[music playing in background] In this video, I am going to review the basics of copyright law .Copyright plays
an important role in our daily lives especially now as much of what we do
relates to digital content. As students, it is important to understand your
rights as a consumer of content as well as a creator of content. I hope this may
help clarify some important concepts. [music ends] A copyright gives exclusive rights to a
person who has created something. It could be a book, a video, a song, a poem a
painting, a photograph -- any literary or artistic work and in some countries it
may even include architectural and other applied arts as well as computer
software. As the copyright owner, a person benefits financially if their work is a
hit. J.K. Rowling, for example, is a very wealthy
author due to the copyright she owns on all of the Harry Potter books. Having
exclusive rights means that the copyright holder can do what they want
with their work. They can make copies of it, get it translated into other
languages, make adaptations to it. For example, allow their books to become a
movie or a play as was the case with Rowling's Potter books. Many creators
grant permission to other people or companies to make adaptations of their
work. It is a way for them to get a greater financial reward from their
intellectual property than they otherwise may have received from the
original work. If you write a poem, for example, you can grant permission to
someone to turn it into a song and reap the financial benefits of it being
available in another adaptation. According to copyright law, there are two
rationales for copyright. The first is utilitarian and encourages
new works and is like a financial incentive to promote the progress of
science and the useful arts. The other is author's rights --- the desire
to ensure that attribution is paid to the creator -- also called "right of
paternity" -- it ensures that the work is kept in its original form without any
distortions or transformations. also called the "right to protect the works
integrity". So if you want to take a Beyoncé song and remix it, you can't do
it without her label's permission. If you did get permission, you would have
to purchase a license to use the song which would be prohibitively expensive!
Using copyrighted music illegally in a YouTube video can result in your video
being muted or blocked and your channel may be penalized. Instead, it would be
much easier to use music that is in the public domain or through a Creative
Commons license. We will learn more about Creative Commons in another
video.A copyright officially exists on a work as soon as the work exists in a
tangible form -- meaning it has to be written down or otherwise recorded by
the creator. It could be a poem on the back of a napkin or a drawing created
using an app on a smartphone. Let's say, however, that the creator -- let's say it's
you -- played a few bars of a new song you were working on on your guitar. You had
the idea for the song but you didn't write it down or record it with your
phone. Your friend heard you play it, memorized it, and wrote it down and
recorded it. It is now their song and they own the copyright even though you had
the idea for the song. Ideas are not protected until they are expressed in
some tangible fashion. Not everything is under copyright. The law states that
after a certain amount of time a copyright expires and then the work
enters what is called the "public domain". Once something is in the public domain,
other creators can take that work, make derivatives of it, make copies of it, and
are using it without any penalty or paying the copyright holder. A work can
enter the public domain in four ways: The copyright expires. The law states that a
copyright can't last forever. The holder of the copyright does not renew their
copyright or otherwise follow the rules to protect their copyright. The work is
not entitled to be protected by copyright law. For example, in the US, that
is any work created by a federal government employee. The creator allows
for the work to automatically be part of the public domain. Creative Commons has a
CC0 button that assists authors in making
their work available to all without a copyright. There are also what are called
exceptions and limitations to copyright. There has to be flexibility for students,
for example, to take snapshots of pages in a textbook to study for an exam or
you need to download a copy of a journal article from the library databases. These
examples fall under "fair use" and it means that you can fairly use a creative
work if it helps you to acquire new knowledge. Here in the US we have what's
called the Four Factor Test. No. 1: The purpose and character of the use-- is
the use for commercial purposes or for an educational purposes?
No. 2: The nature of the copyrighted work. Fair use analysis look at
certain relevant aspects of the work including whether it is fiction or
nonfiction because facts are not protected under copyright. No. 3:
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole. In other words, how much of the work is being
copied? Also, is it "the heart of the work" that's being copied or also called
substantiality? In Harper & Row versus Nation Enterprises, the US Supreme Court
held that the Nation Magazine quoted what the court considered to be a
substantial amount from President Ford's memoir without the permission of the
publisher, Harper & Row. The use was found not to be fair. No. 4: The effect of
the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Does your
use of the work deprive the copyright owner of income that they could have
made if you purchased the work? Here are two examples. In Rogers vs. Koons, a
sculptor used a copyrighted photograph as a basis to create wood sculptures
which had the qualities of the photograp. He made hundreds of thousands
of dollars on the sculptures. The photographer's sued and the sculptor
claimed fair use because the photographer was not going to make
sculptures.The sculptor lost. The court sided with the photographer
stating that a potential market for sculptures of the photograph existed.
Some lawsuits are too ridiculous to even be considered a fair use case. In the
motion picture Se7en, several copyrighted photographs appear in the background of
a scene. The photographer sued the producer of
the film for copyright infringement but the court held that the photographs were
fleeting in nature or obscured or out of focus. So it was called a "de minimis" case --
Latin for "minimal things" and that the court didn't even conduct a fair use
analysis.According to the World Intellectual Property Association,
intellectual property refers to the creations of the mind.
Besides copyrights, patents and trademarks are two other forms of
intellectual property. Patent law covers inventions. It has to be some new
functional development in the field. Patents give the inventor an exclusive
right to the invention for a limited amount of time. Trademarks protect logos,
symbols, and names representing a product or brand. Think about the Nike swoosh or
the brand name Kleenex or even a sound like Homer Simpson's "D'oh" is trademarked
by Fox Television.Trademark law allows companies to protect their brand and its
reputation. [Music begins] It also helps to solidify the brand name in the minds of consumers.
Well, there you have it. The biggest takeaways from this video
are the purpose of copyright, exclusive rights of copyright, the freedom to reuse
without permission anything in the public domain, and the importance of fair
use. Those concepts should give you a good foundation on copyrights and why
they are so important in our daily lives.
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