YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is.

I'm not saying that's how it should be. I'm saying that's how it is. So. How do we fix it? What's up,

world

? It's your boy Tom... Oh, come on! This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream and for this: my new streaming series Nebula that you can watch for free when you join. More on that later. Sold! What's up

world

? It's your boy, TomReacts. Let's see what this moron has to say. A few warnings before we begin: While this video has been tested and verified by a team of legal experts, I am not a lawyer and this is not a substitute for legal advice.

Yes, I can say it, friend. I also talk a lot about YouTube and Google, companies from which I benefit greatly. Google even sponsored an entire series on this channel last year. Accomplice! I'm friends with some YouTube employees. Of course you are. So while all words here are my own, YouTube doesn't even know I'm doing this, know that if you're one of the outliers who's been screwed by YouTube's

copyright

system

... Yes, you probably will. . a different view of parts of this. I hope you still agree with my conclusion though. With all that said, enjoy the show. Let's do it!

Not you. I realize that saying "YouTube's

copyright

system

is not

broken

" is a controversial claim, when every week there seems to be a new headline about how a YouTube creator is being misled by false copyright claims, identity mistaken or deliberate copyright. abuse. I'm not saying the system is perfect. It's far from perfect and I'll talk about that too. But I don't think it's fundamentally

broken

. In May 2019, music label Warner Chappell claimed hundreds of its videos from a YouTube Minecraft player named Oli using YouTube's Content ID system. His post about it angered many people. He had gotten permission to use a song from an independent composer as his intro music, and now a huge corporation was claiming every video and taking all of his earnings!

Popular websites even went so far as to claim that Oli was the victim of outright theft, as 25% of his earnings were directed to Warner Chappell. But the follow-up wasn't seen by as many people: those claims were completely legitimate. Yes, Oli got permission from his composer to use that music, but that composer had sampled another piece of music that was the property of Warner Chappell, without a license. So the permission Oli got was completely useless. Warner Chappell was right and Oli was wrong. So here's how that should have worked in the world that current copyright law was designed for: First, everyone involved would have been part of a large company with a legal team.

The record label's lawyers would have contacted the video company's lawyers and said, "What's going on? They didn't license that." And the video company's lawyers would have said, Oh, I'm sorry. I had no idea. We purchased that license in good faith from a third party. We should both talk to them. At that moment, the third company's lawyers would receive a very worrying phone call. And the whole mess would almost certainly have been settled out of court. Maybe through secret deals, maybe through teams of lawyers sending formal letters to each other. That was the world copyright law was designed for.

Because individuals couldn't make things that would be seen by millions without corporate support, you needed a publisher, a broadcaster, or a big production company, and...those companies had lawyers. The world has moved on and copyright law has not. And the result is that when something like this happens in the world of relatively small, independent online creators, we have to fix what the law needs to do. Music has two main copyrights. First, there is the copyright on the composition itself: all the parts of a work that can be written down, that is, the lyrics and notes. And then secondly, there is copyright on each individual recorded performance.

So I can sit here and play Pachelbel's Canon in D without having to pay any license fees, because Pachelbel died in 1706 and his work is now in the public domain, in the body of works whose copyright has expired. His music is now free for anyone to use without payment and without credit. Which is brilliant! But if I'm not playing it, I'm actually using a modern recording of it... ...then it doesn't matter that the composition is in the public domain: someone has added their own hard work by playing it, along with the work. from a production team to make it sound good, and that recording is under a separate copyright that needs a license to be used in a video like this.

Composer after composer after composer has used Pachelbel's Canon in D to the point that it is now a cliché, and no one has had to pay a dime to Pachelbel or his family in centuries, but that doesn't mean that none of the modern songs based on it are in the public domain. There is new work there. And I can't use those modern songs in this video to demonstrate that, unless I'm really criticizing them. On that point... ♫♫ Memories by Maroon 5 is an infuriating composition that uses the beginning of the Canon melody in D but never resolves it, meaning it has the same stuck-in-your-head effect as The Alfred's jingle Bester.

Demolished man, and I hate it. ♫♫ C U When U Get There by Coolio was a breezy lead single from a third album that obviously worked much better with a naïve global audience than it did with its actual target market. There's a reason it went platinum in New Zealand. ♫♫ And All Together Now by The Farm is... actually a pretty good song despite the incongruity between its theme and style, but it's been completely destroyed by unnecessary, repetitive covers and football chants. Criticism and review! Here we go. That's the kind of thing that's considered "fair use" under US law and "fair dealing" under the much stricter UK law, but I had to censor the album art for those songs, because I wasn't critiquing or reviewing. art, and art is covered by separate copyrights.

In 2009, Andy Baio, then one of the directors of Kickstarter, released an 8-bit chiptune version of the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. He obtained a license from the music publisher. He called him Bloop Guy. Everything was in order. But he settled out of court for more than $30,000 with Jay Maisel, the photographer who took the iconic photograph on the album's original cover. Kind of Bloop's album art was a pixelated version of that album's cover. Baio thought it was fair use. Maisel said no, and Maisel had lawyers. To quote Baio: "The fact that he settled is not an admission of guilt.

This was the least expensive option available." Because copyright lawyers and copyright lawsuits are very, very expensive. Expensive enough that that's not the album cover! That's a stock photo that looks like the album cover, because I'm not taking any chances. I don't know if that pixel art was fair use if someone took your best work, ran it through a pixelation filter, and. Then he sold it, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to think that he has been scammed. The "fair use" line is very confusing and both sides can have very strong and contradictory arguments. That is the job of the courts.

Resolve it if both parties can afford it. And there wasn't even a music video involved! That's a completely different problem. There is something called a "compulsory license" to only sell and perform music, but if you want to publish. A video that goes with someone else's song, even if it's just a video of you performing it on a ukulele in your room, requires a separate sync license, and the copyright holder has the absolute right to say no to that. . YouTube has always had a lot of people uploading covers of songs, singing and performing the music they love and hoping to get attention.

By headhunters, not by lawyers. Many modern pop singers got their start on YouTube, but the legal basis for doing it outside of the YouTube bubble, if you just film yourself and upload it somewhere else online... Well, the basis is that you would have to pay for an expensive license, or they sue you and you lose. Or, more likely, you get a cease and desist letter, pay a little money for the lawyers to leave, and leave the music industry, disillusioned. And you can't get away with changing the lyrics. A parody probably isn't "fair use" unless you directly criticize the original, and even then, it's questionable. 'Weird' Al Yankovic, the most popular parody artist in history, licenses the songs he parodies.

There are many long articles in law journals asking if it's necessary, but... it's better to be safe than sorry, and yes, I wouldn't like your chances if it actually went to court. The worst case scenario when making an unlicensed song parody on YouTube is that you get sued and lose. Because under current copyright law, you are wrong. I'm not saying that's how it should be. I'm saying that's how it is. And most people won't have the money to even begin to defend a case like that. Now, YouTube has a solution for this, Content ID, I'll talk about that later.

And if you're not actually using the original piece, if you're just... reminding the viewer of it, getting close enough in your parody, then you're probably safe. YouTube creators who change only the lyrics of songs to make parodies often say, "Oh, but it's transformative! It's fair use, it's for criticism!" They can't claim copyright on it! They're making a false claim... They're making a false claim!" And... Look, if you take a Katy Perry song and change the lyrics so that it's about something other than criticizing Katy Perry or the song in yeah, probably not fair use. In the same way that big film companies can't take the work of small composers, change the lyrics and put the result in movies without paying and say, "Oh, but it's transformative, it's transformative." fair use." Look, we changed the lyrics." And it may seem unfair that the law requires kids on YouTube to play to more or less the same legal standards as Hollywood studios.

In public opinion, there is definitely a big difference there: people smile at small creators. take big companies' content out of fair use, but never the other way around. And that's why some small-time YouTuber... Hey, they can take a five-second clip from a movie and use it as a cheap punchline! , even if it's not criticism and review... but I'm pretty sure that if a movie studio took a clip from a reaction channel's video and used it in a movie without permission, there would be lawyers lining up to take the case. You're right. This is my content, I got it!

Did you hear, Disney? Remember, tomorrow I will react to the new Star Wars trailer. Maybe there should be a different treatment there. it is not. If you take a photo from a stock image site, or some photographer's Flickr account, and simply copy it into your blog post or company website, you may receive an email from a service called Pixsy. They use automated systems to scan the website, detect people who have used photographs without permission and then send legal letters threatening legal action and demanding payment. And legally they are right. They are using heavy-handed tactics and they are doing it for money; and in some cases, they are threatening someone who has no idea about copyright and who actually thinks the content on the web is free.

There are a lot of threads online with people saying, "Ugh, what...what's going on? I didn't know that, how do I make this go away?" To which the answer is: pay. Photography is an art, and an expensive one, and yes, until we live in the magical post-scarcity space communism of Star Trek, you shouldn't be able to simply copy a photographer's copyrighted work and use it. Except that's what the Internet does. A lot. Hell, I used to. It's not on the internet anymore, for obvious reasons, but when I was younger, I would shamelessly take images and other things from the web and repurpose them, because I knew that almost no one would see them, fewer people would care, and at worst .

The scenario was that I would receive a cease and desist letter. and if that happened, I could shout "censorship" and get some publicity. I've grown up since then, but there's a new wave of kids who have the same philosophy. "No copyright infringement intended," they will say. "I own nothing, all rights belong to the copyright owners", or "this is transformative under fair use", as if simply claiming that this is some magical incantation that will protect lawyers, like waving a cross before the vampires. I want to sue you now! No copyright infringement intended! No copyright infringement intended! András Arató, from Hungary, posed for some archive photographs a few years ago.

He has no rights to yourface or image in any of these photos, signed them as part of the photography contract. And while there is a discussion about personality rights and the ethics of taking a random person's face and using it without context, that's not relevant here. What is relevant is the copyright of that photo. Whether you're criticizing or commenting on the photo itself, whether you're judging the composition, the camera work, or... yes, the incredibly awkward expression that meant he earned the nickname "Hide the Pain Harold" and became one of the most ...well-known figures on the nerdier side of the Internet, so yes, that may well be acceptable.

But if you're just using those images as stock images to highlight anything else, then you better have a license or you'll be exposing yourself to a lot of legal liability. When major publications talk about the "distracted boyfriend" photo, they authorize it. There is no exception, under the law, for: "I put it in my video as a quick joke!" I licensed all those photos from a company called Shutterstock, here's the licensing agreement. I actually got a package of image credits from them because it was cheaper, and I had some of those credits left over, so now enjoy some inexplicable stock photos that I now also have the legal right to use.

Anyway, the photographer who took that original "distracted boyfriend" photo was asked how he felt about his work being used everywhere without permission. And he said: "They are just a group of people who do it in good faith. We are not going to take any action, except in extreme cases in which that good faith does not exist." That's an act of generosity on his part. You would be well within your rights to hire a service like Pixsy, let them play the bad guys and make a lot of money, and if you think that's wrong, then talk to a professional photographer. how they make a living, how much their equipment costs, and how they would feel about it.

As I record this, Pixsy doesn't appear to have automated systems that search YouTube videos for unlicensed images and send legal threats. , but... they could do it quite easily. Maybe those claims could be defended in court with enough money, but in the current system, most people would be forced to walk away, pay a licensing fee, and give up viral video licenses. Companies like Jukin Media are already looking to YouTube for unlicensed use of the video clips they own, and although as a company they are vilified by the creator community, they are, um... they are right. Creators have the right to determine how their work is used, and taking someone else's copyrighted photos or videos and using them commercially, without permission and without criticism, is not fair use under the law.

Even if many other people have already used them. Even if you add a few words on top. Even if you mix them with three other things. Are you 100% sure that you are transforming or critiquing the original, not just using it? And are you 100% sure that a court would agree with you? And just to repeat: I'm not saying that's how it should be. I say: that's right. But those are photos and videos. What about the pop culture bits? In late 2019, Giphy, a GIF aggregation site, briefly removed… Actually, wait. People will complain. I pronounce it /ɡɪf/ because Giphy, the site I'm talking about, pronounces it /ɡɪf/.

And also, the real problem is that they are not actually GIFs, but short video files in other formats. GIF is a really specific descriptor for a data format. Short looping videos aren't GIFs, but apparently they are now! It's like now "emoji" refers to any small image. I'm still in a bad mood about all of this. Don't @ me. Anyway. In late 2019, Giphy briefly removed its many, many GIFs of The Child from The Mandalorian, a creature designed to be so adorable that I can only assume the design came directly from Disney's merchandising team. Those GIFs were removed due to what Giphy described as "confusion over certain content." I assume they received a legal letter from someone at Disney, before Disney realized what a PR disaster it would be to prevent the Internet from having immediate access to Baby Yoda.

But The Guardian's article about that brief removal has a really interesting final line: "GIF images are widely understood to fall under the 'fair use' exception." Notice how it is phrased: "Broadly understood." There has never been a judicial process on this. Are GIFs fair use? In fact, I think that if a company got nervous, like Napster did twenty years ago, and insisted on litigating all the way to court, there's a good chance a judge would say, "No." , GIFs are not a parody, they are not a critique, they are not transformative, they are not fair use "Giphy's entire product, the GIF economy, is based on systematic copyright infringement. "Pay the money, shut it down." In practice, of course, it wouldn't go that far.

Giphy would accept a cease and desist and remove what you were complaining about. It's just easier, because remember, you're not an individual creator or a small site. Giphy has a huge office in New York with lunch service and arcade games for over 100 employees...based on a possibly copyright infringing business model. I'm surprised no major media company has looked at their money and done so. said... "We can sue them for that!" Likewise, it's "widely understood" that uploading video game footage to YouTube is fine, but that's questionable. Maybe if it's something like Minecraft, where there's a lot of original work, It could be.

And also, the licensing agreement you agree to when playing Minecraft allows streaming and most YouTube videos. But if it's just a cutscene video, or follows roughly the same sequence of events that each player would follow, it's a bit like posting a video of you watching a TV show. We've seen companies decide in the past that... they don't actually want videos of their games online. It's very easy to argue that streaming games online affects sales. And the impact on sales is a key component of determining whether something is fair use. Sure, games get some exposure, but exposure doesn't pay the rent.

I didn't buy Untitled Goose Game or experience the beautiful artwork and impeccably timed comedic scenes. I skipped a couple of videos so I could get the jokes and then moved on. I didn't buy Superliminal either. I just watched a video of someone playing it to understand how it works, skipped ahead to see how it ends, and then went on with my life. And I'm glad I did, the game mechanics are clever... but the ending is unsatisfying. Or maybe I just think that because I saw someone else play it. And that someone else, who provided a substitute for the original product, made money from it, either through advertising or streaming donations.

Now, streaming video games can be fair use if you have someone constantly critiquing and reviewing the work while you play it. Not just talking about it, or not just repeating what they say in the game, or greeting the chat, like actively criticizing. Maybe. It would be up to a judge to decide, and no one wants a case like that to go to court, because somehow we have an entire industry based on something that is most likely copyright infringement, but that most video game publishers They are just doing. With. Maybe because they really think it's a good thing, or maybe... because they've seen the reaction that happens when horrible child players are suddenly denied something they think is their right.

Like our friend on the corner. Hey, this is transformative. This is definitely fair use. Would you do this to a Marvel movie? Without a partner. They would sue me for every penny I have. ♪ In the not too distant future, next Sunday AD. ♪ In 1988, KTMA-TV in Minneapolis aired the first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which was basically a reaction channel. A presenter, along with a cast of robot puppets, watched a full-length film, usually an old piece of science fiction. They would be in silhouette, as if they were in the row of movie theater seats in front of you, constantly making jokes about whatever was on the screen.

It's well-written, scripted with joke after joke after joke, although the parodies surrounding the film are often so loaded with in-jokes and character tricks that new viewers who don't know the show and cast can be completely lost. Like I said: it's basically a reaction channel. Time magazine listed Mystery Science Theater as one of the 100 best television shows of all time. Kickstarter brought it back in 2016, and then Netflix brought it back for a couple more seasons. Mystery Science Theater was absolutely critique and review and absolutely transformative. But they still obtained licenses for the films. Everything that was not in the public domain, they negotiated and paid for, because… yes.

Playing someone else's entire movie, just with jokes about it... probably isn't fair use. And even if it was, a studio probably would have sued them at some point anyway, and they would have had to defend the case and spend the money to defend it. Now, there have been YouTube comment channels that have defended lawsuits where fair use and fair dealing seem clear. H3H3, an often controversial comment and reaction channel, won a very expensive lawsuit brought by someone they criticized. They were very happy with the result and shared it with their fans in a way that sums up why their style... isn't for everyone.

Good job, Hila. Good job. The court even noted that his video was transformative because it "responds to and transforms the video from a parody "into material for caustic comments and moment-to-moment ridicule." The judge's decision delves into the balancing factors of fair use, but most The important one is a little further down: "Some reaction videos... intersperse short segments of someone else's work "with criticism and feedback," while others are more like a group viewing session without feedback. "Accordingly, the Court does not rule here that all 'reaction videos' constitute fair use." It is clear that simply playing a video and laughing at it is not fair use.

It is a copyright infringement. The border of fair use lies somewhere in the gray area between effortlessly reacting lazy streamers and deep, insightful critiques... but it's a blurry border, and at this point, questions about it can only be resolved if by case. in an expensive courtroom, because, yes, there is a common thread in all of these examples: under the current system, it often doesn't matter who is really right. Even if the answer to "Is it fair use?" It is clear that it is really about whether one can afford to plead a case. You can be 100% sure it's fair use... but unless you're willing to spend the time and money to fight it in court, it doesn't matter.

Which brings us to how YouTube fixed this. In 2006, YouTube reached an agreement with the big music companies, so that the big players in the industry would not sue this new platform to cease existing. YouTube developed Content ID, which scans every uploaded video and compares it to a huge database of copyrighted content. If there is a match, everything works completely outside the usual copyright system. All of those concerns about sync licenses and publishing rights, all of that law, are effectively replaced with two contracts: one that's private between YouTube and the big media companies, and another that's in the Terms of Service that you agree to when you upload your bedroom.

Vlogger video to YouTube. There is a public list of music tracks found on Content ID, including the music companies' current policies. There is no list of TV shows, movies or other things that are there. Mostly, copyright owners simply put ads on the video. Sometimes they block it completely, but… those policies can change at any time, and if you do something they don't particularly like, that doesn't make you immune to lawsuits or formal takedown notices under a law called the DMCA. YouTube calls them "copyright attacks." These remain an option for copyright owners. What happens is that, with very, very few exceptions, they keep the money from the ads.

Content ID means that video creators, unless they are malicious enough to attract a lot of attention, are generally not sued or taken down by the DMCA. They don't have to negotiate a sync license for cover songs. Now, some companies (mostly record labels) can also manually place Content ID claims on videos that automated systems miss. That is an avenue for abuse. And so is the manual appeals process that must be triggered if automated systems have flagged something that actually is fair use, like a review or a brief incidental snippet of a song that was playing somewhere as you walked by.

TOThe appeals process often works... but if you give a corporation an inch, it will cost you a mile. Fair use and copyright decision making should be left to experienced, trained people who can make nuanced judgments... but from the stories that have emerged over the years, it seems that it is mostly outsourced to the lowest bidder, with enormous decision-making power given to people whose job is simply to review the backlog of appeals as quickly as possible and make quick decisions, knowing that very few people will be able to do anything about the outcome. I've been a victim of that in the past: a TV channel in Thailand took one of my videos, played it without permission on one of their big TV shows, and then put that entire TV show on Content ID.

I got a Content ID hit from them on my original video and it took me a long time to fix it. And in the end I never found out if that channel kept its access to Content ID or not, because, yes, companies that abuse it should have it removed. But of course, if YouTube does that, then they'll be back to the default legal position: takedowns or DMCA lawsuits, either against the creators or against YouTube itself. There are absolutely flaws in Content ID. I'm not saying it's perfect. There are hundreds of cases we could talk about where the system didn't work, and thousands more that never received enough publicity for the world to take notice.

There are so many extreme cases, like people who received copyright claims on white noise, only on the sound of static, because the system was not originally built to deal with white noise. Or people doing in-depth music theory analysis of songs, most likely fair use, but still getting manual Content ID claims. But I don't think Content ID is broken. It is a reasonable interim solution. It works almost all the time. That video of a couple's first dance at a wedding, uploaded by the bride's father: No, copyright law doesn't allow you to upload it to YouTube, unless you have a sync license.

But Content ID simply takes care of it and the video remains active. That excited fan video of the kid in the front row at a concert: No, it's not allowed under copyright law. Content ID takes care of that. The teenager making a video compiling all the romantic subtext between his two favorite characters from a show: No, it's not allowed. It is not criticism or review. But Content ID takes care of it and the video remains active. Without Content ID, those videos would be removed for DMCA copyright strikes, and if anyone were to protest, the next step is a lawsuit.

Maybe for the uploader, but more likely the same thing would happen as all those years ago: big media companies would go to YouTube and say, "You're allowing this to happen. You're making money off of this." "Unfortunately, it is not about what is fair or what is fair. It is about the agreement that YouTube and the big media companies have reached. It is not ideal, but under copyright law, copyright law current copyright on At least, I don't think there's a better option. And I don't want to sound like the grumpy old man who complains about kids these days, but yeah, when I started on YouTube, in 2006, there was no monetization option.

I couldn't make money on the platform at all. And that was okay, because it was a miracle that anyone offered to do the incredibly expensive and difficult job of hosting videos for free! One of the reasons there are no serious competitors. ! YouTube is that running a video hosting site is tremendously expensive: you either have to be a subscription service or one of the largest advertising companies in the world Many people, especially younger ones, have joined YouTube in. Recent years have a different basis for this: they think they have "the right" to upload long compilations of their favorite videos with maybe a few words spoken. between each clip, and make a ton of money off of it, that that's something they have the right to do, and that any copyright owner who complains is censoring them and making false claims...

Yeah. Okay. , Yeah. I'm the grumpy old man who complains about kids. But, under the current copyright system, those children are legally in the wrong. Maybe not morally. That's a different question. But legally they are wrong. There is a huge distance between what the law says and what the world actually does, and that's where most of this tension comes from. So. How do we fix it? We need three things. We need to update copyright law, we need a good small claims court for copyright, and we need to shorten the duration of copyright. So, first: update the law.

This is a great goal, but the entirety of international copyright law needs to be rewritten to reflect what is fair in today's world. Everyone will have a different opinion on what that is. I'm actually quite conservative about it. I'm not convinced that we should vastly expand the definition of fair use, because every bit of freedom given to individual creators also makes it easier for big companies to rip them off. But I'm not going to say where the line should be drawn. It is a work of consultation and conversation, where everyone is at the table, not just the big publishers.

And if a complete rewrite of international law seems unlikely, then it is still possible to push for change. In 1990, an article by a judge influenced the opinion of the American legal community and helped change the most important factor in fair use from whether it was commercial to whether it was transformative. It's very possible that new posts like that could help improve things. The judge's conclusion in that article is also an excellent point: there should be no clear, unambiguous definition of "fair use," what he calls a "bright line standard," unless we have a good standard. And we don't have one.

The fair use boundary has to be confusing because people and creativity are confusing. So if fair use is going to be complicated and if it will inevitably lead to a conflict, let's make the resolution of that conflict quick, fair and accessible. This is already starting to happen in the United States, but badly. The UK has one of the friendliest copyright regimes in the world for individual creators. We have the Intellectual Property Companies Court, which is based primarily here at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and is a specific court for dealing with copyright, patent and trademark cases.

And that court has a small claims section. If you're an individual photographer or video creator, you can do your research, file the right forms, follow the right procedures, and file a claim as a "litigant in person," which is the fancy British term for "without a lawyer." ". I did it because a major company ripped off one of my videos. This court is designed to be friendlier to individuals: the procedures are more relaxed, it's almost like a mediation instead of a court... except, if all negotiations fail, then there's a judge issuing a legal order at the end. It's stressful.

You have to get all the details right. You should probably hire a lawyer if you're going to do it, but if your job is basically reading hundreds. of pages of nerdy details and boil it down into something the world can understand, then yes, it can be done. For example, most people who walk into the administrative building of one of the largest courts in the country, without a lawyer, to try to file a claim... They don't have the best grip on reality, but everyone thinks what to do. And there I was, walking in, without a lawyer, thinking I had a case, thinking I had a grip on reality. .

Statistically, the odds were not in my favor, but I successfully applied. And the company settled with me, they paid me to drop the claim, because they were wrong, and they knew they were wrong, and they knew I could actually take it to a judge in exchange for a little work and a court fee of a little more. of £100. There is a plan to do something like this in the United States. At the time of recording, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Act, the CASE Act, is pending with the government. Unfortunately, it has huge flaws: Using the new small claims route is voluntary for both parties, meaning that if you want to sue a large company, that company can opt out and require you to take the expensive route.

And to quote one explainer: "If the losing party does not comply with the judgment, "the winning party can bring an action in federal court to enforce it." So, if you really want the judgment to be effective, you may need to take the expensive route anyway. In short, all the power is still in the hands of the people who have money Oh, and that means it's now much, much cheaper for big companies to try to assert unfair claims against a big one. number of people: it is like that. -called 'default sentence factory'. The CASE Law is not a solution.

It is a step in the right direction, but it is not very good and may generate more problems international borders. As a separate issue, having a small claims process working in the United States would help address the huge imbalance between the rights of individuals and the rights of large corporations, at least on this platform, on YouTube. That's just in the United States: from there, the world will follow. So, finally: we shorten the duration of the copyright. Under current US law, if a modern work has an individual author, its copyright generally lasts until death plus 70 years. For works by a corporation, it is 95 years from its publication.

There are a lot of complicating factors for older works due to the many, many changes in the law over the decades, but that's a decent rule of thumb. And… that's too long. Singer-songwriter-turned-politician Sonny Bono, the person after whom the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was named: believed that copyright should be forever. That great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather would have been sold to a corporation at some point, and "Shakespeare Intellectual Property Ltd." Now he could collect license fees until eternity. I think that opinion is so ridiculous as to be indefensible. If copyright lasted forever, if nothing ever entered the public domain, then yes, someone would still have the final say on how Shakespeare could be adapted or performed.

Maybe you could do it however you wanted, but only by paying a huge licensing fee. Small community theaters like this? Starting price. Or perhaps someone would want to defend Shakespeare's brand guidelines and insist that all adaptations be entirely faithful to the original text. So, no Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet without permission. There are no 10 things I hate about you without permission. The Lion King? Very close to Hamlet, that. You want to avoid that lawsuit. Referring to "all the world's a stage"? Pay. You need a license. And if you think that's ridiculous, look for any book that quotes lyrics from a copyrighted song, perhaps to introduce a chapter: there will be an acknowledgment somewhere that they have permission from the copyright holder.

The goal of copyright is to allow people to profit from their creative work. I am not against copyright. I rely on copyrights to make a living. But works that belong to the public domain are vital to creativity. And patents only last twenty years! Twenty years before your patent expires, anyone can take your real, physical, real-world invention and produce cheap copies for everyone. If you invent something that literally changes the world, great! You have twenty years to make as much money as you can, and after that, other people who can do it better and cheaper will compete with you.

But writing a song? You have until you're dead! Furthermore, your descendants will receive another seventy years. That's ridiculous! And meanwhile, all the "orphan works", those obscure things where no one can locate the copyright holder anymore to ask for a license... Well, they can't be archived, they can't be copied. Often they cannot be kept at all, simply because no one knows who to ask permission from. The longer the copyright, the worse the problem becomes. And I know, a twenty-year copyright term matching that of patents would never pass muster with modern politics. When there are huge corporations making billions from their copyrighted back catalogue, it is trivial for them to spend a fraction of that amount on lobbying to ensure that the copyright is not reduced.

I would like it to be twenty years, I would campaign for twenty years, but... I also know that that is not going to happen. And to be fair, it seems like the people who made the songs from the '80s and '90s, the songsthat are still heard in this current nostalgia cycle, they should probably be able to make some money off of it. So I would suggest 50 years. It's an easy number, it allows for a couple of nostalgia cycles to occur, and it would mean that right now, the '60s would be common knowledge and the '70s would be on the way.

The decades that are no longer pop culture nostalgia, but history. Pachelbel, Chopin, Beethoven: Dylan, Mitchell, Hendrix and Cline should now be added to them in the public domain. Shakespeare and Shelley (whether Shelley) should be joined by Lee, Heller, Orwell and many others, including works whose owner no one can trace, because after 50 years, it should not be necessary to trace the owner of a work. You should be able to use it. Anyone should be able to make a James Bond movie by now. Because they would probably do a better job. Yes, people who have already won ridiculous amounts of money won't be able to win as much anymore, of course.

But the work of artists, what they are supposed to really care about, can be enjoyed and developed by everyone. And the few artists from back then who are still popular will be absolutely fine and will continue to make money from their world tours, their merchandise, their public appearances and their new albums. And a whole new generation would be exposed to music, writing and art that would otherwise be forgotten. A shorter copyright life would seriously affect perhaps a few hundred people in the world: the people who created a hit song or an amazing book that is still making them money decades later, and who now depend on that money as their livelihood. sole source of income. income.

It's not a lot of people, but yeah, the very, very, very few that fit into that category, it's going to be shit for them. If royalties were their pension plan, I mean, that's bad financial planning, but if they were thinking that the one song they made in '64 would get them through retirement, yeah, that would be a shock. I don't think that's a strong enough argument to justify locking up all that creativity, all that potential for the entire world, for so long. Nobody is going to stop creating because they are only granted 50 or 20 years of copyright.

Composers, authors, filmmakers, choreographers and YouTube creators: we make things because we can. Because we have ideas and we want to show them to the world. Not because we're thinking that our grandchildren might one day have the chance to get a splash of money from some future copyright license. So when I say YouTube's copyright system isn't broken, I mean it. It's a reasonable patch, a piece of duct tape holding together a system that somehow still works, despite being completely inadequate for the modern world. Yes, it goes wrong from time to time. When that happens, it should be resolved quickly and transparently.

But the long-term solution is not to apply another patch, another patch, another patch, another patch. The solution is to fix the system you are trying to fix. Because that's the problem. YouTube's copyright system is not broken. The one in the world is. Very well, that's all. Remember to like, comment... let's go! In Nebula, I have a new series. Here is the trailer. I invited five people to play some games. I don't trust anyone. None of us are trustworthy. …in an environment designed to slowly separate your team. This is real money! But all they knew was that they would be sitting around a table trying to win real money: $10,000.

The atmosphere changed after that robbery. This is a show about trust, loyalty and money. Tom wants chaos. (everyone laughs) Nebula is a home for new, deep, experimental content and collaborations from some educational video creators you may have heard of. And you can get it for free when you join CuriosityStream, a subscription streaming service with thousands of professional documentaries and big-budget nonfiction titles. CuriosityStream costs $2.99 ​​a month or $19.99 a year, includes access to Nebula, including my new series, and you can get a free 30-day trial by visiting Curiositystream.com/tomscott Are you even allowed to mix advertising and content like that? ?

That's a completely different video. So if fair use is going to be complicated, and if some of it is going to inevitably lead to disputes, let's speed up that process... I said disputes. I didn't say FUCKS, I said FUCKS. I said the verb, not the noun. It is an important distinction. Can we try again? …will inevitably lead to disputes, let's make that process quick, fair and accessible. I still said, DIS-whores. …inevitably lead to disputes—inevitably lead to disputes— …inevitably lead to disputes—let's make a— DIS-whores! So if fair use is going to be complicated and if it will inevitably lead to a conflict...

Memories by Maroon 5 is an infuriating composition that uses the beginning of the Canon melody in D but never resolves it, which means that it has the same jam. -Effect of your head like the jiun-gle of... No. It's worth trying. Let's go back! Very good, how are we? Yes, I have it on camera. That's good. Good. Every week, there seems to be a new headline about... There seems to be... We bought that license in good faith from a... What did it say? "Oh, sorry, we had no idea." Let's try it again, here... eight, or is it seven now?

Oh I'm sorry. …mainly based here, in the Royal Courts of Justice. No, I saw you go into that... Yes! Alright! Alright, that's it, I'm out of battery and out of patience. We're done.