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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

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.

throwaway189262 6y ago
I think the problem runs deeper than that. When music is playing in the background of your zoom call, it's clearly copyright infringement. When you share your screen, it's copyright infringement. When you send a screenshot of random stuff to a co-worker it's infringement. Uploading any of the above to Facebook too. Fonts are copyrighted, so any of the countless pictures of text you see online are infringing When you take a picture in a city, all those little signs and ads are copyrighted. Posting a picture of this is a ton of violations of copyright law. Technology has advanced beyond a point where copyright on images and audio is reasonable at all. When these laws were created, copies were hard to make and deliberate. Put in another way, everything is so easy to replicate that it has zero value, and copyright is attempting to force people to pay for things that aren't worth anything. At a minimum, the law needs to be changed so that the copied works must be "non trivial" and the copying "deliberate". This will make copyright hard to enforce, but it needs to be. You shouldn't be able to copyright a picture of your ass and sue people for sharing it on facebook
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  I think this recent article gives a nice concrete insight with regards to how copyright suddenly turns at odds with working from home: https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2020/07/articles/random-issues-to-consider-as-media-businesses-adapt-to-the-new-world-of-the-virus-music-uses-on-zoom-and-other-platforms-unlicensed-fm-transmitters/ https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2020/07/articles/random-iss... But I think this quote is what it essentially all boils down to: > Are copyright holders going to pursue users for these issues? Likely playing some music during a live virtual happy hour with friends and family is not actionable – and may well not even be a “public” performance. But using music in an online meeting in a commercial setting may not be treated as kindly. This is about liability and the extent to which you can be held liable by someone else. Technically, all of the examples you gave are infringements of copyright. But copyright is ultimately a matter between two private parties. If you didn't ask permission up front, the other party may - and more importantly - may not (!) decide to claim damages. When music plays in the background during your Zoom call, that's technically copyright infringement. Is Geffen going to come after you personally because you had Bing Crosby's White Christmas playing during a family occasion over Zoom or Skype? Hardly. What about Zoom? This is where things get interesting. For all intents and purposes, Zoom basically enables millions of people to play Crossby's song in the background during their social calls. Is Zoom then damaging the commercial interests of Geffen? This is the crux of the matter: depends on which angle you consider the role Zoom is playing. If you consider just 1 case - you and your family members - then Zoom is just a service provider that tends to the infrastructure and makes video calling a possibility. But if you look at millions of cases - millions of people playing music over Zoom - then maybe Zoom isn't a just a service provide: it's a publisher of protected creative content. And it's actively infringing on the rights held by Geffen causing a significant sum of missed income for the record label. This is also exactly why Facebook disallows prohibiting music and music listening on FB Live. Facebook tries to create the perception that is - from a legal point of view - just a service provider that only does the piping and has literally nothing to do with what people post on it's platform. The moment a judge rules "Nah, Zuck, you're a publisher", all bets are off and literally any big record label, movie producer,... can come after Facebook for infringing on copyright simply because anyone and their dog unwittingly shared protected content on the platform. > Put in another way, everything is so easy to replicate that it has zero value, and copyright is attempting to force people to pay for things that aren't worth anything. Hardly. Copyright gives rights holders that possibility, but it doesn't force consumers to pay up by default. The gross majority of pictures, videos and audio isn't valuated at a million dollar price point. Just because you play in a band on Saturday, doesn't make your music on par with The Beatles. Still, that valuation is irrelevant as far as copyright goes: you have the exact same rights as far as protection goes as The Beatles. If someone rips your music from Bandcamp, you can equally decide to sue them. Exactly like what The Beatles would do. In the exact same courtrooms. What makes all the difference is context. For instance, it might be smart to just let others share and publish your songs and not care about the apparent infringement: you just hope that someone important notices your song and offers you a nice deal. That's a big difference with shelling off pirated singles with The Yellow Submarine: The Beatles - or better, the record label holding the rights to their music - are already past that stage and would mind you stealing from their plate. The big problem, as a consumer, is that it's not always very clear what you can and can't do as copyright literally pertains to any creative work, regardless. Creative content sold in a commercial context is, ultimately, just a one facet of a much larger reality where copyright applies. That's what makes it so confusing for the general public: they tend to apply copyright just to commercially sold music and video, whereas it reaches much, much farther.

throwaway189262 6y ago

I think the problem runs deeper than that. When music is playing in the background of your zoom call, it's clearly copyright infringement. When you share your screen, it's copyright infringement. When you send a screenshot of random stuff to a co-worker it's infringement. Uploading any of the above to Facebook too. Fonts are copyrighted, so any of the countless pictures of text you see online are infringing When you take a picture in a city, all those little signs and ads are copyrighted. Posting a picture of this is a ton of violations of copyright law. Technology has advanced beyond a point where copyright on images and audio is reasonable at all. When these laws were created, copies were hard to make and deliberate. Put in another way, everything is so easy to replicate that it has zero value, and copyright is attempting to force people to pay for things that aren't worth anything. At a minimum, the law needs to be changed so that the copied works must be "non trivial" and the copying "deliberate". This will make copyright hard to enforce, but it needs to be. You shouldn't be able to copyright a picture of your ass and sue people for sharing it on facebook

CaptArmchair 6y ago
I think this recent article gives a nice concrete insight with regards to how copyright suddenly turns at odds with working from home: https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2020/07/articles/random-issues-to-consider-as-media-businesses-adapt-to-the-new-world-of-the-virus-music-uses-on-zoom-and-other-platforms-unlicensed-fm-transmitters/ https://www.broadcastlawblog.com/2020/07/articles/random-iss... But I think this quote is what it essentially all boils down to: > Are copyright holders going to pursue users for these issues? Likely playing some music during a live virtual happy hour with friends and family is not actionable – and may well not even be a “public” performance. But using music in an online meeting in a commercial setting may not be treated as kindly. This is about liability and the extent to which you can be held liable by someone else. Technically, all of the examples you gave are infringements of copyright. But copyright is ultimately a matter between two private parties. If you didn't ask permission up front, the other party may - and more importantly - may not (!) decide to claim damages. When music plays in the background during your Zoom call, that's technically copyright infringement. Is Geffen going to come after you personally because you had Bing Crosby's White Christmas playing during a family occasion over Zoom or Skype? Hardly. What about Zoom? This is where things get interesting. For all intents and purposes, Zoom basically enables millions of people to play Crossby's song in the background during their social calls. Is Zoom then damaging the commercial interests of Geffen? This is the crux of the matter: depends on which angle you consider the role Zoom is playing. If you consider just 1 case - you and your family members - then Zoom is just a service provider that tends to the infrastructure and makes video calling a possibility. But if you look at millions of cases - millions of people playing music over Zoom - then maybe Zoom isn't a just a service provide: it's a publisher of protected creative content. And it's actively infringing on the rights held by Geffen causing a significant sum of missed income for the record label. This is also exactly why Facebook disallows prohibiting music and music listening on FB Live. Facebook tries to create the perception that is - from a legal point of view - just a service provider that only does the piping and has literally nothing to do with what people post on it's platform. The moment a judge rules "Nah, Zuck, you're a publisher", all bets are off and literally any big record label, movie producer,... can come after Facebook for infringing on copyright simply because anyone and their dog unwittingly shared protected content on the platform. > Put in another way, everything is so easy to replicate that it has zero value, and copyright is attempting to force people to pay for things that aren't worth anything. Hardly. Copyright gives rights holders that possibility, but it doesn't force consumers to pay up by default. The gross majority of pictures, videos and audio isn't valuated at a million dollar price point. Just because you play in a band on Saturday, doesn't make your music on par with The Beatles. Still, that valuation is irrelevant as far as copyright goes: you have the exact same rights as far as protection goes as The Beatles. If someone rips your music from Bandcamp, you can equally decide to sue them. Exactly like what The Beatles would do. In the exact same courtrooms. What makes all the difference is context. For instance, it might be smart to just let others share and publish your songs and not care about the apparent infringement: you just hope that someone important notices your song and offers you a nice deal. That's a big difference with shelling off pirated singles with The Yellow Submarine: The Beatles - or better, the record label holding the rights to their music - are already past that stage and would mind you stealing from their plate. The big problem, as a consumer, is that it's not always very clear what you can and can't do as copyright literally pertains to any creative work, regardless. Creative content sold in a commercial context is, ultimately, just a one facet of a much larger reality where copyright applies. That's what makes it so confusing for the general public: they tend to apply copyright just to commercially sold music and video, whereas it reaches much, much farther.