Copyright In The Media

Every week there are new stories cropping up somewhere on the planet of copyright holders clamping down in some way how people can use their work, or in most cases can't use their work. News organisations are among them. I've noticed something odd here. Well, I say "odd", it's just the usual hypocrisy at work.

They demand they should be paid to be listed in search engines etc even though the world has changed and search engines draw visitors. They demand that "fair use" shouldn't exist, and that anyone who uses their stuff without permission and payment is a theif who should be prosecuted; preferably with jail time. Ignorance of the law is no excuse right?

This is an example from the Guardian. You will spot this theme across all news organisations, across all of their specialist sections from football, fashion, music, movie etc. They happily do stories of compilations "best goals by Ronaldo" "top 10 Phil Collins tunes" "best Twilight moments" etc and embed YouTube clips in the post. In podcasts they happily discuss clips they've seen on YouTube, inviting listeners what to search for to go find it.

Do they have the rights to do this?

The soul singer Etta James died, so the Guardian put together a "10 classic performances" post. All of the clips are from YouTube. Their policy on copyright can be found here, the terms of service can be found here. Take a look at section 3 "Use of material appearing on the Guardian site". 

I regularly listen to Football Weekly by the Guardian. It's an excellent football (soccer) podcast but that's a side point. They regularly talk of incidents uploaded to YouTube from games around the world. Those clips will belong to a whole range of rights holders. A clip from Sky with Sky logos, Sky commentators etc belongs to Sky for example. Surely by pointing people to go search for and consume those clips, they are encouraging and facilitating copyright infringement right?

Did they link to any clips uploaded by people who don't have the rights to upload them? How much of the Guardian's back catalogue of posts have infringed like this? How many podcasts have pointed folks to infringing material? How many years has this been going on? I'm sure the legal departments for the copyright Mafia would have a field day multiplying the monitory damages they'd claim for. Keep in mind these people seem to think a single song being shared by a single mother for no financial gain is valued in the $100,000's.

Does this mean the Guardian's staff are unaware of the law? Does this mean the Guardian only care about THEIR copyrights and feel others are there to be used how they like? Should the Guardian have a training session on how to respect copyright law when producing their copy? Of course respecting those laws the way copyright holders want them respected makes for more neutered posts, but that's the point. If they realise this, they will open their eyes to the idea that fair use is actually a good thing for them, their staff and their readers.

Don't get me wrong, I see all of this as "fair use". The problem is that the rights holders don't. The problem is that they are hell bent on clamping down on any fair use for regular folks. The problem is not the actions, the problem is the hypocrisy.

I've only use the Guardian as an example. The entire industry is rife with these double standards.

Under laws like SOPA (that the rights holders are constantly pushing for), the Guardian could easily be shut down for facilitating copyright infringement. No safe harbours, no fair use, wilful infringement (ie not by an anonymous commenter but by a member of staff) and for commercial gain.

Surely if you want others to respect your copyrights, you should set an example and respect others. The same applies to attribution for comments too "Facebook" or "Twitter" is NOT attribution, the USER on those services should be attributed, not the site. By all means show you're one of the news organisations who value accuracy and give their username and site, but not just the site if it's a multi user site like Facebook. By attributing "Twitter" to a Tweet by one of their users, you are implying that Twitter as a company stated that, not one of their users.