The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - an amendment to the Copyright Law most publishers have been using to take down copyright infringements - was signed by Bill Clinton in 1998, when the internet was far less of a force than it is today.
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“It becomes a business decision about whether they want to go after a person or not,” Jacobson says, “because they are completely in their rights to go after them if they want to.”īut don't panic, yet! For the most part, Jacobson says, “You could have a full staff just tracking all of those infringements, but from a business perspective, sometimes it’s just not worth it to spend the time.” Especially for smaller infringements that are generally unknowingly committed by fans, Jacobson says, “You might look at it and say ‘Is the backlash we're going to get going to hurt the artist or the writer, more than its actually going to help them?”Īt the end of the day, copyright law is severely outdated.
It also wasn’t all that surprising when Taylor Swift, who wrote in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed that “ music is art, and art.should be paid for”, had her legal team send cease and desist letters to Etsy vendors who were selling items with Swift’s trademarks and lyrics printed on them. (Granted, this case wasn’t over song lyrics, but it’s not hard to imagine something similar happening over a non-official lyric video going viral.) Universal Music Corp., that ended in 2015 and decidedly ruled in favor of Lenz and fair use. Prince, for example, said in his 2007 statement that he was suing YouTube and Ebay for copyright infringement, that he was going to “reclaim his art on the Internet.” That same year, Universal sent a DMCA takedown to Stephanie Lenz for a video that featured her 13-month-old child dancing to “ Let’s Go Crazy.” That incident led to the near decade-long court case, Lenz v. Often it's up to the principles of the songwriters and owners. Sadly, there doesn’t need to be an incentive outside of the fact that the owner of the copyright simply wants to, and can. “All of them need to be licensed and any of them that are not licensed are just infringing.” “Lyric sites have funding, they have ad support, and they're using all of the lyrics,” Jacobson says. How much or little of the original work that gets used matters, too, and as its written in section 107 of the Copyright Act “if the use includes a large portion of the copyrighted work, fair use is less likely to be found.” So, say using just one line from a song versus an entire verse.įair use judgements are made on a case-by-case basis, Jacobson says, though one indicator that something most likely is not fair use is if it’s used for commercial purposes. Satires and parodies - like “Weird Al” Yankovic’s songs - fall under this category, as do educational videos and other art that builds on top of an original work.
It essentially states that their use of copyright material is okay because it is using the work for educational purposes or because the original work has been transformed in some way.
Fair use is usually the go-to defense for those who’ve been accused of copyright infringement.
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