Gadgetory

when the world's first copyright law was passed in 1710 I can't even imagine that the British Parliament would have ever envisioned people flinging pirated copies of movies all over the internet whatever that would have seemed like thousands of times every day yet that's exactly what eventually happened and seeing as many of our copyright laws were meant for the pre cyberspace era the way the copyright works online is often quite messy now we here at tech wiki aren't lawyers up that's not entirely true John our writer did graduate from an American law school but anyways we can help clear up some of the misconceptions around what you can and can't do online at least legally anyways although today's episode is based around u.s. copyright law similar concepts exist in many other countries as well so one of the main reasons that copyright laws even exist is to encourage people like musicians software developers and game designers to come up with creative stuff I mean do you think that Mark Wahlberg would have starred in that awful movie The Happening if there wasn't a copyright holder there to cut him a fat paycheck so perhaps it isn't surprising that usually when you hear a news story about a high-profile copyright case it's where some copyright infringer either made tons of money off of bootleg and copies of something or where some bigshot movie studio comes after someone for cutting into their profits by distributing one of their films for free even if the infringer isn't making any money but let's assume that like most people you aren't running a huge bootleg operation and are concerned about whether you can do something like share a screen shot from a movie on your blog or play a song in the background of a Youtube upload this is where fair use comes into play and a really important concept that's misunderstood by a lot of people in a nutshell most kinds of creative work including songs books and the angsty poems that you wrote when you're a 16 year old scene kid have an automatic copyright that applies as soon as they're created but that doesn't mean no one else can ever use them fair use helps keep people from getting sued for copyright infringement as long as they're using stuff well fairly but what constitutes fair that's a pretty subjective question that courts use several factors to answer but generally speaking the most important one is whether you're costing someone money by how you're using their stuff even though any reproduction without permission of a copyrighted work is technically infringement even if you're just reposting some cool picture you found as your facebook cover photo that being said if one day you get a nasty letter from someone's lawyer you can probably assert fair use if you're not affecting someone's bottom line on the other hand simply posting something with a disclaimer that the content isn't yours doesn't automatically make it fair use if you're seeding a torrent of a copyrighted song fair use will not save you from the wrath of a recording studio even if you say this isn't mine I'm not making money off of it since people are just going to download the song anyways for free instead of paying for it on itunes or wherever else the company will see it as a hit to their bottom line whether or not that person would have bought the song at all or not this concept also comes to play if you've ever spent any time reading or writing fanfiction it's pretty popular for a fanfic writer to put a disclaimer at the top claiming that they don't own the characters but since copyright law also gives the right to make derivative works to the original creator for example a movie book or game sequel it's theoretically possible for fanfic writers to get in trouble with publishers though many authors notably JK Rowling of Harry Potter Fame have given their blessing to fanfic writers so long as they're not trying to sell their stories and of course content creators are under no obligation to let people use their stuff even if they aren't making money off of it but at least the way we think about laws in an age where anything can be uploaded in a matter of seconds seemingly they're catching up to reality even if the process is a bit slow one appeals court in the u.s. recently ruled that fair use should not just be a legal excuse for infringement but instead a right that shouldn't constitute infringement at all after Universal issued a takedown notice after a woman uploaded a 30-second clip of her kids dancing to a print song meaning it may be the case soon where major companies have to actually think before just flagging everything they can we've also seen the proliferation of sites that use things like Creative Commons licenses to allow for free reuse of lots of different types of content Wikipedia is a good example of this and we've also seen the end of heavy-handed lawsuits from entertainment industry associations against people who shared one or two songs often unwittingly but even though the powers that be seem to be trying to make it a bit easier for folks who really aren't intentionally doing anything wrong do be careful about what you share or hosts online and remember not to buy Game of Thrones episodes on USB sticks from that dude that hangs out in the alley behind Arby's it's just it's just not safe fresh books is on a mission to make freelancers less stressed and more organized through their easy-to-use tool for crafting and sending professional invoices in seconds fresh books also helps you track your hours so when it comes to create set invoice you know exactly what you did when you did it and who you did it for and you can even accept deposits from those people through their platform so you are paid on your schedule they also have a tool to manage your expense reports their mobile app lets you take a picture of your receipts and it pretty much handles the rest getting started on fresh books is extremely simple even if you're not a numbers person and they say especially if you're not a numbers person you can try fresh books for free for 30 days by going to fresh books calm forward slash tech quickie and entering tech quickie and how did you hear about a section thanks for watching this video guys if you want to see more videos on how technology and law can interact with each other leave a comment down below on that and any specific subjects of that that you would like to hear about also like the video dislikes video gets subscribe check out this channel super fun thing it's cool and stuff and I'm gonna go away but this isn't blowing up so I need to keep going but then why go on now ok that's good