Copyright violations lessen value of creative work

So who should be responsible? YouTube, its users, society or do we blame everyone for the current copyright mess?

The New York Times recently reported on people having their YouTube videos removed because they violated copyright laws. The article specifically focused on people playing copyrighted music in their videos and copyright holders not receiving compensation from YouTube on pages with the work.

"I wouldn't think that my singing somebody else's song would hurt their sales," said Jim Kuhlman, UNC Asheville librarian and chief information officer. "It's not like you're making a recording and then selling it and making a fortune and therefore the vendor's losing a lot."

While copyright violations remain a hot topic in society, the violations show how little people know about what they can and cannot legally put online.

Whenever someone wishes to use a copyrighted work legally without the permission of the copyright holder, they do so by using the fair use doctrine, according to the U.S. Copyright Office.

In school, fair use allows students to use published and copyrighted works for educational purposes. In fact, the U.S. Copyright Office lists several reasons when a use may be considered fair use. These include comment and criticism, news reporting and teaching. In addition, the use must pass a four-part test to determine fair use, and the U.S. Copyright Office points out that the test doesn't always clearly distinguish between fair use and infringement in cases. In other words, it's a complicated mess.

Whenever someone puts a video up on YouTube in which they included copyrighted music, or any other commercial copyright, we need to ask why. Why put up a video of yourself using or playing another person's work?

"You know I think you could make a reasonable argument that what was really going on was that 'I am using this particular song as a means of self-expression,'" Kuhlman said. "And that's the primary focus of it; therefore, my recording this song is fair use because it's really for self-expression."

Of course with self-expression, people need to keep the recording as original as possible. By staying original, people don't compete with the artist who wrote the song.

"It's my self-expression and that's got nothing to do with affecting the sales of the song," Kuhlman said.

But people using copyrighted work illegally didn't start with YouTube. It started a little over a decade ago with Napster.

When Napster first came around, people used it to the point of overkill in getting music for free. Record labels and musicians began to lose money, which eventually forced us into the iTunes era where we pay a small fee per song. And whether or not you like it, such a business practice maintains integrity and standards.

"It's the same violation of copyright to take a program off the air or a song off the air," Kuhlman said in reference to years ago when people recorded on video and cassettes. "And one of the ways that they dealt with it was that some part of what you pay for a blank video tape or cassette tape went to a general copyright fund."

Maybe YouTube and copyright holders could set up a similar system. For instance, people could, through YouTube, pay a small fee in order to use a song in a video. And so that copyright holders will still make money, maybe the small fee only lasts for a year before the user must pay again.

If musicians never received compensation for their work they would simply stop playing. Yes, these people make millions of dollars, but that shouldn't be justification to break the law.

"I would think a fairly nominal fee should take care of it," Kuhlman said.

Fair use can get exceptionally confusing when users post clips of movies and television shows. For example, professors on campus show videos on YouTube every now and then. This certainly falls under fair use because it's an educational purpose. But the people posting them online don't seem to do it for educational purposes. They don't seem to have much purpose at all except to post a video, which, as The New York Times article discussed, creates a problem because YouTube gets advertising dollars on pages where copyrighted work appears.

People need to figure out their priorities for putting something online. Because the Internet brings us closer together, we must take into account the different responsibilities. It would have been acceptable for someone to make a VHS recording from a television show 10 or 15 years ago because it would not appear online.

"Of course, back in that time and in that sort of format, even though it may have been infringement, people who owned it didn't really know that you infringed. And when you infringed, it wouldn't go to everybody on earth," Kuhlman said.

We no longer live in those days and so we must understand why posting something wouldn't be acceptable. But it's not a bad thing.

If people stop posting copyrighted music online, it forces them to become more creative. And if they become more creative and successful on YouTube, maybe a label will pick the person up. Imagine: Someone using their own copyrighted, creative work to make money.

Almost a foreign idea these days, when people do something original they deserve the credit. Covers of songs might be a form of self-expression, but if people never go beyond that, they start to look like a karaoke singer. And think back over the course of history. Aside from the few exceptions, the truly original people line the halls of fame.

Originally published in The Blue Banner, Spring 2009