Age of the Geek

Copyright: Part 4 of 2
     OK, week four of copyright. Let’s get right down to it.
     Fair Use.
     The Copyright Act of 1976 did more than just extend Disney’s protections for a couple decades. It also established the terms of what would be considered “Fair Use,” which are the conditions that allow the unauthorized use of copyrighted material.
     From educational materials to parody movies, fair use is the legal gray area that makes sure copyright owners can’t use the legal system to silence critics, reporters, or researchers. A movie reviewer, for instance, is completely within their rights to use clips from a movie to demonstrate what they did or didn’t like.
     The problem with fair use is that it’s not very well defined and one man’s parody may be another man’s copyright violation. Clear legal definitions about what is or isn’t fair use generally only come after a court case, and even then those decisions can be narrow or even contradictory.
     Which brings us to YouTube.
     There’s little doubt that YouTube has changed the way our society consumes media. The ability to upload your own video and share it with the whole world has enabled a new generation of content creators, myself included.
     It’s also allowed any scumbag with a DVD drive and a good Internet connection to upload full movies, television shows, music videos, ect.
     While the entertainment industry is still trying to figure out how to deal with the former, they know exactly how to handle the latter. Sue the heck out of them.
     Or, more specifically, sue YouTube and its parent company, Google. This is exactly what several media organizations did, demanding a billion dollars in damages due to YouTube not doing enough to prevent their copyrighted material from being illegally uploaded.
     In response, YouTube established their Content ID system, which allows media companies to put their copyrighted content into a database. Any YouTube video that goes up gets checked against that database and if there’s a hit, the owner of the copyright can have the video taken down or monetize it for themselves.
     It seems fair enough. After all, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. A studio can’t be expected to search every video on the site to make sure their movies or songs aren’t being pirated.
     But of course, no system is perfect. After all, remember our good friend, “Fair Use?” Well, YouTube’s Content ID may be great at finding copyrighted material, but it’s not so great at determining context.
     So when YouTube’s little Content ID robot picks up a hit and says, “Hey, does this belong to you?” the answer from the studio’s own little robot is always a resounding, “Yes.”
     And because there’s so little oversight, this can result in a perfectly legal video getting monetized by a company that has no valid claim to do so. In an ironic twist, the same media companies so adamantly opposed to online piracy effectively use the Content ID system to steal money from YouTube creators.
     I know, because it’s happened to me.
     Every weekend I pour through the week’s big news in pop culture, collect relevant video and art, and edit it into a short news video.
     I quickly found that when reporting on subjects involving Nintendo, the gaming company seemed to get the impression that they were entitled to any ad revenue I might receive on the video, even though my content easily falls under the parameters of fair use.
     Not that I’ve made a dime on my channel anyway.
     Out of curiosity, I decided to see how far Nintendo was willing to take one of their claims. YouTube allows creators to object to copyright claims, so I did. The initial objection got me an automated rejection from Nintendo. The second got me a copyright strike, which is exactly as bad as it sounds for a YouTube account.
     On the third appeal though, it seemed I had called Nintendo’s bluff enough times for them to have an actual human look at my video.
They retracted their claim and everything went back to normal.
     That’s a lot of hoops to jump through to keep a company from using automated programs to bully you out of ad revenue. I obviously don’t make a living doing my YouTube videos, but there are plenty of people that do and many of them aren’t any more protected than I am from this sort of behavior.
     Mind you, this isn’t necessarily malicious behavior. It’s just laziness. YouTube is too big to monitor effectively, so these companies cast the widest net they can get away with. If a legitimate video gets caught in the system, then that’s just too bad.
     Which is not to say malicious behavior doesn’t happen. In 2012, Sega went on a blitzkrieg attack on any and every YouTube video that involved the game “Shining Force III.” Not just gameplay videos. Even videos that merely talked about the game were not spared from Sega’s wrath.
     Why was Sega suddenly so protective over a video game from 1997?
     Smart money says that it had nothing to do with copyright infringement and everything to do with manipulating search results so it would be easier to find promotional videos for Sega’s then upcoming “Shining Ark” game.
     For a more recent case, did you see the recent Adam Sandler movie, “Pixels?” No? Don’t worry, nobody else did either. But that didn’t stop Columbia Pictures from issuing hundreds of takedown notices to the video website, Vimeo, targeting any and every video with the word “Pixels” in the name. (Technically, they hired an incredibly inept “online piracy solution” company to do it, but the blame still falls on them.) Among the videos ordered taken down were a short film from 2006, a music video from 2010, Patrick Jean’s award winning short film that inspired the movie in the first place and, yes, even the studio’s own official trailer.
     And while the incident caused a PR nightmare, there aren’t really any laws to discourage large media companies from making these kind of blanket claims.
     If I were to walk into a business, proclaim that it somehow infringed on my rights, and barred the doors, I would probably be arrested.
     If I were to walk into a business, proclaim that the business actually belonged to me and took all the money out of the cash register, I would definitely be arrested.
     However, if a large media corporation decides they are the owners of any random YouTube video, they can take control of that video and, if they wanted, fight you all the way to court for it.
     And Google will do little to nothing to stop them.
     Even worse, not only are these kind of actions not illegal, but media corporations are trying their hardest to push through laws that would make it easier for them to ignore fair use protections.
     You might remember the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from a few years back, which threatened free speech protections to the point that it caused an unofficial Internet blackout day.
     SOPA was defeated, but similar attempts to strengthen copyright enforcement continue to sneak into legislation.
     In many ways, the Internet is still the wild wild west when it comes to copyright. Particularly when it comes to video games (Oh, I could make that into part five. Maybe another time.) Unless you’re willing and able to start your own video sharing service, your only rights are the ones allowed to you by the corporations with the most lawyers.
     Fortunately, losing in the court of public opinion is usually enough to get them to back off, but there’s no guarantee that will last forever.
     That is, for now, all I have to say about copyright. But I’m sure it won’t be the end of it. Particularly if what I’m hearing about the Trans-Pacific Partnership is true.
 
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and promises to write about something else next week.