Copyright and Balance

I work a lot with copyright at my job.  I work in an academic library with videos, and I'm the person who has to answer questions about when it's legal to show something.  It was a fricking steep learning curve, because I didn't really know much about the ins and outs of copyright law.  (Fuck it, I still don't.  I just knew less before.  Now I know marginally more.)

I guess I took it for granted that copyright law was intended to protect artists and consumers, to protect rights' holders and those who want to use what the rights holder has created (or inherited, as it were).  But I think that balance between the two has shifted incredibly fast and incredibly cruelly since the advent of online media availability.  And I honestly can't see a reason for this shift except for exceptional and incredible greed.

I'm having a hard time making up my mind on this issue.  I firmly believe that DRM is a problem, and I have issues with the iTunes music store and my iPod because of it.  (Oh, to listen to an audiobook rented from my public library on my iPod.  But no.)  And I do think that artists have rights, and that stealing is wrong.  I don't feel comfortable downloading music illegally.  However.  Once I pay for it, shouldn't it be mine, to do with it what I want?  It's not, and people who control copyright are moving very quickly in the direction of restricting heavily what you can and can't do with your music--and I think they're willing to prosecute. 

There is another issue, and it is called "fair use".  It's not a term I really heard before I started working in a library, but basically, under the law, certain things are permitted.  That's why a teacher can show a film to a room full of students, and more murkily, it's why documentary filmmakers can show seconds of other works in their works.  But it's murky because fair use is very case-by-case.  I don't really want to go into the whole "what is fair use?" discussion, but suffice it to say that I think the law is leaning hard on the side of rights holders, making it hard for people to legally use anything in their films.  There's one famous example of a filmmaker being forced to remove 15 seconds of Simpsons footage from his doc--two people in the film were watching TV and that show happened to be on.  I know that the clip meant something in the film, and the filmmaker resented Fox coming at him demanding money for that 15 seconds.  He clipped the Simpsons part out.

It just seems to me that when the law if prohibiting creativity in the name of trying to protect it, we have a problem.  This little rant was mostly brought on by a piece at Boing Boing, about Amazon's new Unbox thing.  It's interesting read, and disheartening too, if you care at all about copyright and DRM and so on.

Comments

[Susan]

Hi! Here's some contact info for a person who does copyright law workshops online. I took one through the Society of American Archivists. It's a very interesting, rapidly morphing area of the law. The course helped with some of the basics. S.N.

This newsletter is prepared by Lesley Ellen Harris, a Copyright Lawyer and Consultant. Lesley is the author of the books Canadian Copyright Law (McGrawHill), Digital Property: Currency of the 21st Century, and Licensing Digital Content (ALA Editions). Lesley may be reached at: http://copyrightlaws.com.