I just received my periodic newsletter from American University’s Center for Social Media, and was reminded of an excellent talk I heard last year by its director, Pat Aufderheide. She started off by explaining that the purpose of copyright was to support creativity. She showed a brief video giving snapshots of YouTube favorites and asked us to evaluate whether they violated copyright. At that point, I was convinced all of them did so. By the end of her talk – something like 25 minutes – I was convinced they were all “legal” under “fair use.”
What’s Fair Use? It’s basically the only legal way to use copyrighted material in the creation of new material. Ever load anything up on YouTube and get dinged for copyright music? Depending on the copyright owner’s wishes, you either get the music deleted, or maybe you’re told it will be unavailable in certain countries…or maybe nothing happens except your video is accompanied with irritating ads next to, or along the bottom of your video. If you try and dispute it, you will have to click through a series of screens that feel like they are warning you that you will be sued if you make a frivolous claim. You think, “hey, I’m not a lawyer, maybe I should just let it go…”
The thing is, you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand Fair Use. Spend less than an hour browsing the Center for Social Media’s articles and videos, and it will become pretty clear what is Fair Use, so you can dispute that YouTube copyright claim with confidence. Because the CSM also reminds us that if we don’t exercise our rights under Fair Use, we can easily lose these rights. It’s not a body of detailed laws, but only a kind of a “common understanding” – a set of “best practices” that determine what’s OK and what’s not.
On YouTube, you can dispute a copyright claim one of three ways. You can claim that (1) the material is not under copyright; (2) that it is under copyright, but you have permission to use it; or (3) that it is under copyright, but is permissible under Fair Use. Click the appropriate button, then type a phrase promising not to sue YouTube for having called you a copyright thief by mistake, and wait a week or two. If you’ve done your homework, the copyright claim will be removed and your video will once again become ad-free. More importantly, you’ll have exercised your legal right to use other content in certain ways to create new content.
I highly recommend checking out the Center for Social Media web site, and signing up for their newsletter if this stuff interests you. Check out their most recent “Fair Use Question of the Month” in their blog and you’ll see that there are a number of issues to consider when you’re uploading videos to YouTube – but you don’t need to hire a lawyer to help you sort it out, either.
