a
hold of this digital copy back when you said it
was okay, Uh, not after you said it wasn't okay.
So if you're gonna publish something under creative commons, just
keep in mind that it's it's pretty much a switch
that stays on once you flip it on. It doesn't
mean you can't again, doesn't mean that you can't sell
(21:00):
things and make money off of them. It just means
that the conditions that you agreed to at the beginning
are you're pretty much stuck with those. And it seems
like since it's a legal agreement then it should conceivably
hold up in a court of law. Right, But again,
when you're talking about using creative commons, um this again
as a supplement to copyright law. If if you are
(21:22):
the owner of the work, uh, then you're going to
be using your your copyright as the basis of your argument,
not creative commons necessarily. And now if you're the person
being accused, you might be using creative commons as your protection, saying, look,
this work was licensed under creative commons. I followed the
parameters I attributed. I didn't use it for commercial purposes exactly.
(21:44):
So therefore, since I'm covering up under the license, there's
no there's no h substance to the complaint. Um. That
would be the defense on the person who is using
the work. You, as the person who created the work,
you would rely upon copyright law and the copyright itself. UM.
And again, like we said, if you create a work,
it's under copyright if you register it. That kind of
(22:05):
helps if you're defending your copyright in court. Not that
you can't defend a copyright in court without registering. You can,
it's just more difficult. It's easier to defend a copyright
if you've registered it. It also tends to make people
think twice because it just it carries with it a
certain kind of gravitas, because it's official. You just wanted
(22:28):
to use the word gravitas because it sounds heavy. It's
the secret word for today. Everybody's scream good pewee Harman Vans.
All right, then I don't really have a lot more
on Yeah. The one other thing I will mention that
just a tiny thing is that you can actually do
(22:50):
search searches for Creative Commons material, which is very handy
if you, let's say that you've got a podcast. You know,
you're an amateur podcaster, and you're not making any money
off of the podcast, and you want, you know, a
really cool song to play in the background of your podcast.
You can go through Creative Commons and find stuff published
under Creative Commons. Um you can do searches in different
(23:12):
uh using the Creative Commons as a as a one
of the parameters of your search and find music that
other people wrote that they'll be more than happy for
you to use it as long as you again follow
the rules. You know, you attribute it, you don't use
it for commercial purposes. So that's another benefit is that
it helps you find resources that you can't produce on
(23:34):
your own to to make your own work that much
more attractive. Yep. And as a matter of fact, if
you're a Firefox browser fan, then there is a plug
in that you can use and added to your search listings.
You know, any stuff. Okay, Well, now I am done. Okay,
then then let's move on to the listener mail. Nice
(24:00):
list listener mail comes from John and John says, hey, guys,
I just recently started listening to your podcast great Stuff.
I was listening to the Augmented Reality one and recalled
that some work had been done at my alma mater,
the University of North Dakota School of Engineering and Mind's
Mechanical Engineering Department. I remembered that some people had used
augmented reality to play pac Man and Doom. Couldn't find
(24:22):
a link, but it was done in Australia. Very cool stuff.
Keep up the good work, John's thanks John. Yeah, augmented
reality has been one of those things that people, you know,
creative minds, find really cool things to do with augmented reality.
I always think of the very simple stuff like looking at,
you know, a restaurant scenes review, but there are so
many other applications, and of course we only went into
(24:44):
one or two of them. People who find ways to
create augmented reality games awesome. So if any of you
have any comments, questions, criticisms that sort of thing, you
can email us. Our email address is tech stuff at
how stuff works dot com. Um, you can learn all
about copyright at how stuff works dot com. I encourage
you to do that because it's one of those really
(25:06):
complicated things that can really affect all of us, especially
if we use the web a lot. And remember tech
Stuff Live. We do a tech stuff Live show one
pm Eastern every Tuesday. You can go to the tech
stuff blog over on how stuff Works dot com. Check
it out. Chris and I desperately try to inform you
(25:27):
of the technology news of the week, and we do
it with amazing special effects provided by Matt Frederick of
Lions and Scissors. And I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
Remember give us great reviews on iTunes because we like that,
and we will talk to you again really soon for
(25:50):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the new tech stuff blog now on the House
Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.