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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is incorrect. It's an offence (although civil, not criminal) to make a copy if you don't have correct authorisation. No-one is going to enforce that for the vast majority of copying, but non-enforcement doesn't mean it's not an offence.
That's exactly why I said that copying is not prohibited. Just that makes a huge difference.
First, it's a right which is granted to natural and legal persons. It's entirely up to that legal person to decide whether or not to seek damages because someone violated that right. What that means is that governments and authorities won't stop original authors from seeking damages in a courtroom.
Second, what it doesn't mean is that public authorities prohibits the act of copying. Extreme example: if copying was prohibited by criminal law, judicial authorities could order law enforcement to search your home on the mere suspicion of you having copied a book using pencil and paper.
Moreover, copyright gives the exclusive right to authorize reproduction to the original author. Mind the wording here: It's not the "exclusive right to reproduce", it's the "exclusive right to authorize".
Finally, that right itself isn't an absolute. The Berne treaty itself already provides for exceptions. In practice, you're looking at Fair Use, Fair Dealing and discussions such as the Treshold of Originality which excludes all kinds of contexts from copyright (i.e. security camera footage).
This entire discussion about the impact of technology is, in truth, a discussion about increased legal liability. The proliferation of camera's and mic's in digital devices have created a huge vector for violating copyright. If Facebook decides to disallow music from being played on it's platform, then that's an attempt to reduce that liability. Let's not forget that there's a huge discussion whether Facebook is merely a service provider of infrastructure, or a publisher, as well. And this move fits within that context.
I'm sorry, but absolutes such as "copyright prohibits you from making a copy" muddle exactly this discussion even more.
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
> Fonts are copyrighted, so any of the countless pictures of text you see online are infringing
Font files are subject to copyright as code, but the resultant rendered character is not subject to copyright in the US [0]. This usually means that distributing a document with an embedded font file is a potential copyright violation while distributing pre-rendered text (such as a screenshot) is not.
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.
Depending on where you live, copyright is a part of civil law, not criminal law. Which makes all the difference.
It means that the act of copying itself isn't outlawed. You won't be prosecuted by public authorities for owning a device that makes copies, or having made copies of a work of art to which you don't own the intellectual rights.
Think about it, if you decide to record an episode of Friends on your PVR, didn't you just make a copy? And does that mean that law enforcement could search your house because there's a suspicion you committed a criminal offence?
The Berne convention is literally what it says: the author owns the exclusive right to authorize reproduction. Copyright is about discerning who holds the authority to sanction reproduction. It's not about prohibiting the act of reproduction.
It means that you're free to make a copy of a copyrighted work, and ask permission after the fact. Public authorities don't come into this, unless the rights holder feels that their exclusive rights were violated, and decides to sue you in civil court.
That's what the treaty says. That's correct, and I'm fully aware of that.
First of all, my response is indeed within the context of Fair Use as the example given was background music in a Zoom call.
Second, a big crux is in the part between parentheses which you didn't include:
> (with the possibility that a Contracting State may permit, in certain special cases, reproduction without authorization, provided that the reproduction does not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author; and the possibility that a Contracting State may provide, in the case of sound recordings of musical works, for a right to equitable remuneration)
The Berne Treaty is a framework of first principles. But the legal reality is shaped by how this treaty is then codified in supra-national and national laws. And finally how those laws then get enacted in civil cases within the applicable legal system depending on where you are.
Another example that limits the application of copyright all together is the Treshold of Originality, which of course comes with it's own opposite doctrines of thought:
Finally, Fair Use and Fair Dealing pertains to vast economic domains such as education, press and research. Why does Fair Use exist? Because lawmakers have conceded over time that a strict definition of copyright can't be practically upheld anyway. The application of Fair Use is far from a "confusing" fringe exception in the real world.
Your point would be valid if copyright was implemented straight up by it's first principles with zero exceptions. But that's not how the legal framework has evolved and gets implemented in the real world today.
Hence why I prefaced with "I totally follow you on copyright reform".
Major labels do license deals too (in my experience, they're actually more common now). So the artist retains ownership of the master recording, but the end result is much the same, as it's typically exclusive and the term is long.
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.
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":
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Interesting. Since the main test is "a reasonable expectation of privacy", I'm guessing that the majority of the time recording is still fine. If there's clearly visible cameras it could be assumed you're being recorded, at least on video, so you don't really have an expectation of privacy.
I guess the main problem would be if you hid the recording device
That’s an extremely high bar to clear. If two people are screaming at each other on a street corner with a crowd of onlookers it’s surely fine to record them. But if those same two people are quietly speaking to each other while you stand nearby with a microphone running, you’re violating the Wiretap Act. Same for recording the patrons behind you at a restaurant, the guy on a phone call on the bus, etc.
There are surprising edge cases to this. People have been found in violation of the Wiretap Act for putting microphones on their walls to collect proof that their neighbors are screaming too often. A loud argument in an apartment still has an expectation of privacy even if you can make out the words with your ear to the wall.
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.
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
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-pl...
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