when the world's first copyright law was passed in
1710 I can't even imagine that the British Parliament would have ever
envisioned people flinging pirated copies of movies all over the Internet
whatever that would have seemed like thousands of times every day yet that's
exactly what eventually happened and seeing as many of our copyright laws
were meant for the preyers space era the
way the copyright Works online is often
quite messy now we hear at Techquickie aren't lawyers uh that's not entirely
true John our writer did graduate from an American law school but anyways we
can help clear up some of the misconceptions around what you can and
can't do online at least legally anyways
although today's episode is based around us copyright law similar Concepts exist
in many other countries as well so one of the main reasons that copyright laws
even exist is to encourage people like musicians software developers and game
designers to come up with creative stuff
I mean do you think that Mark Wahlberg would have starred in that awful movie
The Happening if there wasn't a copyright holder there to cut him a fat
paycheck so perhaps it isn't surprising
that usually when you hear a news story about a high-profile copyright case it's
where some copyright infringer either made tons of money off of bootlegging
copies of something or where some big shot movie studio comes after someone
for cutting into their profits by Distributing one of their films for free
even if the infringer isn't making any money but let's assume that like most
people you aren't running a huge bootleg operation and are concerned about
whether you can do something like share a screenshot from a movie on your blog
or play a song in the background of a Youtube upload this is where fair use
comes into play and a really important concept that's misunderstood by a lot of
people in a nutshell most kinds of creative work including songs books and
the angsty poems that you wrote when you were a 16-year-old scene kid have an
automatic copyright that applies as soon
as they're created but that doesn't mean no one else can ever use them fair use
helps keep people from getting sued for copyright infringement as long as
they're using stuff well fairly but what
constitutes Fair that's a pretty subjective question that courts use
several factors to answer but generally speaking the most important one is
whether you're costing someone money by how you're using their stuff even though
any reproduction without permission of a
copyrighted work is technically
infringement even if you're just reposting some cool picture you found as
your Facebook cover photo that being said if one day you get a nasty letter
from someone's lawyer you can probably
assert fair use if you're you're not affecting someone's bottom line on the
other hand simply posting something with a disclaimer that the content isn't
yours doesn't automatically make it fair use if you're seeding a torrent of a
copyrighted song fair use will not save you from the wrath of a recording studio
even if you say this isn't mine I'm not
making money off of it since people are just going to download the song anyways
for free instead of paying for it on iTunes or wherever else the company will
see it as they hit to their bottom line whether or not that person would have
bought the song at all or not this concept also comes to play if you've
ever spent any time reading or writing fanfiction it's pretty popular for a
fanfic writer to put a disclaimer at the top claiming that they they don't own
the characters but since copyright law also gives the right to make derivative
Works to the original creator for example a movie book or game sequel It's
theoretically possible for fanfic writers to get in trouble with
Publishers though many authors notably JK Rowling of Harry Potter Fame have
given their blessing to fanfic writers so long as they're not trying to sell
their stories and of course content creators are under no obligation to let
people use their stuff even if they aren't making money off of it but at
least the way we think about laws in an age where anything can be uploaded in a
matter of seconds seemingly they're catching up to reality even if the
process is a bit slow one appeals court in the US recently ruled that fair use
should not just be a legal excuse for
infringement but instead a right that shouldn't constitute infringement at all
after Universal issued a takedown notice after a woman uploaded a 30-second clip
of her kids dancing to a print song meaning it may be the case soon where
major companies have to actually think before just flagging everything they can
we've also seen the proliferation of sites that use things like Creative
Commons licenses to allow for free reuse
of lots of different types of content Wikipedia is a good example of this and
we've also seen the end of heavy-handed lawsuits from entertainment industry
associations against people who shared one or two songs often unwittingly but
even though the powers that be seem to be trying to make it a bit easier for
folks who really aren't intentionally doing anything wrong do be careful about
what you share or host online and remember not to buy Game of Thrones
episodes on USB sticks from that dude that hangs out in the alley behind
Arby's it's just it's just not safe
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fun thing it's cool and stuff and I'm
going to go away but this isn't low enough so I need to keep
going am I gone now okay that's good