What to be Concerned About...

Entertainment Law Update.  Sometimes when going to court you will get clarification of requirements of what is lawful and what is not.  YouTube vs. Viacom; Viacom states that 75% of what is shown of YouTube is copyrighted.  This comes to the point of whether or not YouTube has willful knowledge or blindness.  It comes down to what you can prove and whether there was enough evidence. 

Podcast are something a lot of businesses use to promote themselves.  The question has come up, should podcasters have to pay for licensing and how much do you charge?  Is there a royalty they need to pay?  This is something that I would be concerned with as a business owner because if you make a podcast for your business, what infringements might you incur?

Another issue that might arise is making sure that the people who sign your agreements have the capacity to consent.  Think of the person who does the Girls Gone Wild videos, he filmed a girl that was only 14 year of age.  There are a lot of question that came up in the court case.  This makes me think of when film children do they have the capacity to consent? No.  So what do you do? 

Jon Ipolito: How to Hack Copyright for Fun and Profit.  Sharing, is it good or bad?  That is the question that Ipolito asks.  He states that there are media giants out there that control the Internet.  He also states “cheating is the pedagogy of the internet.”  The Internet is a super charged environment that circulates media.  He then goes on to discuss keeping your eyes on your own paper and that universities spend millions of dollars a year on trying to derail cheating.  He mentioned how they use the website TurnItIn.com to check if there is plagiarism. 

There is also digital arts to consider, and how people have recombined it into new material.  We have access to everything and no one controls it.  This makes me think of my own business of film.  After you create it, who stops people from spreading it all over the Internet.  In this day and age of YouTube, everything is out there.  You make a digital footprint and it is hard to erase.

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Copyright and Copy Wrongs.  Vaidhyanathan talks a lot about open source and no longer being able to do what we wish to do.  Does the creator need to have a license is one of the questions he raises and what should be the policy?  Even though the courts have given Hollywood everything they have asked for in the last 10 years the system is just not great.  People are frustrated.  Even with all the regulations out there, there is nothing we can’t get.  People should be able to build off the abilities of others.

He raises a lot of good questions, but really does not have an answer.  The questions I have to be concerned with is, how does it affect my business?  Even with all the copyright regulations out there in place people still violate the copyright infringements and intellectual properties.