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Copyright law needs major reform. Technology has hit the point where you have to make a concerted effort to avoid infringing by accident. Every time a security

Copyright law needs major reform. Technology has hit the point where you have to make a concerted effort to avoid infringing by accident. Every time a security camera picks up music, it's copyright infringement. When your camera records virtually anything man-made, copyright infringement. Probably 90% of photos are infringing copyright. It's totally nuts now that recording devices are everywhere. Copyright on images and audio are just unrealistic. Abolish them, the artists make most of their money in other ways anyway

goodside 6y ago
What kind of security camera “picks up” music unintentionally? In the US at least, you can’t leave surveillance microphones recording in public areas, or anywhere that people might have a conversation without knowing it’s being recorded. That’s illegal in every state, regardless of copyright.
- fingerlocks 6y ago
  Home security & Dash cams. The latter especially struggles with YouTube takedowns due to ambient car music.
  - goodside 6y ago
    To have those running as a security camera recording audio is legally perilous anyway. You’d have to inform car passengers or house guests that you have a microphone running if there’s any chance they might converse without you. The trouble you’d get into for surreptitious recording is a lot worse than a YouTube takedown. And in the ambient music scenario the accidental recording of music isn’t a problem — it’s always been fine to record live music, radio, TV, etc. for your own enjoyment. It’s the non-accidental uploading to YouTube that’s the problem. Copyright doesn’t interfere with using it as a security camera, with or without audio.
    - throwaway189262 6y ago
      Recording audio of passengers and house guests is absolutely fine in most states. I had a dash cam recording audio the entire time I was driving rideshare, many drivers do. And it's not legal to bypass copy protection post DMCA for recording. So in most cases it's not legal to make recordings
      - goodside 6y ago
        If you didn’t post prominent signage in your car about the recording, you were breaking the law. Uber rolled out audio recording in Latin America but had to leave the United States out until they could be sure they’d fully satisfied the requirement to inform passengers. It’s not a small issue. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/20/uber-plans-start-audio-recording-rides-us-safety/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/20/uber-pl...
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Dash cams, any cameras in bars or club, security cams at homes and stoplights. And smart speakers are recording copyrighted music constantly. And you're definitely wrong about recording. Single party consent is legal in most states. There's only a handful with laws against it, everywhere else recording private conversations and even phone calls is totally legal without permission.
  - goodside 6y ago
    That’s only conversations that you’re a part of. Zero-party consent is illegal everywhere. E.g., if you invite people into your home, leave the room, and they continue talking, it’s a illegal to not inform them of the microphone. Recording audio on a security camera in a club is certainly illegal, just as it would be in a restaurant. You can’t record the private conversations of your customers without informing them.
    - throwaway189262 6y ago
      Do you have a source for this? If someone is in your home they're on your property, and generally you can record whatever you want in a single party state. It's not "zero party" if you know there's a recording. AirBnb's do it all the time. There's exceptions for recording naked people and bathrooms, but in most states it's fine otherwise. Recording audio in a business is 100% legal in nearly every state. Most businesses do not give you any "expectation of privacy" outside the restrooms.
      - goodside 6y ago
        > If someone is in your home they're on your property, and generally you can record whatever you want in a single party state. That’s simply not true. They’re called “one-party states” because there has to be one party in the conversation who knows about the recording. Some states are one-party, some are two-party, but there is no such thing as a zero-party state. It is always illegal to record a conversation between two people if both are unaware of the device and believe their conversation is private. The fact that they are in your home, your car (without you), or in your business is irrelevant. You’re confusing laws that apply to video with laws that apply to audio. You can of course record images on a security camera in your home or business (except, as you said, in restrooms, dressing rooms, etc.) Audio is different. Sources on this are easy to Google for. Here’s one in pretty straightforward language from a defense attorney’s website: https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/felony-offense/can-i-record-a-conversation-between-myself-anothe https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...
- justinclift 6y ago
  > you can’t leave surveillance microphones recording in public areas ... Wonder if that means having (say) Samsung TV's running in shop windows is therefore illegal? Sounds like it is.
i-am-curious 6y ago
Except that the instances you listed are not a problem the vast majority of the time. While copyrights and patents are enforceable for any unauthorized use no one would bother until you are rolling in the dough, at which point the laws make perfect sense. That said, I am not arguing that patent law doesn't need reform, especially patents for software, algorithms and math.
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Copyright has become the ultimate tool of selective enforcement, because it's nearly impossible to avoid breaking the law. It's not a problem the majority of the time, just like laws that allow police to detain you for no reason. It becomes a problem when someone decides to arbitrarily target you. There's countless stories about small businesses being targeted. The latest I know of is against streamers. Since everybody is breaking the law music industry uses copyright mafia style. If they think they can get money out of you they send some goons to extort protection money from you, with huge leverage against your previous "crimes". A country with rule of law should not have laws that are impossible to avoid breaking. Such laws are only useful for corruption, a way to enforce "justice" arbitrarily through bribes
kjakm 6y ago
>> Abolish them, the artists make most of their money in other ways anyway And look how great that's working out for them now that an entire year, potentially more of touring has been cancelled. Why don't software companies start giving away their product and instead make their money through t-shirt sales and speaking tours? Music has already been made exponentially less expensive for the consumer (at a massive cost to artists). It seems cruel to take even more away so that someone can use music in their vlog or travel video for free. >> It's totally nuts now that recording devices are everywhere. Maybe instead we should reconsider why we have recording devices everywhere. Music and musicians getting paid is beneficial to society, people recording who's ringing their doorbell and who's walking past their home is detrimental.
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Artists already make virtually nothing from music rights. I've seen royalties of less than $100 for a million plays, so taking away copyright royalties would do basically nothing to hurt artists. It only hurts the recording industry that's become a monopoly which abuses copyright law to hurt artists and consumers alike
  - evgen 6y ago
    Ah, the wonderful logic of 'Spotify screws artists anyway, so lets just take the last few pennies going into their pocket and light them on fire.'
    - throwaway189262 6y ago
      The recording industry is screwing over users and artists alike. What purpose does it serve beyond a profit sucking middleman? With the advent of the internet, recording companies are pointless. You can release your music on a personal website with a few hours of work. There's no longer a need for any distribution on radio, vinyl, CD's. The original purpose of these companies is gone, they exists solely to reap rewards from our crazy copyright laws
  - afarrell 6y ago
CaptArmchair 6y ago
Preface: I absolutely agree on the reform. I can't stress this enough. I've dealt with copyright professionally and had my fair share of discussions with legal experts... It's definitely a rabbit hole, but it's not a rabbit hole you can readily dismiss and replace with something else. Working with copyrighted materials, copyright hampered us, but other times it backed us as well. It really is a double edged sword depending on where you come from... So. I hope to give you a bit of an insight why it's not that easy... At it's core, there are three reasons why copyright - or any law for that matter - is a hard problem: First, describing a complex reality and codifying them in rules that govern society is a hard problem. Either the principles you derive from reality are too generic; or you end up with a law and volumes upon volumes of exceptions, clarifications, and so on. And in between, you always end up with people who feel that the law doesn't include them. Secondly, there's the interpretation of the rules. That happens in court. And depending on the legal system that applies to you, this creates a precedent that may or may not be followed in general. Which is where you end up in the murkiness of legal traditions, customs and so on. Thirdly, as a result, most people have a vague notion of what copyright is... but when you ask them to clarify and apply copyright law to specific cases, they tend have it wrong. For instance: > Every time a security camera picks up music, it's copyright infringement. When your camera records virtually anything man-made, copyright infringement. No, it's not. Copyright doesn't prohibit you from making a copy. It prohibits you from publishing that copy: sharing with or distributing to other people. You're perfectly good to make a recording or photo's with your smartphone, security camera, whatever. But as soon as you hit the "post" or "publish" button and you make your copy available for the wider world, that's copyright infringement. > Probably 90% of photos are infringing copyright. Depends who publishes them and whether they have permission from the original photographer to publish them. Or whether they are the original photographer themselves. If you snap a picture and you publish that on Instagram, you are the original photographer and copyright automatically protects your rights. If some paper or magazine downloads that picture and publishes it on their website without your permission: you can send them an e-mail demanding to take that picture down. And they actually will have to comply with your demand less they want to risk you suing them. If you make a picture of protected materials and you post that on line, well, now you are potentially infringing copyright. Like, if you go to MoMa and you do an Instagram of Andy Warhol. Technically, you published a copy of a creative work which is still under copyright. Or if you publish a 30 second sample from a Walt Disney's Snowwhite on Snapchat: same thing. You could go "Oh! But Andy Warhol is dead and his art is in a museum, and Snowwhite is 80 years old, what's the harm? They are so well known!" You could argue: let's create exceptions for anything that hits a collection display of a museum; or is so well known that it's part of some implicit cultural canon which is foundational to society... ... but then you end up in a massive rabbit hole: how do you establish equal and fair criteria that say "this creative work is protected by copyright; and this isn't?" Which inevitably leads to endless yak shaving and bike shedding discussions (Yes, I've been there professionally. These are unwinable!). > the artists make most of their money in other ways anyway It's the other way around. Artists make their money in other ways today, not because of copyright... but because of technology. When your band gets signed up with a record label, you actually sign away your own copyright. You waive your rights as an author to your material. You basically say to a record label: "In exchange for leveraging your capability to produce, market and distribute millions of copies, I'll agree to 2, 5 or 10% of the revenue of the distribution." That's the deal you signed up for. As an artist, it used to be that you earned nicely when music/video/movies were still distributed through movie theatres or record shops where consumers bought a physical record. You'd pay maybe 15 or 20$ for the album of your favourite band. And you'd listen to that album for hours on end. Digital technology and streaming platforms have completely undercut that model. And the price for content has crashed entirely. Today, you don't pay 15$ for just 20 songs on a single album. You pay 15$ a month to get access to a catalogue of tens of thousands of songs. That's the difference. The biggest issue is that streaming platforms and digital services have taken over distribution of creative content - audio and video - from traditional record labels, movie produces and so on, and have become the new middle men. And it has happened, the artists who signed away their rights see far less in return for their efforts. This is a huge debate in the industry: https://musically.com/2020/05/05/spotify-should-pay-musicians-more-lets-talk-about-how/ https://musically.com/2020/05/05/spotify-should-pay-musician... At the end of the day, copyright isn't going to go anywhere, I'm afraid. After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And that's why modern copyright emerged some 300 years in the first place: Ironically because of the introduction of a new technology. As it happens, with the proliferation of the printing press and movable type, book printers, authors and publishers wanted to put a halt to others piggybacking on the success of selling their materials.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
I suspect none of your examples are factually correct, or even particularly relevant. I'm not aware of any significant trend of suing security camera owners for copyright infractions, for example. Copyright on images and audio is actually how artists make most of their money. Some musicians can play live, but what options do professional photographers have if they want to create work of lasting value? Perhaps artists should move towards the software developer model and produce products that are never actually finished and never really work correctly, so they can spend their professional lives never quite fixing the problems they've created.
- white-flame 6y ago
  > I'm not aware of any significant trend of suing security camera owners for copyright infractions, for example. It doesn't matter if anyone is being sued or in what quantity. Most types of incidental recordings have been declared copyright infringement in some capacity or another, and everything else is selective enforcement.
- ehnto 6y ago
  A lot of copyright claims on online platforms are not actually copyright infringement, but will have all the same repercussions as if they were. That's really the crux of the problem.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  > Copyright on images and audio is actually how artists make most of their money. This might be true for images, but I doubt this is true for music. I would bet that musicians as a whole make most of their money from live performances. Music labels make their money from copyright though.
  - Antip0dean 6y ago
    > I would bet that musicians as a whole make most of their money from live performances. That's certainly been true for artists who are locked into restrictive contracts. Live performances have usually been the main ways for many to make money outside of their recording deals, experiment, and to sell merch.
vertbhrtn 6y ago
Whenever someone says that something needs to change for the greater good, I want to say something snarky. Copyright law is like the orbit of Jupiter - it is the way it is because it's a balance of all involved forces - and the only way to change it is to change those forces.
- danielrpa 6y ago
  It's indeed a balance of forces in a sense. The crushing force of major recording companies vs the small force of millions of artists acting/negotiating independently, meaning that the recording companies get a share proportional to their force. In the past 250 years, the protected copyright duration in the US slowly went from up to 28 years to up to 120 years (!). It's no accident that the last big change was nicknamed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... A reversion in the protection periods to be aligned, let's say, with patent durations would still offer reasonable protection to all parties.
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Those forces are giant monopolies. The best way to initiate copyright reform is probably antitrust. Once these huge conglomerates are broken up there won't be armies of lobbyists advocating insane copyright laws
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You're free to record music, copyright claims only come into play when you republish it. And I doubt your security cameras are open to the internet. I think you should look up actual copyright cases instead of whatever it is you're trying to do now.
GhostVII 6y ago
I don't think those are copyright infringement according to the law, however the way the laws are written in many places has effectively made things like picking up background music in your videos illegal. When the only way online platforms can comply with the law is to have automated systems take down anything with copyrighted music in it, fair use largely disappears on those platforms. So I agree that copyright law needs reform, but there are actually pretty good laws surrounding fair use that protect the examples you provided - the problem is that with the current laws it is almost impossible for platforms to preserve fair use while getting rid of copyright infringement.
_fat_santa 6y ago
I don't think abolishing copyright for Audio and Images is the right way forward, but we do need to overhaul what is considered "fair use" for these mediums.

goodside 6y ago

What kind of security camera “picks up” music unintentionally? In the US at least, you can’t leave surveillance microphones recording in public areas, or anywhere that people might have a conversation without knowing it’s being recorded. That’s illegal in every state, regardless of copyright.

fingerlocks 6y ago
Home security & Dash cams. The latter especially struggles with YouTube takedowns due to ambient car music.
- goodside 6y ago
  To have those running as a security camera recording audio is legally perilous anyway. You’d have to inform car passengers or house guests that you have a microphone running if there’s any chance they might converse without you. The trouble you’d get into for surreptitious recording is a lot worse than a YouTube takedown. And in the ambient music scenario the accidental recording of music isn’t a problem — it’s always been fine to record live music, radio, TV, etc. for your own enjoyment. It’s the non-accidental uploading to YouTube that’s the problem. Copyright doesn’t interfere with using it as a security camera, with or without audio.
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    Recording audio of passengers and house guests is absolutely fine in most states. I had a dash cam recording audio the entire time I was driving rideshare, many drivers do. And it's not legal to bypass copy protection post DMCA for recording. So in most cases it's not legal to make recordings
    - goodside 6y ago
      If you didn’t post prominent signage in your car about the recording, you were breaking the law. Uber rolled out audio recording in Latin America but had to leave the United States out until they could be sure they’d fully satisfied the requirement to inform passengers. It’s not a small issue. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/20/uber-plans-start-audio-recording-rides-us-safety/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/20/uber-pl...
throwaway189262 6y ago
Dash cams, any cameras in bars or club, security cams at homes and stoplights. And smart speakers are recording copyrighted music constantly. And you're definitely wrong about recording. Single party consent is legal in most states. There's only a handful with laws against it, everywhere else recording private conversations and even phone calls is totally legal without permission.
- goodside 6y ago
  That’s only conversations that you’re a part of. Zero-party consent is illegal everywhere. E.g., if you invite people into your home, leave the room, and they continue talking, it’s a illegal to not inform them of the microphone. Recording audio on a security camera in a club is certainly illegal, just as it would be in a restaurant. You can’t record the private conversations of your customers without informing them.
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    Do you have a source for this? If someone is in your home they're on your property, and generally you can record whatever you want in a single party state. It's not "zero party" if you know there's a recording. AirBnb's do it all the time. There's exceptions for recording naked people and bathrooms, but in most states it's fine otherwise. Recording audio in a business is 100% legal in nearly every state. Most businesses do not give you any "expectation of privacy" outside the restrooms.
    - goodside 6y ago
      > If someone is in your home they're on your property, and generally you can record whatever you want in a single party state. That’s simply not true. They’re called “one-party states” because there has to be one party in the conversation who knows about the recording. Some states are one-party, some are two-party, but there is no such thing as a zero-party state. It is always illegal to record a conversation between two people if both are unaware of the device and believe their conversation is private. The fact that they are in your home, your car (without you), or in your business is irrelevant. You’re confusing laws that apply to video with laws that apply to audio. You can of course record images on a security camera in your home or business (except, as you said, in restrooms, dressing rooms, etc.) Audio is different. Sources on this are easy to Google for. Here’s one in pretty straightforward language from a defense attorney’s website: https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/felony-offense/can-i-record-a-conversation-between-myself-anothe https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...
justinclift 6y ago
> you can’t leave surveillance microphones recording in public areas ... Wonder if that means having (say) Samsung TV's running in shop windows is therefore illegal? Sounds like it is.

i-am-curious 6y ago

Except that the instances you listed are not a problem the vast majority of the time. While copyrights and patents are enforceable for any unauthorized use no one would bother until you are rolling in the dough, at which point the laws make perfect sense. That said, I am not arguing that patent law doesn't need reform, especially patents for software, algorithms and math.

throwaway189262 6y ago
Copyright has become the ultimate tool of selective enforcement, because it's nearly impossible to avoid breaking the law. It's not a problem the majority of the time, just like laws that allow police to detain you for no reason. It becomes a problem when someone decides to arbitrarily target you. There's countless stories about small businesses being targeted. The latest I know of is against streamers. Since everybody is breaking the law music industry uses copyright mafia style. If they think they can get money out of you they send some goons to extort protection money from you, with huge leverage against your previous "crimes". A country with rule of law should not have laws that are impossible to avoid breaking. Such laws are only useful for corruption, a way to enforce "justice" arbitrarily through bribes

kjakm 6y ago

>> Abolish them, the artists make most of their money in other ways anyway And look how great that's working out for them now that an entire year, potentially more of touring has been cancelled. Why don't software companies start giving away their product and instead make their money through t-shirt sales and speaking tours? Music has already been made exponentially less expensive for the consumer (at a massive cost to artists). It seems cruel to take even more away so that someone can use music in their vlog or travel video for free. >> It's totally nuts now that recording devices are everywhere. Maybe instead we should reconsider why we have recording devices everywhere. Music and musicians getting paid is beneficial to society, people recording who's ringing their doorbell and who's walking past their home is detrimental.

throwaway189262 6y ago
Artists already make virtually nothing from music rights. I've seen royalties of less than $100 for a million plays, so taking away copyright royalties would do basically nothing to hurt artists. It only hurts the recording industry that's become a monopoly which abuses copyright law to hurt artists and consumers alike
- evgen 6y ago
  Ah, the wonderful logic of 'Spotify screws artists anyway, so lets just take the last few pennies going into their pocket and light them on fire.'
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    The recording industry is screwing over users and artists alike. What purpose does it serve beyond a profit sucking middleman? With the advent of the internet, recording companies are pointless. You can release your music on a personal website with a few hours of work. There's no longer a need for any distribution on radio, vinyl, CD's. The original purpose of these companies is gone, they exists solely to reap rewards from our crazy copyright laws
- afarrell 6y ago

CaptArmchair 6y ago

Preface: I absolutely agree on the reform. I can't stress this enough. I've dealt with copyright professionally and had my fair share of discussions with legal experts... It's definitely a rabbit hole, but it's not a rabbit hole you can readily dismiss and replace with something else. Working with copyrighted materials, copyright hampered us, but other times it backed us as well. It really is a double edged sword depending on where you come from... So. I hope to give you a bit of an insight why it's not that easy... At it's core, there are three reasons why copyright - or any law for that matter - is a hard problem: First, describing a complex reality and codifying them in rules that govern society is a hard problem. Either the principles you derive from reality are too generic; or you end up with a law and volumes upon volumes of exceptions, clarifications, and so on. And in between, you always end up with people who feel that the law doesn't include them. Secondly, there's the interpretation of the rules. That happens in court. And depending on the legal system that applies to you, this creates a precedent that may or may not be followed in general. Which is where you end up in the murkiness of legal traditions, customs and so on. Thirdly, as a result, most people have a vague notion of what copyright is... but when you ask them to clarify and apply copyright law to specific cases, they tend have it wrong. For instance: > Every time a security camera picks up music, it's copyright infringement. When your camera records virtually anything man-made, copyright infringement. No, it's not. Copyright doesn't prohibit you from making a copy. It prohibits you from publishing that copy: sharing with or distributing to other people. You're perfectly good to make a recording or photo's with your smartphone, security camera, whatever. But as soon as you hit the "post" or "publish" button and you make your copy available for the wider world, that's copyright infringement. > Probably 90% of photos are infringing copyright. Depends who publishes them and whether they have permission from the original photographer to publish them. Or whether they are the original photographer themselves. If you snap a picture and you publish that on Instagram, you are the original photographer and copyright automatically protects your rights. If some paper or magazine downloads that picture and publishes it on their website without your permission: you can send them an e-mail demanding to take that picture down. And they actually will have to comply with your demand less they want to risk you suing them. If you make a picture of protected materials and you post that on line, well, now you are potentially infringing copyright. Like, if you go to MoMa and you do an Instagram of Andy Warhol. Technically, you published a copy of a creative work which is still under copyright. Or if you publish a 30 second sample from a Walt Disney's Snowwhite on Snapchat: same thing. You could go "Oh! But Andy Warhol is dead and his art is in a museum, and Snowwhite is 80 years old, what's the harm? They are so well known!" You could argue: let's create exceptions for anything that hits a collection display of a museum; or is so well known that it's part of some implicit cultural canon which is foundational to society... ... but then you end up in a massive rabbit hole: how do you establish equal and fair criteria that say "this creative work is protected by copyright; and this isn't?" Which inevitably leads to endless yak shaving and bike shedding discussions (Yes, I've been there professionally. These are unwinable!). > the artists make most of their money in other ways anyway It's the other way around. Artists make their money in other ways today, not because of copyright... but because of technology. When your band gets signed up with a record label, you actually sign away your own copyright. You waive your rights as an author to your material. You basically say to a record label: "In exchange for leveraging your capability to produce, market and distribute millions of copies, I'll agree to 2, 5 or 10% of the revenue of the distribution." That's the deal you signed up for. As an artist, it used to be that you earned nicely when music/video/movies were still distributed through movie theatres or record shops where consumers bought a physical record. You'd pay maybe 15 or 20$ for the album of your favourite band. And you'd listen to that album for hours on end. Digital technology and streaming platforms have completely undercut that model. And the price for content has crashed entirely. Today, you don't pay 15$ for just 20 songs on a single album. You pay 15$ a month to get access to a catalogue of tens of thousands of songs. That's the difference. The biggest issue is that streaming platforms and digital services have taken over distribution of creative content - audio and video - from traditional record labels, movie produces and so on, and have become the new middle men. And it has happened, the artists who signed away their rights see far less in return for their efforts. This is a huge debate in the industry: https://musically.com/2020/05/05/spotify-should-pay-musicians-more-lets-talk-about-how/ https://musically.com/2020/05/05/spotify-should-pay-musician... At the end of the day, copyright isn't going to go anywhere, I'm afraid. After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And that's why modern copyright emerged some 300 years in the first place: Ironically because of the introduction of a new technology. As it happens, with the proliferation of the printing press and movable type, book printers, authors and publishers wanted to put a halt to others piggybacking on the success of selling their materials.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

I suspect none of your examples are factually correct, or even particularly relevant. I'm not aware of any significant trend of suing security camera owners for copyright infractions, for example. Copyright on images and audio is actually how artists make most of their money. Some musicians can play live, but what options do professional photographers have if they want to create work of lasting value? Perhaps artists should move towards the software developer model and produce products that are never actually finished and never really work correctly, so they can spend their professional lives never quite fixing the problems they've created.

white-flame 6y ago
> I'm not aware of any significant trend of suing security camera owners for copyright infractions, for example. It doesn't matter if anyone is being sued or in what quantity. Most types of incidental recordings have been declared copyright infringement in some capacity or another, and everything else is selective enforcement.
ehnto 6y ago
A lot of copyright claims on online platforms are not actually copyright infringement, but will have all the same repercussions as if they were. That's really the crux of the problem.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
> Copyright on images and audio is actually how artists make most of their money. This might be true for images, but I doubt this is true for music. I would bet that musicians as a whole make most of their money from live performances. Music labels make their money from copyright though.
- Antip0dean 6y ago
  > I would bet that musicians as a whole make most of their money from live performances. That's certainly been true for artists who are locked into restrictive contracts. Live performances have usually been the main ways for many to make money outside of their recording deals, experiment, and to sell merch.

vertbhrtn 6y ago

Whenever someone says that something needs to change for the greater good, I want to say something snarky. Copyright law is like the orbit of Jupiter - it is the way it is because it's a balance of all involved forces - and the only way to change it is to change those forces.

danielrpa 6y ago
It's indeed a balance of forces in a sense. The crushing force of major recording companies vs the small force of millions of artists acting/negotiating independently, meaning that the recording companies get a share proportional to their force. In the past 250 years, the protected copyright duration in the US slowly went from up to 28 years to up to 120 years (!). It's no accident that the last big change was nicknamed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... A reversion in the protection periods to be aligned, let's say, with patent durations would still offer reasonable protection to all parties.
throwaway189262 6y ago
Those forces are giant monopolies. The best way to initiate copyright reform is probably antitrust. Once these huge conglomerates are broken up there won't be armies of lobbyists advocating insane copyright laws

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

You're free to record music, copyright claims only come into play when you republish it. And I doubt your security cameras are open to the internet. I think you should look up actual copyright cases instead of whatever it is you're trying to do now.

GhostVII 6y ago

I don't think those are copyright infringement according to the law, however the way the laws are written in many places has effectively made things like picking up background music in your videos illegal. When the only way online platforms can comply with the law is to have automated systems take down anything with copyrighted music in it, fair use largely disappears on those platforms. So I agree that copyright law needs reform, but there are actually pretty good laws surrounding fair use that protect the examples you provided - the problem is that with the current laws it is almost impossible for platforms to preserve fair use while getting rid of copyright infringement.

_fat_santa 6y ago

I don't think abolishing copyright for Audio and Images is the right way forward, but we do need to overhaul what is considered "fair use" for these mediums.