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Copyright, fair use, and unofficial music videos
Calica
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The bad news gone right thread featured a story about copyright and fair use of music, and it reminded me of a friendly argument I had with my dad a while ago.
Lots of people, including me, like to make music videos by taking scenes from their favorite movies/shows/games and setting them to music they like. They then like to post them on YouTube for other people to enjoy. My dad (who has been a writer for most of his career) and I fundamentally disagree on whether this should be allowed under fair use. My position is that people should be able to take bits and pieces of culture - in this case, copyrighted songs and video clips - and remix them into new things, and they should be allowed to share those creations as long as 1) they're not making money from them, and 2) they give credit to the original creators. His position is that, since a music video on YouTube allows people to listen to the song without paying for it, this constitutes copyright infringement, harms the artist, and should be illegal. He likens it to someone taking an article he wrote and posting it, in its entirety, where it could be stolen by anyone, even though it's nominally part of a new work.
On one hand, I do see his point, and I have often used YouTube to listen to music I haven't paid for. On the other, I can't stomach a world where people aren't allowed to do this sort of thing. One of my favorite things about any given fandom is watching the music videos other fans come up with. What's your opinion, thread?
Just to be clear, the question isn't whether fan-made music videos (and similar things) are legal; it's whether they should be, and why or why not.
Lots of people, including me, like to make music videos by taking scenes from their favorite movies/shows/games and setting them to music they like. They then like to post them on YouTube for other people to enjoy. My dad (who has been a writer for most of his career) and I fundamentally disagree on whether this should be allowed under fair use. My position is that people should be able to take bits and pieces of culture - in this case, copyrighted songs and video clips - and remix them into new things, and they should be allowed to share those creations as long as 1) they're not making money from them, and 2) they give credit to the original creators. His position is that, since a music video on YouTube allows people to listen to the song without paying for it, this constitutes copyright infringement, harms the artist, and should be illegal. He likens it to someone taking an article he wrote and posting it, in its entirety, where it could be stolen by anyone, even though it's nominally part of a new work.
On one hand, I do see his point, and I have often used YouTube to listen to music I haven't paid for. On the other, I can't stomach a world where people aren't allowed to do this sort of thing. One of my favorite things about any given fandom is watching the music videos other fans come up with. What's your opinion, thread?
Just to be clear, the question isn't whether fan-made music videos (and similar things) are legal; it's whether they should be, and why or why not.
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It's great, but uh, yeah, I'd have to say it's definitely infringement. Whether or not the person is making money from doing it, they're making sure that *I* don't buy any of these OSTs.
Now, remixes and nightcore and crap? That's fine. But a lot of the stuff posted is just the original songs in their entirety. With video or without, it's still basically a music channel.
Edit: And no, it shouldn't be legal. For the same reasons we have copyright law at all.
There are now millionaires that do nothing but play video games streaming (Pewdiepie being the front-runner), and I myself pay $3 a month to giantbomb.com to watch people play video games.
For now that seems to count as sufficiently altered that most companies go along with it, but there are definitely some question marks.
For instance giantbomb played through http://steamspy.com/app/373390 recently, in it's entirety (on their premium stream only), between 1 week and 1 month after its launch. That game has very linear story beats and only 1 resolution. It also sold very poorly, at least on Steam, at around 4500 copies. Giantbomb premium streams capture about 3-5k viewers immediately, and maybe 3x that afterwards. So roughly 3-4x the ownership-count worth of people saw this entire game for free, with added commentary, goofs and someone else making the decisions for them.
In this case the creators gave their blessings and saw it at as a marketing opportunity, and even recorded a 5 minute bit to be played on the GiantBeastcast.
It's a system that desperately needs to be updated for the modern era and its myriad distribution channels.
Yeah, content creators deserve compensation. Current approach just has massive issues with it.
Yeah, I'm not seeing how putting a new video over an entire song and then uploading it to youtube is any different from just uploading the song itself. The actual work hasn't changed at all and is being provided in it's entirety. It's like if I took a book, added a bunch of illustrations alongside the complete unabridged text and then tried to give that book away as my own creation.
So, how does it need to be "updated"? Frankly, when you consider what people are actually pirating, I tend to see things like copyright length and orphan works to be red herrings.
It's also worth pointing out that for all the complaining you hear about Big Media, the tech industry is just as big. And there's a lot of shit that gets pushed that would benefit the tech industry at the expense of creators as well.
No, because nothing increases cleverness like people trying to get something for nothing. They would find a way around it.
One thing I would like to see are updated guidelines on music royalties on older TV shows. It took a miracle just to get the Wonder Years on DVD, and the set costs $300.
Being "unable to stomach a world" where you can't just use other people's work for free without permission comes across as feeling a bit entitled.
I'm going to mostly bookmark this thread and watch where it goes for a bit, but let me take my first stab by directly answering the OP. I haven't seen you around before @Calica, so welcome!
I think your father is dead wrong, on all counts.
Firstly, his analogy is terrible - we already live in the world he wants you to imagine as a terrible future and by your description he's doing fine.
Secondly: the logic that underpins the argument that a potential lost sale is the same as a real harm to the creator is tortured at best. There's no proof that anyone listening to a song on youtube would instead buy the song (thus making it a lost sale), and there's no accounting in the argument for the promotional value to the artist of a widely available song.
Thirdly, an argument in two parts:
1) Copyright is fundamentally broken and cannot be salvaged without destroying the technology that created the Digital Age. It doesn't matter whether either of you think it should be legal because the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. It should be discarded entirely, and a new system created from scratch that recognizes the realities of the modern era of data copying. The old world is dead, it will never return.
2) Copyright is a promise made between the People and the Artist, and that promise has been broken so blatantly and so radically by powerful Artists and their advocates that it can no longer be supported by the People, and should be ignored as an act of civil disobedience. Today, the Artist gets the ability to wield the physical enforcement power of the State against the People, for his own personal benefit, and the People get nothing in return for placing themselves under that yoke. It can't be tolerated any longer.
The Constitution is clear that copyright is a means to the end of benefiting society in general, which, when combined with the first amendment's free speech guarantee, should lead us to leaning on the side of more art, not less art.
Also, in practice, Youtube already finds a pretty good compromise, in that any video which uses a substantial portion of a song will include a line such as: with all of those being links to places to buy said song.
Cory Doctorow making a good point here, and has mentioned the same in the past:
https://boingboing.net/2012/03/29/user-uploads-to-youtube-hit-on.html
We should not neglect the interests of millions of creators and millions of consumers just for the interests of Big Media alone. PewDiePie has 39 million fans and 10 billion views. He isn't Big Media, but he is important media.
It would be disingenuous to make the argument that no artist has ever even lost a single hypothetical penny because of a remix or unauthorized music video, but that is not enough to merit forbidding said content. Hell, that's a stronger standard than we use for literal life and death decisions.
Again, more art and more cultural participation should be our goal, not less.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
He also seems to be talking more about censorship and worth of seemingly mundane content rather than anything do do with copyright.
If you added illustrations to a book, that would actually be amazing, because you'd be adding new value to an existing work. However, with a book, it would be simple to post the illustrations with notes saying what pages they were meant to go with, so people would have to own the book in order to get the full experience. (Well, unless they had a different printing or format.) The problem with music videos is that while you're doing the same thing - adding new value to existing art - there's no easy way to separate and recombine the video from the audio. At best, your audience has to sync up your video with their audio, which is playing in a different player or possibly a different device altogether, which is always a finicky process, and sometimes requires constant adjustment due to slightly different playback speeds. And if you want to make cuts to the song, there's no way to share that without sharing the actual audio.
Knowing Doctorow, he probably views copyright and censorship as the sides of the same coin.
It also defeats the entire purpose of going, "Hey, I put this thing and that song together; come check it out," because you wouldn't be able to find it by searching [thing] with [song].
Again, you're complaining that you don't get to use someone else's work without their permission and without compensation.
Sometimes, you may just not be able to do something you want to do. It sucks, but it happens.
It's a shame the mediums you're working with don't lend themselves to this sort of thing as well as others might (the book and illustration example), but that doesn't mean you suddenly can just because the workaround is a bit inconvenient.
Heck, there are plenty of people who sell commentary tracks to movies online. Those require syncing their audio with a film the customer already owns. Seems to work well enough for them.
He's a topically prominent journalist and author who has commented a lot on new media, copyright, etc. and has put his money where his mouth is by releasing a lot of his works under Creative Commons licensing.
His website:
http://craphound.com/
Copyright takedowns have been abused reasonably consistently as explicit censorship.
One example: http://www.digitalrev.com/article/gopro-doesn-t-like-their/ODUyNjU2ODc_A
But beyond that, what other word would you use for a government enforced crackdown on expressing unauthorized ideas? The goal of copyright is, absent the excessive regulatory capture that has taken place, more noble than that of only allowed registered journalists to write articles, but it's the same thing. If it weren't for the parody exception, this would be even more obvious, because Disney legbreakers would have fucked up South Park, among others.
I'm not including any direct 1:1 sharing in the above statement, but I am absolutely including stuff like fan fiction, where only government licensed people are allowed to make artistic expressions of certain types.
"Censorship" probably oversells a bit, because traditional censorship is even more harmful and a clearer violation of human rights, but it's a relative close enough to merit a Christmas card.
That said, what should and shouldn't be legal and how people are supported really needs to change.
Under the current system, this post is illegal!
Quote button is infringement arrest icyliquid
The problem with that argument is that there is a vast, vast difference between an idea and an expression of that idea, and copyright only protects the latter.
In many cases, the creator of the song fully supports a derivative work, but it's not his call to make.
Personally, I think that any manipulation, including putting lyrics on the screen, constitutes fair use for music. However, I would not be opposed to having a system scan audio on youtube and if it finds a match, the copyright holder of the original work getting the ad revenue. However, there would have to be a way for content creators/manipulators to appeal automatic decisions in a timely manner.
DMCA takedowns definitely need work. They are legal forms threating legal action and need to be treated as such ; most places don't.
I havent been nearly successful enough for anyone to really use my stuff for....well....anything really. BUT! Its really close to home because in the larger scheme of things, musicians seem to get the rawest deal. Its SO easy to use youtube as a personalized radio and often no way to reimburse the artist involved.
I know a few things:
1. As a musician, there is nothing in my life i'd rather do, than make a living off of music and making music. Its my ultimate dream.
2. Its even MORE impossible than it used to be. There are a myriad of reasons for this, from people not going to see local live shows as much to sell-able media (cds) just not selling like it used to.
3. I dont know nearly enough about copywrite law to make an informed decision about anything regarding legality
4. I know what i feel in my gut -i want someone to credit me for what i created AND if there is money to be made, i deserve part of it.
This is basically what happens already
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en
But my illustrations are meant to go with specific passages. At best, my audience has to continually consult the page number on the picture for their particular edition, which is always a finicky process.
The problem with your argument is my example and your example are no different. You are taking someone else's original copyrighted work in it's entirety and adding your own work on top. If one is ok, so is the other.
No, it's not. For various reasons not worth going into.
Nope. If I provide illustrations for someone else's story with instructions for the end user to do the compositing, that's legal. If I perform the compositing myself, then the resulting work is a derivative work that requires licensing.
It's very much different.
To the extent they are deliberately similar because that is relevant to the artistic point, not really. Maleficent being a good recent example.
Or, more practically, if I wanted to do a modern recreation of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington * using the same characters, but where Mr. Smith ends up failing after being slammed by Super PAC slush money and ends up killing himself to make a point about how naive and unrealistic that portrayal is with respect to modern politics, I might be okay under a parody exception, but there's no chance I could make that case cheaply.
Moreover, I'll still double down and say that is similar to lese majeste or related laws, where you're often technically allowed to make a point, but have to be damn careful how you do it.
....
This is exactly what I am saying dude. Like, you seem to have totally missed the point somehow. I said that taking someone else's music and putting video over it and distributing it is the same as taking someone else's book, putting my illustrations in it and distributing it. The two examples are exactly the same.
The point of my "let the user do the compositing" thing is that this is exactly what Calica was complaining about with the music example and I was pointing out how you can say the exact same thing about illustrations added to a book.
Well yes, because you're using a specific expression of an idea (you even outright state that you want to use the exact same characters.) But the idea of "outsider goes to Washington" has been done many times, in many different ways in many different movies, and there's been nary a peep of copyright issues for that idea.
So, let me bring up a classic PA strip:
That scenario was ludicrous, and would not be covered under copyright. But in reality, what the case was actually about was that Sony used a WoD novel as the source material for Underworld without permission or acknowledgement, which is very much under copyright (and why Sony ultimately settled with White Wolf, giving them a small portion of the royalties and credit.)
So no, it's not about you needing to "be careful" about how you make a point. It's about you don't get to use the work of others to make your point without permission.
Is this an argument that it isn't censorship, or that it is acceptable censorship? Because it sure sounds like the latter.
...and now you know Cory Doctorow.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
(also it doesn't matter because you can't stop it without destroying the modern economy)
It's not censorship. Nobody is saying that you cannot express your idea, just that you cannot use the concrete works of others in doing so without their permission. You can create a completely original screenplay about an outsider going to Washington only to be crushed by the system, and nobody will say boo to it.
Just because you get told that you can't use the work of others without permission doesn't mean that you are being censored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legally_Blonde_2:_Red,_White_&_Blonde
They didn't get sued afaik.