Saturday, September 27, 2008

YouTube and Copyright

YouTube (www.youtube.com) is a Web site allowing you to "Broadcast Yourself". Anyone can make a movie and then post it for the world to see - for free. Millions of movies are posted, on topics as wide as you can imagine. What some users may not realize is that their homemade movie could be infringing on the copyright of someone else.

Before posting, users should ask themselves "Do I have permission to post this content?" A movie may seem harmless enough, but could still have copyright implications. For example, a high school student posting a video of himself playing a popular song on his guitar. Permission is needed to use the music. Music in the background of a video is also a concern. Permission must be granted to use copyrighted work. An exception to this falls under the guidelines of fair use. The fair use guideline for music clips is "if a student is using the music clip in a multimedia project directly related to current curriculum, 10% of the song or 30 seconds from a single work is allowable use."

Complicated, isn't it?

Source: Miller, K. M. (2008). Copyright in a social world. MultiMedia & Internet@Schools, (15)3, 14-16.

1 comment:

Lorena said...

Marissa,
I keep forgetting to tell my daughter about this. She doesn't post YouTube videos, but lots of her friends do...I have no clue how many times they must have infringed on copyrights of the video game Halo!!

I guess we also need to be concerned with what we post on our MySpace pages, etc. We could be using logos, quotes and things that aren't permissible too.
Lorena