No Copyright Intended

Posted by Andy Baio

On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order.

A couple things struck me about this video.

First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting removed. Now that it’s on Kottke and Buzzfeed, I’m guessing it won’t be around for much longer.

But I was just as amused by the video description:

“The legendary movie itself placed into chronological order. If you’d like me to put the full movie itself up, let me know and I’ll be glad to oblige. Please no copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project.”

These “no copyright infringement intended” messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you’re a cop. It’s like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Judging by his username, I’m guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

He’s hardly alone. On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

YouTube’s tried to combat these misconceptions with its Copyright School, but it seems futile. For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay.

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I’d wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it’s legal already.

Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe “I downloaded but didn’t share” will be the new “I smoked, but didn’t inhale.”)

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.

Update, February 11: Everybody’s singing the YouTube Disclaimer Blues.

Comments

    I’ve noticed the same thing. The kids seem to interpret copyright as primarily meaning a claim of authorship.

    Perhaps if you grow up in a world where 90% of the media you’ve ever seen was shared or pirated, it seems logical to assume that’s what the © means — it denotes the ultimate origin of the content.

    So the more scrupulous sharers point out that someone else has the copyright, or say things like “no copyright intended”, “I don’t own any of this”, etc.

    Maybe someone should do a survey to find out what their mental model of copyright is.

    Related reading: NYT’s 2007 article, The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality:

    Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I’d ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.

    In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

    Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.”

    There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

    “Who thinks that might be wrong?”

    Two hands out of 500.

    Some people in this discussion earlier this year at Kuro5hin suspected it’s an interaction of two factors: 1) the way legal disclaimers are used in our culture, sprinkled liberally around but in such an opaque way that it’s no wonder people view them as a kind of talisman; and 2) as mentioned in this post and the previous comment, a belief that “stealing” in the sense of plagiarism is what’s at issue.

    I think some of this might be specifically tied to video. Some time in the last 3-4 years, music blogs (especially the totally amateur ones) have stopped posting mp3s in favor of videos. When I used to do outreach to music blogs offering mp3s from my own band you’d be surprised how many responses I got saying that they didn’t post mp3s because those were “illegal” and did I have a youtube video of the song?

    Remember when The Grey Album was aggressively targeted for copyright violations? It seems so quaint looking back at that now. These days mashups are the norm online and don’t even fly under the radar anymore. Look at Girl Talk and how much attention he gets.

    I hope that when this generation becomes a large part of the electorate the laws will changed, but I am a bit cynical about it. Do governments listen at all to what the electorate currently wants with regards to copyright law? If anything corporate influence is going up. Lets hope what the electorate wants can overpower that.

    visual artists are getting screwed because of this. i am not so concerned with Hollywood as the low totem pole artists who is at the whim of corpu-gov-BigArtMarkets

    As a member of said group of kids, I’d say this is accurate. I’ve been making short filns since I was 13, and had no idea that non-commercial use of copyrighted music was illegal until I was about 17 or 18. It never really made any sense to me; after all, it’s not as if I could afford the licensing fees, so my use wasn’t a lost fee for the rightsholder.

    I’d wager that Fair Use, even as it’s currently written, would allow for non-commercial remixing, use of background music, etc. if it were ever tested in court. But nobody’s had the resources to mount that kind of campaign yet.

    Oh, another interesting way young people misunderstand copyright: in sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, people commonly refer to “copyrighted characters”, when in fact trademark law is much more likely to apply.

    It would be interesting to know how things would be different if copyright lasted a much shorter and more reasonable length of time (as copyright was originally intended to foster innovation, not to act as a business model) AND the public were educated about what Fair Use really means.

    Remixing is a crime because corporations (Disney, etc.) made it a crime by extending the terms of their copyright to unreasonable limits. Right now the law is constructed in a way that we’re pretty much all criminals. That’s not reasonable.

    Remember that there were also those of us who grew up before the NET act when noncommercial use _wasn’t_ particularly illegal. I would argue that the odd folks are the people from the brief interval in between.

    I work with an online high school, and we have to continuously explain the copyright rules for pictures, music, videos, etc. It is completely illogical to them that it would be illegal to use the media that someone else created without their permission, let alone share it with others. Many think that copying songs to sell them is wrong, but copying songs to share them for free is perfectly fine.

    Your comparisons argue against your conclusion. Drug prohibition was untouched by a majority of voters having smoked pot. Alcohol prohibition gave way to tax revenue, not demographic change. Maybe the same will happen with drugs, if the economy gets worse, but probably not to transparent legalization, but something like California’s farcical medicalization.

    FWIW, Google’s automated system means that most of these videos are approved by the copyright holder. I am not a lawyer, but that seems to me to grant a narrow license, though only on youtube and duration at the whim of the rights holder. This is clearest in the case where the rights holder is receiving advertising money. Of course, the putative grantee doesn’t know whether the video not being flagged means that the owner is OK with it or failed to register that particular recording.

    Copyright is pretty easy to understand.

    If you didn’t create it you don’t own it so you can’t use it without the owners permissions.

    What blows my mind is that people seemingly don’t understand two simple words that are pressed up against one another. “No copyright implied” is pretty much exactly the same as saying “I’m not implying I have the right to copy this work.”

    And “no copyright infringement implied” is a tacit admission that yes, you are indeed fully aware that what you’re doing is likely infringement of a copyright. The core of this problem is really as simple as this: a certain class of people these days have gotten it in their heads that if they say that a thing is so, then it must be so. It’s certainly a debate tactic that’s been around for millennia, but it really does seem to be becoming quite mainstream these days.

    People may not be creating content “for profit”, but YouTube profits by presenting the material. Even if the remixer isn’t profiting, the remix is still being used for profit. From what Douglas Knight describes above, it sounds like Google is taking responsibility for obtaining rights for some of this content, which makes sense, since they’re distributing it. I guess this makes YouTube/Google a sort of copyright proxy.

    As bec wrote above, YouTube profits off of copyright infringement all the time.

    “By YouTube’s own rules, YouTube cannot exist. And yet it does.” — Jeff Atwood

    This code of best practices indicates that remixes are, in fact, legal.

    Just like I can quote from a book without asking for permission, I can “quote” a movie if I’m creating an original work with it. The length of the quote seems to be the biggest issue, when it comes to YouTube videos.

    As someone who’s spent a few years working against copyright maximalism and helping the public gain access to the public domain, I’ve come to the conclusion that copyright law, in most people’s minds, is what they’d like it to be.

    Because the older generations never made mix tapes, in violation of copyright law. And we never had to feel bad about recording TV and movies on VHS because we had a court case supporting that, despite the fact that the studios felt there was copyright violation.

    And with the “no copyright infringement” notice – many people use this less as a legal disclaimer and more as a respectful acknowledgement that all the material they’ve used belongs to someone else.

    Chris’s definition of copyright is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.

    Creating the work doesn’t mean you have the copyright. Having the copyright doesn’t mean you created it.

    Furthermore, if it’s copyrighted, that doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to use it without permission. The USA has broad exceptions for fair use (unfortunately they are getting narrower in the current environment). And some people use their copyright to grant other users more rights — this is the whole principle of Creative Commons and the GNU Public License.

    There’s another variation of this incantation I often see associated with images: “I assume this is in the public domain,” by which they mean, they took the images from the publicly accessible Internet.

    A good friend of mine who happens to be the executive at a major internet entertainment firm informs me that organized crime is raking in the dough by claiming “copyright” on popular You Tube videos and then forcing Google to pay them the ad revenue. Because there are so many ‘viral’ videos posted anonymously, this sounds like a credible fear-based hack.

    “I’d wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with ….”

    There IS nothing wrong with it. Its illegal yes, but that’s because amoral laws have been passed. Copyright itself is amoral and needs to be abolished. And once the old fat politicians retired, a new generation will get rid of them – and the previous century will be remembered as the sick and greedy one where the aberration of ‘copyright’ was invented.

    copyright and ipr are protection rackets for distribution systems … old distribution systems

    creation and innovation cannot be stopped, they come from the nature of the human mind

    time to move on .. should be obvious even to those born decades before youtube

    enjoy,

    gregorylent

    Do you have rights to use that photo of prohibition at the bottom of your post? I’m not being malicious I am just curious where to get sweet photos like that and not being liable for copyright…

    If we could look into the future, I wonder what we would see if copyright were to be abolished.

    Where it would not be profitable for anyone to invest money into developing any new pharmaceuticals, or new technology. Or film school graduates would never make a film because no one will invest in them. No publishing companies will promote your novel. The list goes on and on.

    Creativity and innovation grow out of necessity and our desire to advance. Take away my ability to provide for my family, I will not create but merely work to survive.

    Copyright laws are there to protect all of us.

    Perhaps those disclaimers are inspired by the similar disclaimers that are in widespread use in the context of trademarks (all trademarks are acknowledged as the property of their respective owners and so forth). Yet another hazard of the overuse of the vague umbrella term “intellectual property”?

    Paul M:

    First, pharma and tech are generally protected by patents, not copyright. But I’ll allow that, since the patent system needs to be reformed on similar grounds as the copyright monopoly system.

    In pharma, yes, there are huge sums invested in the development of new drugs. But, especially here in Sweden, the vast majority of pharma profits come from government subsidies in the health care sector. So, if we restructure the research to be mostly tax-funded, and let pharma companies compete with manufacturing in a free market, we’d get a similar overall outcome, with some differences. (For instance, research would be driven by need rather than profit – more cure, less suppression of symptoms; more focus on cancer and AIDS, less on ulcers and impotence. In today’s system, no-one’s gonna try to develop a cheap cure for malaria that could save millions of lives every year in the third world, since there’s little to no profit in it.)

    Tech in general? Being first on the market with a new gadget is enough economic incentive for most applications. And not having to fear spurious patent infringement claims from competitors frees up vast sums that are now spent on patent lawyers – to say nothing of the freedom to create that comes from not having to worry about if you’ve got the right to use the ideas you come up with, or if someone else has laid claim to them before you.

    To move on to your copyright-related examples, they seem to rest on the assumtion that you’d need a single, big publisher to reach out. That’s not true in today’s connected world; the internet makes it much easier to gain a reputation by word-of-mouth, voluntary micro-donations (like, for instance, Flattr) are stepping up to fill the role of royalties, Kickstarter is a good modelling of fan-driven, rather than publisher-granted, cash advances/funding. The list goes on and on.

    Creativity and innovation grow out of joy, play, and out desire to improve. Make my desire to contribute to my community illegal, and chances are I’ll contribute less.

    Copyright laws stifle all of us.

    Kind regards,

    Tomas Kronvall

    Piratpartiet (the Swedish Pirate Party)

    To your point about those 12 year olds being able to vote, I think the better question is how will these young adults vote when they have to worry about getting paid for their IP.

    I have to say I was one of those 12 year olds (except during the cassette age), when you start making a living on your IP, whether it’s music, film or now coding, you want to protect and get paid for your work. I’ve seen young turks who make millions off their code and get all bent when their IP is copied/stolen, yet have a hypocritical disregard for media copyrights.

    The fundamental problem with big media is that for decades they confused profits from physical product sales with profits from IP licensing. They argued that consumers were IP licensees, but were blind to the fact that their profits were from CD sales. They turned into a billion dollar industry not from IP, but from the sale of little bits of plastic and vinyl. Now that those profits are gone, they have wake up to business models that don’t enjoy the high margins of selling physical goods (streaming and downloads).

    I don’t think the point is “something’s gotta give”, it’s already given, individual lawsuit strategies have proven fruitless, expensive and a PR nightmare. I think the point is “how long will it take for the law, technology and business to adapt and profit in a internet culture”.

    And if there were no copyright, people wouldn’t make movies, songs, games, software and books anymore?

    @Chris >If you didn’t create it you don’t own it so you can’t use it without the owners permissions.>

    Wrong. Creators are not necessarily the owners. Just ask a staff journalist or musician signed to a label, or a researcher who must ‘publish or perish’.

    A few years ago I pitched an idea to the MPAA, that I would try to find out what students (at universities in India) thought about copyright. I was curious because I had seen little evidence that people in the MPAA had any idea what moviegoers (and music listeners) think/understand about copyright, and I was personally curious about the reasons piracy is so prevalent (especially in countries such as India and China where median incomes are low and media prices are relatively high … though in China the MPAA member companies have priced their products much more competitively).

    I made a short video documenting students’ views recorded in interviews, and from that, I made a comic book distilling the responses down even further. I was able to interview students at four universities in three major cities, and to speak with a law professor, an actor, and the writer/director of India’s best-ever-selling (at the time … not sure about the current situation) DVD movie.

    The kids were smart, thoughtful, and the project was fantastically interesting. For most interviewees, including the writer/director, the problem boiled mostly down to pricing: a DVD movie in India was then priced at around $10, which was unaffordable by most people.

    The comic is online here: http://comicaid.blogspot.com/2011/10/copyright-comic-developed-for-motion.html

    I wonder what would happen if YouTube put its foot down and removed ALL copyright? People would leave and they know that,Google or YouTube could give about fair use,but do care about numbers and ad revenue 🙂

    Maybe “no copyright intended” could’ve gotten yourself out of that Miles Davis album cover ripoff pickle you’d gotten yourself into.

    I think until people HAVE actually CREATED their own content that is protected by copyright, and have had it infringe by someone else posting (& therefore gaining the benefit of providing the content) they won’t actually “get it”.

    It’s difficult for example on twitter- RTs are GOOD- as long as attribution is given, but when people take your expert views on a Linked In Group Discussion and re publish them, on their own blog, WITHOUT permission of the author (even with attribution) it’s different again. What gives that person the right to believe they can republish content that wasn’t create by them?

    Tony: I found the prohibition photo on SF Weekly, but couldn’t find the source or the original photo credit. Looked in the usual places (Google Images reverse lookup, Library of Congress, Getty), but no luck.

    Any photo published in 1933 without a copyright notice was automatically in the public domain, as well as any 1933 photo that didn’t apply for a renewal in 1963. If they did renew copyright, it would still by covered by copyright until the year 2028.

    The U.S. Copyright Office estimated that around 15% of all pre-1960 copyrighted works were renewed, and I’m guessing it’s even lower for individual photos, compared to books and music. In this case, I took my chances.

    As an example of how messed up copyright laws are in the US, consider this.

    Nothing created in your lifetime will ever fall into the public domain. Items that might have fallen into the pubic domain such as Steamboat Mickey or the early Beatles recordings are systematically withheld through retroactive copyright extensions.

    Intellectual property laws must be reconsidered in terms of public welfare. Until those 12 year olds cited by the author become not only politicians, but legal authorities willing to reconsider the context of legal precedent, IP laws will only become more restrictive.

    Unfortunately, when a polity ignores or views laws in contempt, the entire legal system is in jeopardy.

    Youtube has a decent way to deal with copyright, its called content match. It fingerprints a copyright holders audio & video and matches the copyright owner usage policy when someone uploads it.

    The copyright owner can block, monetize or allow free use of thir content on youtube if its monetized normally an ad will pop over the video. and the copyright holder gets a (tiny) cut of the income from google.

    This video doesn’t have ads coming up or on the right which suggests either

    – the copyright owner hasn’t logged it with youtube content match yet and may issue a takedown request when they find out about it

    – the copyright owner has allowed anyone to do as they wish with it on Youtube (unlikely)

    – the content match system has got confused with the video – (again unlikely – Youtube match little chunks of fingerprints that would normally match the original even if its a few seconds)

    LG

    There is also the issue of “curation,” which is perfectly valid. Yet, copyright law makes no provisions for it.

    @Jairus

    This gives me hope. Hope that morality comes from the people themselves.

    That you can’t manufacture morality to protect anyone’s profit by restraining obvious physical freedoms of most of the people.

    “What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office?”

    Here’s what’ll happen:

    1) large corporations will have an even bigger influence in law and politics than they do now.

    2) the unelected elements won’t really care enough to influence copyright law, just like now

    3) the elected will suddenly realize that their campaign contributions come from said large corporations, and will abruptly reverse their understanding of “fair use”

    As Upton Sinclair said a hundred years ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

    You know, though, certain chillstep channels (for example MORchillstep) get rights to upload certain tracks from artists, as ADVERTISING. And, if there’s a YouTube link to a song, I guarantee it’s on Facebook somewhere.

    It’s interesting to think that ContentID is actually sorta hurting artists too. Like, how do people know if they want to buy a CD or not, without hearing some teasers?

    Younger people who “get it” would be the pirate party in Germany who has already had 15 of their members elected into the Berlin parliament with nationwide approval once at 10% (now around 7%). In the next German national elections 2013, the Pirate Party will almost certainly get into national parliament. Already with them getting into Berlin parliament has caused a lot of politicians to rethink what they think about copyright.

    It’s not just the fatcat executives that profit from copyright, it’s the artists themselves. Most of us who are artists are caught in between both sides of the law; we love to copy, remix and share other people’s work, but we want to be compensated for the use of our own creations.

    We make deals with fatcat distributors to get a bigger audience, and pay them a percentage, which they defend fiercely through their legal departments. They naturally cite ethics as a reason to refrain from pirating, hoping that would deter some people.

    If you crash a Jay-Z concert because you love his music, you might not think, hey I just stole $100 out of his pocket, you assume that some nameless corporation is profiting, so it’s fine to stick it to them, and Jay-Z probably isn’t hurting anyway.

    So, yes, Pirating is stealing from the artist, but you are also stealing from a draconian distributor who might also be giving the artist a shabby deal. Another aspect that’s not talked about is that copyright is also meant to protect the integrity of the work from alteration, a political author for example might not want his views edited and republished by someone else, or I might not want a random dance remix of my song be mistaken for the original.

    The problem is that new technologies have made it easier to copy and reuse than anything else. 30 years ago, it was easier to make your own music than to copy and remix someone elses, and the delivery mediums were difficult to access, so there was a natural barrier to copying and reselling.

    Now it takes special software techniques to create lockable content, so the model for media is going to keep changing. Many top name artists have gone to staging live tours again as their main income stream, allowing music to be pirated as a loss-leader advertisement for the concert tour.

    We adapt to changing economic circumstances. It’s not just the “people” vs. “the Man.

    It’s hardly surprising.

    Copyright law is written by lawyers for lawyers. Very few people, other than copyright activists, will ever actually read up on copyright law – so the overwhelming majority of the human race doesn’t know what it means.

    The thing is, though, that copyright infringement has always been absolutely huge. The big difference with the internet is how much easier it is to find. It isn’t like the 80’s, where investigators would have to trawl market stalls or raid warehouses: a quick Google search and you have thousands of examples a day.

    Law has badly needed to catch up with this, but it’s happening the wrong way ’round. Rather than taking account for fair use, artistic recreation, or lack of physical availability [digital backup], it’s being aimed at simply making more things illegal – or covering more violation variants. ‘Safe Harbour’ is being attacked more vigorously by the lawsuit.

    And, of course, as @Scott points out, Politics is now so saturated with corporate money that it takes a few very brave souls to make any sense out of the noise.

    How about a library lending/photocopying/radio airplay/author society model, where the sites that make money by putting ads around remixes pay a proportion to a fund that all artists, writers etc register with and receive a fee proportional to how their work is remixed? As a writer I get payments for library photocopies through an author’s society, but if someone copies my blog or my commissioned articles and sells ads against them on their blog I don’t get a cut; if YouTube and the ad networks compared the content they place ads against to my corpus and gave me a share, the unknowing infringers get to remix and I get to pay my mortgage…

    YouTube/Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I’d bet that if all of the non-compliant videos were removed from YouTube and they went to an opt-in system requiring pre-approval from the rights-holders, the only videos left would be a few op “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” type videos and YouTube would die a quick death.

    Raben wrote:

    “There IS nothing wrong with it. Its illegal yes, but that’s because amoral laws have been passed. Copyright itself is amoral and needs to be abolished. And once the old fat politicians retired, a new generation will get rid of them – and the previous century will be remembered as the sick and greedy one where the aberration of ‘copyright’ was invented.”

    Invented in the previous century? Copyright was codified in the US Constitution back in 1787: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. If you’re looking for a scapegoat, you might have to go all the way back to James Madison.

    For what it’s worth: the photo is of Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Chicago. A Google Image reverse search didn’t turn up useful info about this exact photo, but it did find a nearly identical photo — perhaps a frame earlier or later on the roll — with a GettyImages watermark. So I searched Getty and found the similar image on their site at http://bit.ly/tV43gD

    It’s a Rights-Managed photo, and the photo credit goes to “American Stock Archive/Getty Images”.

    It’s safe to assume that both photos were shot by the same photographer. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that both photos are protected by copyright. It’s hopeful that the one Getty carries was published and has had its copyright renewed, and is protected by copyright (because otherwise they shouldn’t be licensing it as rights managed)*. But this outtake may not have ever been published, or registered. Hard to know for sure. It doesn’t show up in their archive when I search for similar photos.

    So the hope is that either the photographer died before 1941 and the photo was never published or registered, or that if it was published, registration wasn’t renewed.

    * Plenty of public domain photos are listed as “Rights-Managed” on Getty. For example, here’s a photograph of John Wilkes Booth that you need to properly license from them to use for some reason: http://bit.ly/vdVN2a

    It’s not just the fatcat executives that profit from copyright, it’s the artists themselves. Most of us who are artists are caught in between both sides of the law; we love to copy, remix and share other people’s work, but we want to be compensated for the use of our own creations.

    We make deals with fatcat distributors to get a bigger audience, and pay them a percentage, which they defend fiercely through their legal departments. They naturally cite ethics as a reason to refrain from pirating, hoping that would deter some people.

    If you crash a Jay-Z concert because you love his music, you might not think, hey I just stole $100 out of his pocket, you assume that some nameless corporation is profiting, so it’s fine to stick it to them, and Jay-Z probably isn’t hurting anyway.

    So, yes, Pirating is stealing from the artist, but you are also stealing from a draconian distributor who might also be giving the artist a shabby deal. Another aspect that’s not talked about is that copyright is also meant to protect the integrity of the work from alteration, a political author for example might not want his views edited and republished by someone else, or I might not want a random dance remix of my song be mistaken for the original.

    The problem is that new technologies have made it easier to copy and reuse than anything else. 30 years ago, it was easier to make your own music than to copy and remix someone elses, and the delivery mediums were difficult to access, so there was a natural barrier to copying and reselling.

    Now it takes special software techniques to create lockable content, so the model for media is going to keep changing. Many top name artists have gone to staging live tours again as their main income stream, allowing music to be pirated as a loss-leader advertisement for the concert tour.

    We adapt to changing economic circumstances. It’s not just the “people” vs. “the Man.

    @RickB: Few people want to abolish copyright. It just needs to be changed. Going back to a seven year period with a seven year renewal option will ensure a rich public domain.

    When works can fall into the public domain new business opportunities arise, much as how Penguin books still makes money on works from great writers.

    I also suspect that customers would benefit as more works would be subject to greater competition. For example, who is to say that only Disney can make a financially successful MIckey Mouse cartoon?

    You raise a great point. What is the value of a copyright if those infringing upon it do not understand it; Either by an assumed lack of morality or simple fact that politics might not matter at their age.

    To me the question quickly becomes: Why do we feel the need to infringe on copyrights? It has been suggested that it may be an age issue at the core of it, that growing up in today’s digital world you naturally set other priorities that define your concept of morality and even the importance a commodity such as music or video has in your life and how much you value it.

    I would largely agree with these observations, but what I find even more tantalizing is the seemingly non-justifiable cost associated with infringed-upon goods.

    Assuming you grow up with digital media the physical media probably holds little value to you, yet you’re asked for a substantial amount of money for a commodity that is easy to access for free. Growing up digital also means that any decision you are making can easily be researched, valued and then made a conscious decision on whether it’s worth pursuing.

    The music and movie industry however does not publish what the cost of production genuinely are, why a musician might get millions of dollars, the ad-company another couple millions et cetera. To digitally minded people all they are able to observe is rich people getting richer, those sitting in high-rises not contributing much to the actual art of music or video itself getting massive margins and yet they, the end-user, are supposed to just quietly pay whatever sum they demand their product is worth.

    Even to me this sounds like an odd approach and certainly one that will not sway people to purchase your goods. Justify why a price is what it is, only then you can expect the people to respect your products and goods and only then can you rightfully (morally that is) pursue infringers of your copyright.

    The solution to all this? I don’t know if there is one at this point, but the best chances would be to publicize all the costs associated with for example bringing a piece of music to the market; From inception to production to the stores. Opening up this chain of events and letting their end-users have a say about the value it actually costs (of course there will be much misunderstanding and scrutiny) to get music done and what they’re ultimately being charged for is in my opinion the only way forward.

    Kids these days.

    While I basically agree with your bias I have doubts that people under 25 are much different now than they ever were. How aware of copyright were you at that age? I’m 37, and I can recall a moment in my tenure as a student when I was gobsmacked that photocopying content out of a book had potential copyright ramifications.

    When we were of that age, copyright was not a part of the zeitgeist. Maybe the surprising thing is that despite all the clamor about it now, kids are no more aware of the issues than we were.

    Youtube is this generation’s mixtape. The difference is that Youtube is a business that commercializes mixtapes regardless of the mixtape creator’s intent. The difference between then and now is that we copied with impunity because the scale of distribution was several orders of magnitude lower than now. Fair Use was actually pretty fair.

    I’m not arguing that copyright law is just, reasonable or useful in its current state. We have laws that contradict “normal” behavior, which make them incredibly hard to enforce. I believe this is the essence of your point.

    But we also have middlemen–Youtube and their ilk–who are profiting from content that probably should be protected under Fair Use, but because it’s being used in a for-profit situation falls into a very grey area. As a musician myself, while I don’t have a problem with someone “remixing” my music for their own amusement, I’m not entirely comfortable with the fact that Youtube can commercialize a remix made by a hapless teenager to share with their friends. All ten million of their friends. That’s a lot of potential profit in ad revenue for Youtube that I will never see a share of.

    Should copyright holders be expected to take some kind of moral high ground while middlemen turn a profit? This is why Youtube so aggressively pulls potentially infringing content down–in the current paradigm, Miramax has little choice but to go after the middlemen like a hawk, lest it set a precedent that it’s ok to re-commercialize copyrighted content by anyone who can figure out a way to do so.

    We need two levels of copyright reform: 1) Reasonable, non-renewable term limits on copyrighted content, 2) Fair Use terms that are consistent with real world human behavior. That makes it sound so simple, and it’s not at all. But it’s a start.

    Kids these days! They have no respect for authority. The world is going to hell in a handbasket.

    Come on. This stuff isn’t new. Just because they’re uploading pirated movies as a teenager doesn’t mean they’re going to grow up as copyright-hating goons.

    Piracy is a form of rebellion that’s a rite of passage.

    We are living in the post-intellectual property era. Copyrights as we have known them are dead. When violations are occurring on such a wide scale, enforcement becomes impossible. This is not going to get better. If you are a content creator, you’d better get used to it.

    I think the issue here is so many people want it to be (or think it is) black and white. What is “stealing”? Go look up the literal definition- great you have it, good for you. Black and white. But you’re missing the bigger picture- morality.

    Our legal system isn’t perfect. In fact, many things can be said to be “legal but immoral”. Furthermore, many other things can be said to be “illegal but moral”. Want to base your morals on what a bunch of lawmakers that don’t even live in the real world make? Fine. But I’m not going to, and neither are many others. There in-lies the issue.

    “Stealing”, youtube and how copyrights fit in is really not that black and white at all. If I go into a store, pick up a cd and walk out without paying I consider that stealing, just as most would. But if I go to youtube and listen to a music video I don’t think that’s stealing, sorry. It’s no different (for me, the listener) than hearing it on the radio.

    The uploader? Well, if you buy a cd and I hear it while we’re in the car are you “stealing” by letting me hear it? “No, but..” No buts. It’s just not stealing. So why does it make it stealing to hear it through the computer? They bought it. I don’t “own” it. They’re sharing it.

    Now with that said I do agree there is a point it goes from right to wrong. But you see my point- there is no black and white, it’s a big gray area between right, wrong, legal and morals. Lawmakers don’t live in the real world. The multimillionaires want us to pay, on a relative basis, a large part of our income to buy their stuff. That $20 cd to us may be the difference between paying rent and not. To them it’s nothing though so we should just pay it. We should not hear, see or share anything until we do. They in turn take those millions collected and use their pull on the same lawmakers.

    Here’s an idea for the lawmakers- Stop with the ridiculous laws and use common sense and morals instead, make things affordable to real people and stop making such a joke out of yourselves. Enforce the laws that are worth enforcing and do away with the bs. Maybe then people will care. If you’re going to smack someones hands no matter what they do anyway what reason do they have not to do it?

    Oh, and btw to this whole crowed of “blame it on the kids!”, get your head out of your back end too. I’m not a kid, but right is right and wrong is wrong. Focus on finding the balance of that rather than thinking you know it all.

    /rant 🙂

    Bookpimp: absent any actual proof, I’m going to assert that your friend is either making shit up or relaying made-up shit. The music labels have been complaining for years that youtube’s revenue sharing model doesn’t bring in any substantial amount of money (hence the Vevo deal), and this story requires me to believe that you could somehow make serious money claiming revenue sharing on material that the RIAA/MPAA haven’t already claimed. That, and the fact that the content cartels have a noted habit of telling tall tales about how file sharing somehow funds organized crime and terorism, makes me say: citation needed.

    Welcome to the future. It’s called the Pirate Party, and we already have seats in the European Parliament.

    you may feel a slight sting when you finally realise your outdated ideas and laws are becoming more and more irrelevant as the evolution of human creativity and technology moves forward. That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts. It never helps. You fight through that shit.

    Is “illegal” the correct word to use? These videos aren’t illegal, but infringing. I seem, for some reason, to define these two differently.

    What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth?

    Well, let’s try a simple little “if this goes on…” style SF prediction:

    Some of that generation will discover that they are good at creating material and figure “Hey, I’ll make a career our of this” only to find that as soon as they produce something it gets copied and uploaded on multiple sites and so widely distributed that only a very few people are willing to pay for it. Then they find that they need to have a day job in order to support their hobby of creating new material. And, of course, since they focused on developing the skills necessary to be good at creating such material and there’s no market for such skills since there’s no money in it, the only job they can get is toting bales of hay or something. Then, when they come home each night, completely exhausted from the effort and in no condition to work on their creative stuff, they can look back over their lives and wonder if it really was such a good idea.

    Of course, the vast majority will end up pursuing other career paths and will never question the practice, but will spend a lot of time on-line and elsewhere complaining about how there’s no new stuff coming out and condemning those hay-toting artists for being lazy. Not like great artists of old who would turn out new material at a regular clip.

    Then we’ll get a lot of sociological and psychological studies trying to come up with explanations for why post-2000 artists are so much less productive than their predecessors — changes in parenting style, contaminants in the environment, a loss of racial purity, whatever. This will be discussed by serious pundits and argued over on social media. And none of it will change anything because the economic incentives aren’t there.

    Oh, one good thing that will come out of it: people will stop talking about “massive media companies” because they will have all disappeared. In fact, the notion that you could actually run a business producing original media will become strange and exotic, akin to the bizarre courtship rituals practiced by obscure tribes in the New Guinea highlands, a weird fact known only to historians and anthropologists and trotted out to amaze and entertain people at trivia nights.

    That’s what happens then.

    @Raben

    “Copyright itself is amoral and needs to be abolished.”

    Really? Why would anybody ever bother creating anything if they weren’t going to get paid for it?

    Why would I spend 80 hours a week creating stuff that people are just going to take for free? What will I live on? I’d be better off just working at my local 7-11 and not creating anything at all.

    Copyright exists for a reason (although I’d certainly agree that the terms need altering- it lasts far too long at the moment). In an ideal world- one that wasn’t fuelled by money and debt- I’d be genuinely happy to sit and create all day and give everything away for free. Seriously- I’d be happy to be paid in kudos.

    Until that world arrives, I need to make money to live.

    Technically, humming a song in the subway can be copyright infringement. That’s how stupid the law is.

    The law is created out of protecting content provider instead of understanding the essence of content. It does not work from the beginning but Internet and digital technology bend the law to the extreme and now to the point of breaking down.

    Copyright used to be for 28 years, if you registered the work and if you wanted, a second 28 years but most people didn’t bother. Patents have always been slightly fewer years than copyright, but not by much.

    Today, everything is automatically copyright protected, including this post, for the lifetime of the creator PLUS 70 years. Today, works for hire are copyrighted for 90 years. What principle is present that makes copyright at nearly 100 years wise compared to patent protection of around 20? When the law changed in 1977, Congress effectively retroactively granted full copyright protection for everything created in the previous 56 years — back to 1921. Add 90 years of protection to that and it means that only in this year are things starting to move into the public domain again.

    No wonder everybody ignores the law… the law is an ass.

    Brilliant post Andy!

    Living in Nashville, you can’t help but constantly be stepping into conversations about copyright.

    I always recommend people watch RIP: A Remix Manifesto. The documentary follows Girl Talk, a popular DJ who’s music is entirely mash ups of commercial tracks.

    No matter what side of the copyright fence you’re on, the movie is entertaining and enlightening. Of course, the film is available on YouTube too.

    Funny all these people who think copyright doesn’t matter – Do you look to a future where your cinema shows nothing but home movies and “remixes” of films shot 20 years prior? Do you wait with baited breath where every song you hear is nothing but another remix of the same music that was popular over 20 years ago? How about visual art that is nothing more than jumbled puzzle pieces of stuff that is already familiar?

    The problem with saying to hell with copyright is that you loose the true creatives. Sure, you’ll still have those people who will spend a week making a personal movie but you’ll be hard pressed to see a Pulp Fiction come from that. The same goes for anything else along those lines. The true artists who push society forward that need to eat will simply do something else and we will all suffer for it – even the poor pirate who only has reality TV to steal.

    The laws may be too restrictive today but to say we just need to get rid of all of them sounds like the begining of a modern dark age.

    I see several people on here saying that because the people who own the copyrights for things want too much money for their music, movies, books or whatever else, they are somehow taking advantage of the consumer. There was a time (and maybe I’m showing my age with this) where when someone had something you WANTED and you couldn’t afford it or you disagreed on the value, YOU SIMPLY DIDN’T CONSUME IT. You didn’t pay money and you didn’t steal, you just moved along. The problem today is you have these moronic “Pirates” that are trying to legitimize what essentially comes down to “I want what you’ve made but I don’t want to pay you for it so I’m going to take it and that ‘should’ be okay because I think what you did was great (can’t you cash in my praise and live off that?) – God knows I could never make anything like that as original on my own but I don’t care. I want it so I’m going to take it and you can’t stop me so instead, get back to work on more stuff for me to steal. I really like your work and want more of it. Thanks!”

    Seriously? What crack are you smoking?

    “What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? ”

    Nothing – it’s not inevitable, and will never happen. It’s like asking after Woodstock, “What happens when a generation opposed to government tyranny becomes a majority of the electorate?” The people who make up YouTube posters ARE a minority, and a small one at that. They are also utterly uneducated about nearly everything, particularly copyright law (show me a high school teacher who knows anything about such things, and I’ll show you someone who has already quit because they’re too smart to make a pathetic teacher salary).

    It’s always been so. It will always be so.

    @ Rick B “Funny all these people who think copyright doesn’t matter – Do you look to a future where your cinema shows nothing but home movies and “remixes” of films shot 20 years prior? Do you wait with baited breath where every song you hear is nothing but another remix of the same music that was popular over 20 years ago? How about visual art that is nothing more than jumbled puzzle pieces of stuff that is already familiar?”

    Who is saying that copyright doesn’t matter?

    Even if another song was never made, another movie never made, or any new original art ever created (a ludicrous assumption), it would take a lifetime to view every video ever made, or listen to every song that has been recorded. What should be the price of those works? Let the market decide, not some cartel of owners (not authors) who keep having the law changed to protect their business model.

    Protecting business models is not the reason for copyright. It is to promote the common good by granting a temporary monopoly on an idea.

    I would absolutely use this video in a filmmaking class to show the import of story blocking, editing, and linear vs. non-linear storytelling.

    It actually shocking to think that we can learn about music without paying Mozart’s estate, or physics or calculus without paying Newton’s estate, or anything to Kepler’s estate to learn about astrodynamics, or to JFK’s estate to learn about presidential politics in the early 60’s.

    If you can’t study things without having to pay everyone involved with the subject, then we might as well close down the schools now.

    oh wait, that’s why its an exception to copyright. Along with parody and criticism.

    Clearly there is something wrong with just sharing original material that isn’t significantly altered, But going after cover songs does nothing but stifle aspiring artists. Really though, there’s no logical reason that these don’t expire like patents. So in 3000 years the company that owns the Beatles albums still gets payed every single time somebody wants them? gtfo.

    This will be like marijuana. And it will not be decriminalized. You need to understand, that it doesn’t matter that these people are of voting age. Voters do not write or vote on matters of law. Laws are written by Corporations and voted on by the legislators they have helped get elected.

    Should the same laws not apply to music and video that apply to written text? They are all media examples. When writing an essay etc you are allowed to cite and reference a certain amount of others work AS LONG AS YOU REFERENCE. Would it make life simpler if this was to apply to youtube also?

    My two cents. I’m 16 years old, and while I understand the copyright dos and don’ts and what they mean, my classmates are less acquainted. I cringe. In 7th grade my technology skills class teacher ran a unit on the illegality of music piracy. It worked for those who listened. But most youngsters didn’t and won’t care until they’ve had to work for their own creative lifeblood. Until then my years will blindly click-rally against SOPA and PIPA, brushing intellectual ownership off as another issue mentioned but not considered.

    I have a few clips up on YouTube I’ve ripped that *are* true Fair Use and I say they’re Fair Use and state what their purpose is — for a blog post.

    http://www.youtube.com/user/mikecane2008?feature=mhee#p/u

    Oddly, the one clip that *was* banned by YouTube for Copyright infringement *wasn’t* for a blog post but should have been: A minute or two of Oprah with Jeff Bezos gushing over the Kindle.

    Stuff like this will never stop. It might be private property in the eyes of the court and law, but people see it as our common cultural currency and I personally don’t see anything wrong with clips of things, where as Fair Use, parody, or just to share.

    The German filmmaker who objected to all the Hitler rant parody videos seems to have had to withdraw his objections. And if he didn’t, well, the Hitler vids keep rolling on even if he still protests.

    Mary Branscombe gets it right. GoogleTube willfully allows the videos to remain because they wrap ads around them. With the vast volume of income they receive from advertisers across all of their placements, it’s far easier and profitable to simply wait for a copyright holder to discover the infringement and then notify them for a takedown. Additionally, it’s far more profitable for the IRS and the US Government to let Google collect revenues that are taxable than to force them to police their traffic and possibly reduce it. So, in the end, corporations are still making more money off the artist’s work than the artist.

    Creative Commons licensing through attribution is intended to promote an artist through the sharing of their work with no revenue generated from it. The idea being that there is a value for the artist in being heard or discovered through any means. Once money is paid for something – a CD, admission to a film or a nightclub – then the artist deserves a portion of it. Once a middleman interjects to collect that fee (Spotify, ASCAP, Rhapsody) then the artist loses value.

    Media files should be made self aware so that once they are “sold”, they automatically subtract a portion from the sale price and deposit it into the artist’s online bank account.

    @Mike Cane

    We’re in total agreement here. If I want to watch ‘Downfall’, I’ll rent it, or buy it and then watch it. The parody clips, while technically infringing on copyright, do not actually harm sales in any way- in fact, if anything (assuming for a moment that the freeloaders were taken out of the equation), I would expect sales of ‘Downfall’ to go up.

    The length of copyright is, in my opinion, completely absurd. Nothing needs to remain in copyright for that long. Nothing. Sure, it’d be nice to think that I could create one really great piece of work and never have to work again- but the reality is that 20 years is more than enough time to make your money.

    Just imagine- anybody who wants to can create their own comic book adaptation of Blade Runner. Yes please. I’d love to see all the different takes on that. Naturally, anybody doing so would get 20 years to make their money too.

    There needs to be some kind of copyright control- or people just won’t bother making stuff- but it needs to benefit everybody. Downloaders- call it what you like. Dress it up how you like- you’re stealing. You might not think you are, but you are.

    Admittedly, when you’re stealing 20 year old films and 40 year old songs that have made their money (and then some), I find it a little harder to get worked up about it- in fact, I can see your point of view (even though I still don’t agree with it). But when you download the latest comic books (for example), I can tell you, right now, that you are putting people out of business. Not big corporations- but individual writers and artists who just can’t afford to work on this stuff for nothing.

    @ Mike Cane

    It wasn’t the director who complained, (he actually had praise for the parodies) it was the studio behind ‘Downfall’ that complained.

    Working in copyright in a classical music publishing company for most of my adult life, I track infringements on the Internet with some regularity. My company owns a couple of compositions that get infringed on all the time-most notably Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” If you’ve seen any adventure movie trailer in the last ten years, you know the music. I just had the distinct pleasure of licensing its use in the trailer for the “South Park” movie!

    From my ‘insider’ position, I can tell you that I think the reason people don’t understand that the audio expression of music is something that can be ‘owned’ is because it isn’t in a physical format, like the sheet music, or (as you so aptly pointed out) the recording.

    My favorite way of explaining the concept of intellectual property to the illiterate tribesmen I encounter daily is “Okay, imagine that all the sheet music in the world burned up in a huge bonfire, and then imagine that they threw on all the CDs. You can still hum the music, right? The music still exists, right? Well, that thing you can’t touch, or buy, or break…that is what we own.”

    Not once in this post or in any of the comments is the word appropriation mentioned. Appropriation is fundamental to the creation of art works. YouTube is an excellent space for appropriation artists to operate. I find it amusing that the assumption is that people behaving in the type of copyright infringement cited here (which I would argue is probably more often appropriation) are under the age of 25.

    As an appropriation artist who is well past that age it is obvious to me that the general public has a very narrow definition of copyright and intellectual property. Furthermore it has and largely left out any consideration for appropriation rights. Without appropriation we do not have artists such as Warhol, General Idea, Damien Hirst, and Duchamp (to name just a few of the more commonly known names). New media practices are particularly intertwined with appropriation of existing material and hence we have the abundance of it on YouTube.

    It is easy to dismiss the work found on YouTube as the misguided and irreverent practices of youth. However the appropriation that is happening on the web is more likely a reflection of how the old cultural and social boundaries we have set up are blurring. This is a scary thought for many, but is also exciting. Without it we wouldn’t have the type of compelling mixed media work that many of us so enjoy (the disappearance of a distinction between print and digital publishing via devices such as the iPad as one simple example).

    There is nothing moral or immoral about what is happening. Morals are as abstract and constructed as the idea that we can own an idea. Right and wrong are what we have accepted. Copyright is very dated and largely no longer useful in the age of media convergence. We have to rethink how we look at content and fair use and consider the role of appropriation. Regardless of whatever else is going on, YouTube videos using appropriated content are contributing to a cultural moment, reflecting back at us a shift that will make archaic ideas about intellectual property and copyright a thing to reconsider and, hopefully, reject.

    We can all share books completely legally, but there is no shortage of authors writing new ones.

    The public has a common misconception about copyrights and the much of the “Bad Law” surrounding it.

    Copyrights were originally intended to allow the original creator of intellectual property to have the opportunity to recover the expenses incurred in that creation before that intellectual property became available to the general.

    This protection was intended to end with the life of the one (living human) who created such property. The property would then become public!

    Politicians, Lawyers and their creations – Corporations – have perverted and exploited this protection by “giving” “Fictitious Creations” (corporations) the “right” to own property!

    Corporations never die nor can they be

    “injured” as they have no actual existence!

    The matter of Corporate “property rights” has been expanded by misinterpretation of various court “clip notes”.

    Since Politicians and most Lawyers are dependent on Corporations for most of their revenue this is not likely to be resolved in favor of the public.

    Corporations never die and have “all of eternity” to recover any expanses incurred. Presently most expenses are quickly recovered and the rest is simply price gouging.

    Adam Smith said it best when he taught us that: When a product is sold at a competitive price it discourages competition. Competition compels all parties to sell products at the best price possible to insure a fair profit over the actual cost of products.

    It is only when that price is excessive that government regulation is needed to protect the greed of such businesses!

    “(Maybe “I downloaded but didn’t share” will be the new “I smoked, but didn’t inhale.”)”

    I don’t think so – after all, “I didn’t inhale” is from when I was in college, and I’m 40 now. Marijuana is still illegal, and even though there’s a lot of signs that the prohibition on that is ending, way more people still have their lives destroyed by being arrested for possession than have been wrecked by the copyright goons.

    And the hippies are running shit.

    The problem is that US law is set mostly in the interest of (or just written by) the recently-rebranded 1% (you know, “military-industrial-healthcare-entertainment complex”), who do not give a shit about crimewriter95, postmodern forms of authorship, mashup, or anything except maximizing their profits and inhibiting the ability of their real -or imagined- competitors to make a profit.

    Pot is illegal because a) it’s hard to legalize pleasure, especially when b) there’s so much money to be made from keep it illegal (amnesty for pot possession would probably bankrupt the private prison system).

    Remix is illegal because it doesn’t fit into the business model of people who have the money to pay lobbyists and lawyers.

    When I was 12, back in 1960, I had a tape recorder and was (in retrospect) a criminal. In the ’70’s I read up on copyright laws to see if I could copy a tape (tapes get chewed up too easily) for regular play. I didn’t have to get permission, but decided to try. I was refused by some lawyer speaking legalese.

    None of this is new.

    Copyright was originally good, but even fifty years ago was counter-productive. Let Mickey Mouse be trademarked and give the copyrights back to the originator. Making it impossible to sell the copyright to others would help, in my opinion.

    Ill tell you what happens when these kids get older… They’ll start creating things on their own without using others creations and they’ll start getting pissed when some kid starts stealing their work.

    Once it starts hurting their pocket book, copyright will matter.

    How’s the saying go: If you’re young and not a democrat you have no heart. If you’re old and not a republican you have no brain.”

    Sigh. suppose that it IS difficult to understand that if you create something, in the sense of something original, you own the right to distribute it. And it is easy to misunderstand how content creators get screwed when their creations are co-opted. Putting a disclaimer on your stolen material- well if my car was stolen would I feel better if the thief left a note on the car saying “no crime intended”? Would the police go easy on the thief? Disney and other mega-owners aside, do people understand that artists make a living from their art, and copyright is the legal means of protecting it?

    “6:22 PM

    Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:

    Chris’s definition of copyright is simple, easy to understand, and wrong.

    “Creating the work doesn’t mean you have the copyright. Having the copyright doesn’t mean you created it.”

    Not true, if you create a work, and it is “transfixed in a tangible medium”, (i.e., you write a song, then write out the sheet music, record the audio of a tune; think of a poem, then write it down, etc), you own copyright to that work. REGISTERING copyright is another step that you can take if you so desire to help defend your copyright claim. But the act of registering is not creating the copyright; the copyright exists when you create the work and transfix it in a tangible medium.

    The only place copyright can go is “only the copyright holder can monetize it”.

    The idea that you can stop average people from redistributing content is complete and utter idiocy, and people need to stop wasting time and money on it.

    “Putting a disclaimer on your stolen material- well if my car was stolen would I feel better if the thief left a note on the car saying “no crime intended”?”

    Well there’s no way you can lose that argument with amazing car analogies like these.

    (pro tip: in this analogy, your car is still there in the morning, the so-called thief just owns a matter replicator that created a perfect copy of your car).

    In that world the talented pro artists who create a movement around them would still be able to make cash by concerts, events, services, people who are willing to pay. The rest just does not matter.

    I feel like best pop art is created by talented enthusiasts, not “pro” artists. So it is not a big loss if all works become shared and they cannot sell it as property.

    World cannot become a boring place because of that. Given everything around me boring, i make up fun things myself and then share it for recognition. People add to the world what it is missing and share it. They feel good because of recognition. It is possible to create great art without huge time and money investments (if there is some talent) and cooperate into creative groups for larger projects. The groups with best ideas would become famous and rich anyway.

    @Karl

    I don’t parade my car around town and sell it to 10 different people and then claim that it was stolen….

    The problem with copyright, (as it is currently manipulated, I mean written) is that it allows someone to sell “something” without really selling “something.”

    If a band wants to protect its material, then I suggest it only distribute its material on media that cannnot be copied. I have no problem with bands selling tickets to a concert in a closed arena and not allowing recording equipment into the arena, but the second you blast your music over the “public airways”, game over. Same goes for the movie industry….

    Problem is that the music and movie industries can’t handle the free market forces that would NOT pay to see or hear their creative products, so they need the government to “create” a market for them…Government should not be in the business of helping people protect their stuff. I keep mine locked up. So should artists.

    “Really? Why would anybody ever bother creating anything if they weren’t going to get paid for it?”

    No one said they weren’t going to get paid for it. There are other ways to monetize your creative work than sending lawyers after teenagers making mix tapes.

    And your argument has already been proven to be bunk.

    It takes less than a minute to download an illegal ebook, and about 20 minutes to download the movie adaptation.

    Yet JK Rowling is worth nearly a billion dollars, despite the entire body of her work being written and published in the internet age.

    Yes, the 1% has manipulated copyright for their interests. As part of the 99%, and a creative, I appreciate that any economic value in the work I can create can be passed on to the benefit of both my kids, and my grandkids. Two generations seems pretty fair, as I’m unlikely to personally know any of my great grandkids, and by then, seeing the work go into the pubic domain is fine by me.

    Copyright Laws (US) do make plenty of allowances for Fair Use, and they are meant to equally protect those rights.

    As for it’s so common violations; there are a bazillion stop signs in the world. 50 Gazillion people fail to come to a full stop every day. There aren’t enough cops in the world to police every stop sign. But if one catches you running a stop sign and gives you a ticket, you’re busted. Just ‘cuz it’s common doesn’t make it legal by Law standards. Would you do away with all stop signs? No? Why Not?

    Same goes for copyright. To allow creatives the right to benefit from their own creative efforts is the exact reason the law exists. IF you get caught infringing a work, and you’re outside the allowed realm of fair use, you’re caught, just like the guy that chose to not stop at the stop sign.

    I have a lot of links to info and resources (again, US) here: http://www.enlightphoto.com/views/copyright/legal

    The fact that copyrights last forever (Or that’s just how congress keeps legislating them) seems crazy. I mean, look at Walt Disney, he ripped off some content, and admittedly did a much better job of it than others – see SteamBoat Willey, and now it’s his forever!? If you patent a cancer medicine, you only get to keep it for a limited amount of time – why not the same for content? I have no problem with authors having full ownership for a fixed period, say 20-30 years, but after that, it should be opened up.

    A depressingly few number you mentioned the glowing main point this post brings to light: the state of media consumption and its future.

    Arguing about 20th century laws that can’t even be enforced, let alone modified quickly enough to pertain to the behaviors of today’s consumer is tiresome….isn’t it? Time for me to get exhausted….

    It’s kind of clichéd to compare this to the oh-so-familiar washed up, but experienced, blue collar employee who just can’t keep up with the changing times and finds himself booted pre-retirement and replaced by a younger, more in-touch-with-the-times whippersnapper (who will no doubt be paid less and continue smiling)….but you get the idea.

    All of us here are reading this on our fancy Internet savvy devices, taking time out of our “creative” day to respond with our oh-so-informed opinions…but it tough to deny that the way we interact with each other and the things we create is changing faster than the rules and regulations we try to put in place to maintain order. This may have been the case for us all along, a kind of cat and mouse game. But the rate is exponential. So much so that the number of voters from any given generation will not make a lick of difference.

    We shouldn’t be worried about copyright law and whether or not the youth understand and obey it. Our society is gluttonous. We are a nation of over consumers. Maybe if the youth were actually given the skills and opportunity to create things of their own, instead of practicing rote memorization, taking standardized tests, and stressing out about student loans, we would see that they actually care about their “intellectual property.” Or maybe not…

    Just try and remember what it’s like being a kid. Being an adolescent. Not caring about other people’s things. You can’t expect our youth to raise themselves to understand the ways of the world—especially when their parents are so blatantly bad at doing their part. Youth will always be the adopters of the what’s “next.” By definition, that’s how each generation works.

    This rant, like everyone else’s, is a waste of time. Just try to enjoy your life. I know it’s hard in this over stimulating, and simultaneously empty world we live in. But all we can do is try (right Yoda?).

    [and yes, I LOVE hyphens!]

    Since the GNU GPL was mentioned, I’d like to point out its full name is GNU General Public License. “GPL” stands for General Public License, and this particular GPL is the GNU one. See http://gnu.org/licenses.

    dj.derek used the term “IP” as if it were equivalent to “copyright”, but that is far from the case. “Intellectual property” is used to refer to a dozen unrelated laws that have very little in common, so lumping them together is misleading. In effect, it spreads confusion.

    The first step in educating people about copyright, or raising ethical issues about what copyright law ought to say, is to discourage people from confusing it with other laws. Please join me in denouncing the term “intellectual property” and refusing to use it.

    See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.

    The implication here is that current copyright law is actually made and intended by the current electorate.

    Do you think if we started from a blank slate, and got a popular vote on copyright law tomorrow, it would turn out the way it is now? Most certainly not.

    What happened is that corporations have bought the lawmaking process and corporate interests are making the laws. Not the people.

    The thing that seems most likely to change that is the occupy movement. Once everyone knows that laws are made by corporations – and all our law enforcement agencies are therefore indirectly working for corporations, as they have to enforce the laws – once that is widely known, it will be changed. Something’s got to give, indeed!

    “As for it’s so common violations; there are a bazillion stop signs in the world. 50 Gazillion people fail to come to a full stop every day. There aren’t enough cops in the world to police every stop sign. But if one catches you running a stop sign and gives you a ticket, you’re busted. Just ‘cuz it’s common doesn’t make it legal by Law standards. Would you do away with all stop signs? No? Why Not?” {Gary Crabbe}

    The stop signs are there to help the people who are prepared to accept their guidance. To take them away means you have crashes of ignorance (from people who would have followed the stop sign if it was there and comprehensible) to deal with as well as crashes of recklessness (i.e. the people who know the law and, at least for that particular stop sign, didn’t care).

    Copyright law these days is so complicated that we already have “crashes of ignorance” – in fact these probably exceed the “crashes of recklessness” by an order of magnitude. Remember copyright law alters according to what rules the originating artist decided should apply to their work, whether they’ve sold it to an intermediary, what other changes to the original intention were applied by the intermediary/ies, who’s buying it, when they’re buying it, what purposes they’re buying it for, where they bought it, where they live, whether they’ve got an arrangement with the regional royalties organisation of which the artist and intermediary/ies might approve and how the relevant lawyers interpret the way the above are described on the relevant items of documentation (which in the case of music are often not fully written down anywhere, even in a fully-paid and legal product).

    Most people I know can’t even hold that many conditionals in their head at the same time (especially in a wall of text like the one above!), let alone check whether they’re complying with them at the time they’re doing something that might possibly contravene those principles. A lot of today’s youth have simply given up trying, except when personally-relevant things like qualification grades directly depend on making an attempt (and frequently not even then).

    Simplifying copyright law on its own won’t fix the problem, however. The main trouble is that music (and other intellectual property sales to the general public) has been considered up to now as being sold due to its media or content. Neither is true. What is actually being monetised is the relationship between the customer and the artist and seller. When young people feel a strong connection with the artist that isn’t too badly impaired by their relationship with the intermediary/ies involved, then they are as apt to purchase as anyone else – and do so irrespective of their understanding or lack of same of copyright law. Even if they already pirated the product prior to the relationship reaching that level. The trouble is that said relationship does not exist between the majority of young people and the majority of artists – at which point, no amount of copyright law is going to protect them. Basically, copyright has ceased to be particularly relevant to how young people behave (explaining the research findings of Roberto), but social interaction allows the creative economy to continue functioning after a fashion. I bet if the 500 university students had been asked if they thought it was OK to copy a specific song they all thought was great, most of them would have said downloading it wasn’t OK. Or at least that they should pay for it after downloading.

    A similar concept underlies all other trade, but things like food and housing are never likely to experience the full implications of the fact monetisation rests on customer-seller&originator relationships. Let’s face it, you can’t exactly pirate a loaf of bread or a house (well, not without someone noticing…)

    Back in the 80s, I used to say the very same thing about Marijuana reform and an impending electorate that grew up around its casual use.

    30 years later, I feel somewhat less than prescient.

    (Sigh.) If you do away with copyright, then the megacorps make ALL the money – they won’t have to pay for anything. If they like your book, they’ll make the film without paying you a dime, and use a soundtrack from a band that doesn’t get paid. Youtube is not a charity.

    It’s not just ‘kids’!

    How many emails from companies have you seen with those long legalise headers that attempt to wave company responsibility for anything the author may say? None of those would hold up in court if tested.

    What about all those products with ‘patent pending’ stamped on their base? No patent has been made (too expensive) but the label was added in the hope that any infringement of the IP could be challenged in court. Again, not worth the paper it’s printed on.

    I work as a developer and must add a legal disclaimer to every source file. Again, meaningless.

    It’s not that people don’t understand the law. It’s that complying with the letter of the law in every single case is prohibitively expensive. According to the law, we’re all pirates for copying and pasting text from a website!

    The law has to change. For every successful suit against a ‘pirate’, a thousand more are created.

    Copyright law has been perverted by big companies for purposes of competition, often to ridiculous extremes (e.g. Disney).

    Nor can these companies complain when their IPs are infringed on sites which monetize that infringement!

    It makes me laugh sometimes when people try to play down how big of an issue piracy really is and the total disregard for copyright amongst people today (mainly young people, admittedly). I’m 17 and I can tell you first hand that a large majority of kids my age don’t buy music. EVERYONE downloads music, and not in the legal iTunes sense…

    Some also assume that because they’re paying to go see the band/artist live, it cancels out the fact that they’re stealing their music. Obviously it’s better than nothing but um, no.

    When I tell people my age that I actually buy 100% of my music – unless the band give it away for free – they can’t understand why I would. Why buy something when you can get it for free, and instantly too? I actually used to download all my music from Limewire about 5/6 years ago and only stopped when I realised that a) I would like to pursue a career in the business side of the music industry, and b) how little composers/songwriters really get paid. I don’t necessarily buy my music because of the idea that it’s morally right, but more because I want to support the bands who make the music I love.

    However, in terms of all those cover songs on YouTube… while I understand that it violates copyright, what harm does it really do if the cover artist is not making a profit? I can think of countless times I’ve looked up an artist because I found a YouTube cover of their song. If they’re not selling anything, I can’t see any practical issue.

    At least some people are getting it right. For instance Hasbro and the Brony community. Much of the content created by the brony community would be considered “copyright infringment” from music videos to postings of entire episodes of “My Little Pony: friendship is magic” on youtube. Hasbro could’ve thrown a hissy fit and destroyed everything that made the community great, but instead Hasbro decided to let the community thrive and now many musicians and artists are creating and becoming known. And you know what? Hasbro is making huge profits off of My little pony related merchandise.

    Hasbro Q3 2011 transcirpts

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/300031-hasbro-s-ceo-discusses-q3-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript

    Your quote parallel totally just made my day.

    That aside, this is an interesting perspective. It’s very true that the youth will grow into voting adults. My fiance teaches small children, and he talks often about the generation of kids that don’t remember a time before Facebook. Their brains are being shaped in different ways from ours — how is that going to affect their future views on intellectual property and the concept of “owning” words? It will be interesting to find out.

    This goes back well beyond the current age, you can copy a painting so long as you reference the artist on the back, morally wrong or right Monet or any artist will not make money from it nor will his descendants. What was unacceptable behavior 50 years ago is perfectly acceptable today, so copyright laws will have to change as time moves on.

    the inability of the young to comprehend the meaning of copyright, and their instinctive denial to consider copying the same as stealing, is something that gives hope at least to me.

    I knew I was doing something wrong remixing and reusing stuff all the time back in 99, all the way on to modern day. I just didn’t care because I think copyright is obsolete. It needs to change, everything’s been done. It’s too easy to make something original that looks, sounds, or acts like something else. Look at the patent wars in mobile devices. I found a patent on toast written in 1998. They will let you patent anything, not knowing a thing about technology themselves.

    Sidenote:

    Remember though, you can use 30 seconds of audio legally. MTV does it all the time on their shows, you’ll notice the clips never last long. It’s so they don’t have to pay a dime to the artists or record labels.

    the kids on youtube may not understand about copyright law but they do treat “ideas” as property , you see “drama” all the time if someone uses the same idea, and it is the same if an icon or BG is copied, also some of them use (c) on stuff they put in there description, so they have some idea about what it means.

    that being said i dont see any harm in using copied material in youtube videos, copyright, patent and trademark laws should be used only against people who copy material for profit.

    If YouTube doesn’t want any copyright infringement. . .THEN IT SHOULD NOT ALLOW IT IN ANY WAY!!! No covers, guitar tutorials, music videos or rip offs. If they really wanted to be strict then Justin Bieber (for example) would have never made it big as his cover videos should have been removed.

    Face it, youtube doesn’t care, they just want to make it look like they are doing their part

    Did you know that without all these things, like spearing things in the internet I could never enjoy of good movies or good manga.

    Just because they are made on the other side of the world I don’t have a possibility to buy most of them in English or in Finnish (we have only about 50 different manga translated…) if I couldn’t read it online in English tranlated by a fan.

    So please think of the teenagers, what else you want us to do if you say we are going straight to the trashbin. You want us to rebell in town or just watching tv at home? (for you to know we have only 12 free channels in Finland)

    AND WE DO RESPECT THE MAKER OF THEM!!!!

    We want others to enjoy as well, and want to make it even better by remixing them and so on. But I have not seen any film in Youtube that had been lying about the owner and said that the music was originally their own…

    I have to agree with Kisacandy, who states that without internet those who live in smaller and poorer countries wouldn’t know anything about the world.

    The thing is that in Hungary for example we only have THREE free channels and most of them keep repeating the same movies we have already seen a thousand times. Every now and then some new movies appear but still, there are more old ones. Only a very few American and British TV shows, which are taken for granted in the U.S., appear on our channels. Besides, even if cinemas are available in our smaller towns, too, they don’t play all of the movies which release. It is only in our capital where all the movies can be watched in cinemas however a great amount of people can’t afford to go to the cinema because the price of the ticket is getting higher and higher.

    What I would like to add is that in my personal opinion most of the people who use this “little voodoo charm”, a.k.a. “no copyright infringement intended”, are well aware of the fact that the piece of music or the video they use do not belong to them, moreover I’m pretty sure many of them know what a copyright infringement is. The only thing they aim with their fanmade videos, mixes, etc. is to show their love and adoration. There are many cases when these videos help raise the popularity of their owner or make other people interested in it.

    However, I would like to lay down that my whole comment is about the harmless fanmade videos in connection with TV Shows and movies which can be found on YouTube.

    As a pretty young person I will say that the reason we don’t “get it” is because it seems that if its obvious that nobody is making money off of your songs or images and we are just being creative and hosting it online there shouldn’t be an issue. If I PAY for music and I want to make a video of say, a trip to Disneyland, and use my PURCHASED favorite song to show how happy I was why would an artist object to that? They make so much money off selling the music, concerts and much more why deny a fan the right to use the music that they bought in their own private video? This happened to me on YouTube when I made a video as a gift to a friend showing all of our years since elementary school together and included PURCHASED music that we liked to play in the background. We supported these artists and made them a big part of our lives over the years and to deny me the ability to make a PRIVATE not for profit video with those memories is just greedy. I’m only talking about PRIVATE use here but shared with personal friends and family. If this were some movie that I was charging money for then YES that is different. I hate to sound off about the 99% because for the most part I don’t believe in the whole movement but in this case artists are in that less than 1% who are only relevant if the other 99% of us choose to support them. If you put something out there for sale its crazy to try and police what people do with it in their private lives. I’d have so much respect for any artist or record / production company that said, “look, if you pay for it, you can use it for personal use as much as you want as long as you don’t make money from it”. After all once someone you know hears that wonderful music they might want to buy it too. Its actually good marketing. 🙂

    No, the reason you kids don’t “get it” is because you see copyright as a law that protects the copyright owner from damages.

    Which. It. Isn’t.

    The word isn’t even that hard to understand: “Copyright” is the “right to copy”. He gets the say who gets to copy it and who doesn’t.

    Even in today’s hedonism-based social media culture some creators do not want their creations spread as widely as possible. This may be, and often is, financially motivated, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

    Ignoring the right of a creator to decide who gets to copy his creations is morally indefendable and downright disrespectful.

    But you’ll probably only learn this once you created something of actual artistic or intellectual value.

    Copyright is necessary, and at the same time, I think room needs to be made for common sense. For instance, not every work is actually available for sale. I started looking up copyright law when I came across full-length opera productions on YouTube. I couldn’t find anywhere where certain productions were actually available for purchase. Yet the content is made available on YouTube, likely after having been broadcast live and personally recorded on DVD. Neither the uploader nor the viewers are making a profit, and watching a YouTube video of an opera performance does not compete with the live performance…meaning that no one who can afford a ticket is going to skip going to the opera just because they can watch it on YouTube. So what do you do with that? Technically the LA Opera “owns” the content, and yet that content is merely ancillary to its main source of revenue–ticket sales.

    In my experience (and I came of age right when Napster exploded onto the scene), YouTube has actually made it more, rather than less, likely that I will discover new artists and purchase their music. Now, I might be slower in doing it–as before, you couldn’t really hear an artist fully unless you rushed out and bought the CD (and my friends and I were always talking about what CD we were going to get next). Now, you can save the video to your favorites and listen as you will. Nevertheless, I have found that the availability of content on YouTube has introduced me to artists that I never would have found otherwise.

    I really think the onus is on the artists, record labels, and studios to be ahead of the curve technology wise in creating product that is not uploadable or widely shareable. Apple was able to do this to some extent with their MP4s and ITunes program. Pandora is another alternative, though they should never have provided it for free. That’s where the music industry missed the ball (online newsmedia as well)–they provided free content and relied only on advertising rather than an actual purchase or subscription.

    Cloud services make sense. Less expensive and easily downloadable music from Amazon, ITunes, etc. Actual CDs should be made impossible to upload to a computer, as most everything is available for purchase digitally. I think instead of taking the legal route, corporations need to just go the technological route and curb misuse that way.

    For anything I think it would be easier if licensing perhaps wasn’t so expensive and you do have people who want to see movies on youtube and in my opinion youtube isn’t doing a good job with the movies. The movies on there I notice is that the really good movies you have to pay for and on the other hand the free movies some of them are really crappy and as far as uploading full movies to youtube how exactly would we get permission from its original owner??!?!?!

    Copyright isn’t going to work in the digital age. You can’t enforce it. It should just be dropped – at least for art and media. Perhaps inventions and such can be safeguarded from “criminal use” – but media is an important part of culture; the access of media is important to people. When you deny them the instant freedom to download and view something, that gets under somebody’s skin.

    You can monetize the viewing of material, look at Steam. Video Games were heavily pirated, but Steam has cracked down on video game piracy because it’s made getting games easier. Sure, you pay money now instead of just getting a torrent – but you get a lot of value. It’s actually just as easy, or sometimes, easier to buy a game off Steam as it is to pirate it. People don’t seem to mind purchasing a product somebody produced. They do seem to mind how long it takes to get said media.

    So far, Disney, Warner Bros, etc. haven’t put full-length movies on youtube. They’re stagnating in an age of technological and cultural revolution – because they fear losing control over the “intellectual properties”. As soon as other forms of media can get how Steam is so successful and copy it – copyright infringement will be a thing of the past. If not that, then significantly reduced.

    And as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t morally wrong. It isn’t stealing to share media. It’s how the internet has blossomed. Share source code. Share ideas. Be connected. If it weren’t for this ideology, we wouldn’t be talking about this today. Lawyers and corporations are just too narrow minded – they need to use more current business tactics in order to stay afloat.

    The original fair and reasonable purpose of copyright laws was, clearly, to stop people from using other people’s works for personal gain. It has been taken over by extremely nasty people who have expanded the interpretation of infringement into a “catch-all” turning everybody into criminals and has become completely unreasonable. Common sense does not prevail. It’s guilty until proven innocent. It’s so extreme you can’t take a photograph of a city street without infringing a copyright law as you will probably capture some Brand logo in your foto. You are right, it’s like Prohibition all over again and forced on us by the self same self righteous idiots except worse – cos it’s they who want to be gangsters and threaten us unless we pay up for what? For posting a video clip to share with friends!

    The thing is simple, it’s all about moral, and no, moral isn’t anything “abstract” as someone claimed, it’s pretty much clear and obvious.

    If you’re creating a piece of art that you don’t want people to share and do whatever they wanna do with it even if they bought it and supported you in that way – don’t publish it, OR DO SOMETHING ELSE. If you’re creating an art for the sake of money, and feel some divine right to be paid for that by everyone who in any way “consume” your creation – you’re anything but an artist…you’re just another greedy asshole who sold it’s soul for the money.

    You love doing it? Great, but don’t expect money from it at first place. Want money from your art? That’s also fine, but don’t tell me what to do with it after i buy it from you. It’s not enough money, and you have to eat? Fine, then do something else that will bring you enough money. Just don’t expect people not to share something that they paid for, you can never win.

    Why is this copyright crap not applied to DJ’s for example? If this law is upheld, there would be no dj’s in the world, as they are using someone elses creations and making money from it. Right?! So if a dj can use someones music and make money of it, why can’t i use it on youtube and do the same? hmmm…a problem? Yes, you have a problem. Give me an answer that will justify that, and i will become the biggest fighter for copyrights in the world.

    But why is it that on YouTube, that the majority of videos are taken down from smaller channels, even though the much larger channels constantly perform copywrite infringement. These larger channels get off while the smaller channels get strikes against them severely prohibiting their growth.

    I have been uploading to YouTube and other sites since 2008 with no intent to “infringe” violate another artist’s work or claim ownership of.

    What seems to be the most frustrating factor in doing this (sharing different art work and presenting it with music) is the fact that, You NEVER know what the “RULES” are as YouTube does not seem to be able to determine their own rules….

    OR are they consistent in enforcing such “rules”.

    All I have observed is that they are loosening many songs once blocked yet every once in ahwile, you upload a video using a song and YouTube comes at you like you have just uploaded the unthinkable…

    “strikes”…”warning”…”your channel removed” type messages start flowing in from a song that you had no clue had a “special” rule connected to it.

    Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for fair use for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

    “I’d wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it’s legal already.”

    I think — I’m afraid — those examples you see on youtube are the exception, not the norm.

    most “younger” internet users I know are completely comfortable with not just exposing their private life to corporations but also accepting completely the notion that copyright holders can forbid whatever they want whenever they want and of course could have complete control of all of their content, including stuff they already sold. And if you listen to music the wrong way and end up in jail, well, that’s your fault.

    The one extreme (people who think adding “no copyright intended” to YT videos will protect them) is only part of a generation that’s trying to come to terms with the whole issue. The other part is invisible because they believe that pretty much everything you do with pre-existing material is illegal and will put you in jail. I think neither are a reliable indicator of what future generations of voters will tend towards.

    Sadly.

    I think the real problem with copyright law is the fact that you can’t truly ‘own’ an idea as much as you can a physical object.

    Whilst you can be the first person to create an idea, you can only profit from it if others have no other way of gaining access to it, and once you have distributed it out to someone they can then give it away for free, destroying your business model.

    Maybe a whole re-thinking of the music industry is in order. Rather than trying to sell ideas, which is pretty much fruitless, maybe artists should sell their ability to create ideas, much like scientists.

    Many feel that copyright infringement is not stealing due to the fact that the product can be very simply copied and distributed for free, whilst the owner retains his original copy.

    It is up to businesses to find new ways to create profit, not the consumer.

    IT is not as big a deal as you think…regarding the generation becoming the majority of hte voters. People tend to think differently when thye grow up. Think about it…the Woodstock generation has been the majority of hte voters for over 20 years now. And only now is even marijuana gaining serious ground toward leglization. And likely will not reach that even. Why? Because the vast majority of people at Woodstock have children and careers and are against drugs today.

    IT is not as big a deal as you think…regarding the generation becoming the majority of hte voters. People tend to think differently when thye grow up. Think about it…the Woodstock generation has been the majority of hte voters for over 20 years now. And only now is even marijuana gaining serious ground toward leglization. And likely will not reach that even. Why? Because the vast majority of people at Woodstock have children and careers and are against drugs today.

    IT is not as big a deal as you think…regarding the generation becoming the majority of hte voters. People tend to think differently when thye grow up. Think about it…the Woodstock generation has been the majority of hte voters for over 20 years now. And only now is even marijuana gaining serious ground toward leglization. And likely will not reach that even. Why? Because the vast majority of people at Woodstock have children and careers and are against drugs today.

    Sorry Fman..but that is a load of crap “We want to take things without paying for it…so it is THEIR duty to figure out a way to make money off thei work!” is not going to win you any intelligence points. There is NO way to make money off it as long as people are willing to steal it. Tht has been PROVEN. First, whining kids like you said “We would pay for it if it was digital.” then iTunes came out. And you STILL whined about it, saying it was filled with DRM and that you didn’t want it DRM free so you could share…just so you could do whatever you wanted. So iTunes made it so it was DRM free but has a unique signature on your download, so if it was ever shared, they would know it came from you. This fit your criteria, since if you were telling the truth about not wanting to share, that signature would not matter at all. But you STILL whined, and pirated.

    The bottom line is, you are a cheap bastrd who feels ENTITLED to everything you want, even though you don’t ahve a good enough job to pay for it. In that way, you are sort of like a 5 year old throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of Toys R Us because your mommy won’t buy you a toy.

    As long as people have shown they are willing to steal, there is NO way to profit off it. No matter what they do, you will priate. If you walk into a store and see two bins with identical items right next to each other, and one is labeled FREE and hte other costs ANY amount of money, you are going to take the free one. And on the internet, those bins are right next to each other.

    What ticks me off is that I look on socialblade and look these people up. The type that upload a trailer or something from a movie. And on their socailblade it shows that they are actually getting monetized pay from this and making up to 34k to 350k a year. REALLY? I work hard on my youtube videos that I create and I get shit views and shit revenue in return while these guys steal something that’s not theirs and make a fortune of it. Pisses me off.

    Full albums pass because they are often tuned down half a step. The content ID system needs to scan for albums that have been treated in this way. We will see a dramatic decrease of these albums if that happened.

    When I see the disclaimer ‘no copyright intended’ I just think the uploader is an idiot. It’s semantically cringe inducing.

    The missing word from this dialoque, is a greek word ..Parthenogenesis. It means borned by a virgin. Greeks use this word to describe something impossible, because nothing can be done from zero.

    There is no such a thing as an original idea-project-concept-. Parthenogenesis does not exist.We own everything to everyone. Copyright is made by wallet warriors. Artists can never be stopped. Choose your side.

    I want to get your opinions on this. If you were to make a Wilford Brimley Liberty Medical YouTube poop, and if you monetized the YouTube poop, it wouldn’t hurt to have Liberty Medical place their ads on your video, right? You know, because if Liberty received 45% of your advertising revenue, they’d have no reason to file a copyright complaint against you.

    Copyright is designed to allow intellectual property creators to make a living from their work. How are creators of intellectual property – and this means everything from music to new inventions – supposed to make a living in a culture where theft is considered normal?

    ” You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.”

    FALSE. Cultural norms and values, including what is considered moral, ethical, and deemed legal, can change in either direction.

    Slavery was once considered “commonplace activity” in this country.

    Copyright protects works of original authorship such as text, artwork, photographs, sound recordings, screenplays, music, lyrics, etc.

    If you need to protect your work you will want to register it for copyright. Visit http://copyrightregistry-online-form.com/ and fill out the form on the site. Your work will be registered same day!

    People underestimate kids and teenagers. There’s actually some pretty intelligent kids out there who use YouTube on a daily basis. My daughter is 13 years old and, if I ask her, can tell me exactly what copyright is.

    Some kids KNOW what copyright is, but don’t UNDERSTAND it. Others know and understand – like my child.

    Personally, I think it’s a too strict. Fan-fiction, fan videos etc. are perfectly fine. It’s pretty much promoting whatever the video/story etc. is directed too.

    Copyright needs to be toned down a bit. There’s no need to kick up a fuss because some teenager wrote some story for a fellow YouTuber.

    This is an old thread and perhaps this has been said many times already. I think for the most part youtubers make this disclaimer to let it be known that they are not claiming authorship of the content. Sometimes they will even attribute the author as well. The fact that their unauthorized use of someone else’s intellectual property is also illegal is not even in their lexicon.

    copyright, copyright, copyright – did u people know that every supermarket has to contact every record label to be able to play background music from radio in every store they have? why taxi drivers never have their radio on when servicing a customers? why every dj’s phone bills are huge? i could continue this list forever… well i don’t now, answers are supermarkets need to call labels to avoid copyright infringements, dj’s & taxi drivers also need to call every record label just that they don’t get sued. if i’m listening headphones and someone else hears the music – hurray i just made copyright infringement cause i shared the music – but wait hey, why am i not sued? cause that what it says in the copyrights laws, why djs can play music which they do not own? they got blocked in yt.. why..supermarkets… makes sense right?

    copyright, copyright, copyright the mother of all laws

    just fucking ridiculous

    The problem with copyright law is it’s selective enforcement. Every song and nearly every movie ever made is on Youtube and almost always can be downloaded and viewed.

    It’s a game that everyone in authority over copyright law is playing. When it makes them money or promotes someone like Youtube or the movie industry they look the other way. When they “think” it has cost them a couple of bucks, they then enforce the law.

    It should be shameful to the those who wrote the laws, they are in for their own gain only. Who cares! Infringement is meaningless, youtube did nothing to those who posted infringement materials. Online infringement is a wide spread problems across the world now a day. We are approaching an era where nothing matter. No moral, no principle, and no ownership. It’s sad for those who work so hard to create something and then others just take it for free. So irony, what an impressive society! Everybody’s thought is “why buy when you can get it for free”. Even though it’s wrong, no one cares. How sickening can this be…where is copyright law?

    I’m 24 years old so I feel like I can understand why kids make these cover videos and some make fan made music or lyric videos. I used to get on YouTube when I was around when I was 13 so I can listen to music and sing in the comfort of my own room. I also know firsthand that YouTube wasn’t created for what it’s become. You can make a video of anything you wanted to share. A dance, a song, or even sending a lyric video with everything you want to say. 85% of the population that is dancing to popular song, likes to sing but she’s 15, still in school, and hasn’t grasped the difference between there and their. Back then there was no Vevo and absolutely no advertising. We are post up lyric videos so we can karaoke with our best friend. If we had a CD and we wanted them to be able to hear a song we uploaded It just so we can seem cool that we know this song that doesn’t play on the radio. The internet wasn’t that popular before. Why advertise or even care about this city home-video website when it’s just a bunch a kids and no one else sees it? I honestly think the person at least attempting to show respect and recognition. Back when we were uploading all of these artists songs while still this day there has been no recognition to all the free exposure they received from their fans. If the video doesn’t insult or humiliate the artist the greed of suing to make money off of the people that idolize and love your music. What’s next? We’re not allowed to sing along to songs in the car because we don’t have the ownership rights and technically? If it makes anyone feel like they’re serving justice by subpoenaing a teenager that we all know doesn’t know what is copyright or infringement mean. You’re a hypocritical greedy piece of shit whose career is to make beautiful music for everyone to hear. There would be no money in YouTube and advertisements would be cut since no one’s going to want to post something they can get in trouble for…. It would be the next MySpace washed up from all the advertisements and legal issues. It’s like all the greed in the money these social networks slowly ruin them. I see it from both sides and I think I just can’t bully these kids about this when I find it a bit petty to punish them for laws created other adults not to try to make money off of something you created. Happy new year everyone!

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