What Rights Do You Have With Your Media?

When you post information, do you realize who else you are giving rights to? Patrick Reilly from the Intellectual Property Society spoke to this question at today's Vloggercon. The session ultimately devolved into frustrated questions and conflicting answers, leading the moderator to pull a steaming  Creative Commons attendee out from the audience and onto the stage. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is a funder of Creative Commons.)

The biggest question attendees had was about protecting their vlogs (or blogs). The speakers disagreed about the minimum action needed. Most authors believe that blogs (or vlogs) are protected automatically by copyright when you create them. The Creative Commons rep believed that you just needed to protect the blog itself, and as a collective work all of your posts would be protected. Reilly felt that to be prudent, bloggers should go to the Library of Congress to protect in batches. If you agree with Reilly that in order to assert your copyright, the work must be registered, then you have 90 days to register a work for copyright. The implication here is that if you were to protect your work every 90 days, submitting a compilation of the past 90 days' blog posts each time, then you would be fully protected. Note that each submission costs $45, so at minimum bloggers are looking at $180/year to protect their blog posts under this scheme. That sounds annoying, but I suppose it's better than spending $45 to protect each blog post or video.

The second point of contention: How effective is Creative Commons? There haven't been any cases tested in the US, but a recent test in Dutch court held up the Creative Commons license on a Flickr photo, and imposed a small fine on the magazine that violated the photo's license.

Fair Use was also on everyone's minds. It's worth noting that fair use (also known as fair dealing) is not really a right, but rather a defense of infringement. Claiming 'fair use' is an admission that you used someone else's protected work knowingly, without permmission, and that you are betting that your use was protected under free speech. Bloggers should note that you typically are being sued by the time you claim this defense. There are a couple of good resources for documentary filmmakers, who are often in a position of needing the fair use defense: the Center for Social Media has a publication called Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society is working on a Fair Use project.

Note: Derivative works (when you add your own originality to a copyrighted work; for example, adding to a music track) tend to be protected under copyright law (and permission is strongly recommended), but if you make commercial value out of the work without permission then you are most likely infringing upon the original creator's copyright.

The big lesson here is that bloggers need to not only comment on politics, but become politically active. Most people forget that Creative Commons can't lobby (it's a nonprofit), so it's up to individuals to speak their minds and join a cause.

Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys vloggercon fair use creative commons media best practices

Comments

[MartinE]

I was a professional writer for many years. You do not have to register copyright to be protected. Putting a copyright notice with your name and the year covers you. The laws are written and enforced in the creator's favor- those using other's content are going to have to prove they have permission in most cases. Of course, like IP rights, you are only really protected to the extent that you can enforce your rights, something most bloggers have little ability to do.

[Christine Herron]

This is what's commonly accepted, true - and yet all of the copyright experts in the room (including the Creative Commons person) recommended doing more.

Note that at this point, there was a room full of angry bloggers throwing hisses and verbal darts at the speakers. As the moderator noted, 'don't get mad at these guys, they're just here trying to help...'

FWIW, I historically would have agreed with you. Unfortunately, it sounds like protection in theory is different than successful protection in court.

[MartinE]

I probably wasn't clear- IMHO, evenif you are clearly a copyright holder its practically impossible for the average person to police and go after people stealing your stuff, especially now that we're digital. For a lot of people (if monetizing your content is the issue), this means getting as much as you can out of it as early as you can (like a big book advance)and assume that it will quickly become public domain whether you like it or not. Most pro writers, for example, make their living via public speaking rather than royalties just as musicians are increasingly dependent on concert revenues rather than royalties. I don't like it but...