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