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.\u00a0 She started off by explaining that the purpose of copyright was to support creativity.\u00a0 She showed a brief video giving snapshots of YouTube favorites and asked us to evaluate whether they violated copyright.\u00a0 At that point, I was convinced all of them did so.\u00a0 By the end of her talk – something like 25 minutes – I was convinced they were all “legal” under “fair use.”<\/p>\n
What’s Fair Use?\u00a0 It’s basically the only legal way to use copyrighted material in the creation of new material.\u00a0 Ever load anything up on YouTube and get dinged for copyright music?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You think, “hey, I’m not a lawyer, maybe I should just let it go…”<\/p>\n
The thing is, you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand Fair Use.\u00a0 Spend less than an hour browsing the Center for Social Media’s articles and videos<\/a>, and it will become pretty clear what is Fair Use, so you can dispute that YouTube copyright claim with confidence.\u00a0 Because the CSM also reminds us that if we don’t exercise our rights under Fair Use, we can easily lose these rights.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n On YouTube, you can dispute a copyright claim one of three ways.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If you’ve done your homework, the copyright claim will be removed and your video will once again become ad-free.\u00a0 More importantly, you’ll have exercised your legal right to use other content in certain ways to create new content.<\/p>\n I highly recommend checking out the Center for Social Media web site<\/a>, and signing up for their newsletter if this stuff interests you.\u00a0 Check out their most recent “Fair Use Question of the Month”<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 She started off by explaining that the purpose of copyright was to support creativity.\u00a0 She showed a brief video giving snapshots of YouTube favorites and asked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[163,1104],"tags":[169,170,168,7,167,166,164,165,13],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-issues","category-video-2","tag-american-university","tag-aufderheide","tag-center-for-social-media","tag-copyright","tag-csm","tag-dispute","tag-fair-use","tag-law","tag-youtube"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}