- [Audrey] Right.
This is Copyright 101,
AKA Let's Not All Get Sued at Once.
This is a review of what I know about copyright,
what I've learned about copyright
being someone who creates lots of publications
and digital media, and has for quite a while.
I really want to be respectful of people's copyrights.
I want to make sure that I'm giving creators credit
for what they're making.
I want to make sure
that I'm not doing anything that violates the law.
I want to make sure that I'm following directions.
But mostly, being kind to people when I make publications.
Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer.
This is not legal advice.
This is just a summary
of what I have learned about copyright
in my time making publications.
So, we're gonna go through three sections.
One is copyright basics.
What is copyright? Why do we have it?
Creative Commons
and how you can benefit from Creative Commons,
how they, how you can use Creative Commons licenses.
And we're gonna talk about fair use,
what it is and what it is not.
Next, we're gonna talk about copyright friendly materials
in terms of where you can find
copyright friendly materials online.
And how to check whether material
is actually available to be used in certain ways,
how to check exactly how a creator wants their work used.
And finally, we're gonna talk a little bit
about copyright at UVM
because it has some specific quirks to it
that you should be aware of
if you're making publications at UVM.
A copy of these slides is available
at go.uvm.edu/accessibility.
Wait, this is a accessibility?
Yes, this is accessibility.
Knowing what you can and cannot use
and knowing who and when to ask,
that all makes the process of creating publications easier.
And any time you are making processes easier,
you are making them more accessible.
So, let's start with the basics.
Here are three recommendations for working with copyright.
Check an item's copyright status before you use it.
This is absolutely a situation
in which permission is much better than forgiveness.
When in doubt, ask.
Lots of people create things and put them online,
and would love to see them be used more.
They would love to become known as influencers
for creating amazing things that get used a lot.
So, it doesn't hurt to just reach out to someone
and say hey, this is who I am,
this is how I want to use your things,
this is what I'm thinking.
And they can always no,
but they can also say yes.
So, just ask.
And then, go ahead and document everything
just so that you have good records of where you found things
and how, what's steps you took
to make sure that you could use them.
There are three basic types of copyright.
One is when something's copyrighted,
it's actually registered
with the US Office of Copyright Protections.
And ideally, this means that you need explicit permission
from the copyright holder in order to use it.
The second and type of copyright is Creative Commons,
which is becoming more and more common online.
And Creative Commons provides specific directions
you have to follow in order to use materials.
And the third type is public domain.
Public domain is a space where everything's available
to the public for any purpose.
There are no limit limits on what you can do with something
in the public domain.
Creative Commons.
And I provided a link here,
but it's creativecommons.org.
Creative Commons is a set of copyright license
that provide a standardized way
to indicate how work can and cannot be used.
There are six Creative Commons licenses.
So, Creative Commons largely works
by looking at who gets credit,
what are the terms of being able to use items,
and who is getting them money.
Copyright, to a very large extent,
just deals with who gets money.
Who should get money, who has to pay money
in order to create things,
and Creative Commons helps make this clearer.
So Creative Commons,
you can look at up licenses by their lettered abbreviations.
So for instance, the most basic Creative Commons license
is CC-BY.
And that means that simply the only thing you need to do
in order to use this material is give attribution.
You need to give the person credit.
You need to say who, what,
who made the material.
The next license is Creative Commons BY-SA.
That means you have to give credit.
You have to give attribution
and you also have to make sure and share-alike.
Share-alike means you can can't copyright the material
for yourself.
You can't place additional restrictions on it.
You can't remove any restrictions.
You just have to take the license as it is.
The third type is copyright BY-NC.
Copyright BY-NC, again, attribution is required.
You gotta give credit who is the work by
and it specifies that the work can only be used
for non-commercial purposes.
These are the three other Creative Commons licenses.
It gets more into this whole combination
of giving attribution, making sure to share-alike,
making specifying whether things can be used
for commercial purposes.
And then, talking about whether things can be remixed,
whether they can be altered in any way.
Say you took a really beautiful photo of a tree
and you're really proud of it.
And you're willing to let other people use it.
But you wanna be known as the author of this photo,
the creator of this photo of the tree,
and you don't want anyone to dye your tree purple.
The colors are perfect. You captured them perfect.
So you might say that you license
that your photo of the tree using CC-BY-ND.
So, that would be attribution required.
Give me credit for my photo of the tree and no remixes.
You can't turn the tree purple.
And again, you can dig in at the links
to find out more information
about each Creative Commons license.
It's important to note that Creative Commons licenses
cannot be revoked.
The internet is forever.
But things on the internet,
people may try to take them down.
So, your photo of the tree.
You enjoyed sharing it,
but maybe you're like,
"Oh, I don't feel so good about sharing it anymore."
You might pull it down.
But if someone already you use your photo of the tree
in their presentation,
the license stays with that instance of the photo.
So, the license stays with the material
even if you pull it down offline.
And you must own copyright for the work.
You cannot assign a copyright to someone else's photos.
You cannot assign a copyright
to someone else's songs or videos.
You can't tell other people what to do with their stuff.
So, let's talk a little bit more about the public domain.
The public domain really is you can do anything you want
with what's in the public domain.
It's free for any member of the public.
You don't have to give credit.
It can be used to make money.
It can be used to commercially. It can be remixed.
It can be dye purple, shrunk, made large,
sped up, slow it down, anything you want.
When you're giving attribution,
one of the ways that that CDCI does it
is that we have a page of image credits
across the board.
So for instance, the Vermont PBIS Report.
Every report has so many images in it.
So, it became easiest to make sure
that we gave everyone credit for their images
by putting together a long list.
Every image we use in the report is listed.
We say where we got it.
We say who it's by
and specify out the terms of the licenses.
For the most part,
we use a lot of Creative Commons licensed images.
But in other types of,
in other situations where people have said,
"Yeah, you can use our photo,"
we add their image credits here as well.
But you can also just put your attribution,
your byline right next to a photo.
This is much like newspapers do it where they say photo by.
You can do exactly that online.
But what about fair use?
Fair use is a good question.
It's super complicated
because there's no
hard and dry, cut and dry definition
of what is and isn't fair use.
And the reason for this is because the 1976 Copyright Act
specified that if we were to get into being more specific
about what is and isn't fair use,
like to really nail it down,
that would potentially impinge on
the creativity of folks being able to use fair use.
So in general,
fair use must meet these four criteria.
You can think of them as a checklist for fair use.
One, what is the character of the use?
That means how are you proposing to use the work.
What is the nature of the work to be used?
Like what specifically are you trying to claim is fair use?
What are you trying to include?
How much of this work are you going to use?
Are you gonna use an entire two-hour film?
Are you gonna use a 10-second snippet film?
How much of that work?
And then, what effect would this use have
on the market for the original?
So again, copyright largely comes down to money, honey.
It's who's getting paid, who needs to get paid,
how much do you need to pay.
So, let's take each of these four items.
The character of the use,
that means what you are creating.
Fair use, in order to be able to check that box
for character, it should be criticism or commentary,
news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research
and parody.
It's basically never for commercial purposes.
You would have a really hard time arguing
that commercial purposes would be,
would fall under fair use.
The nature of the work that you want to use
in your new creation.
Fair use generally applies to things that are non-fiction,
things that are scholarly, factual, informational,
or published, and less so for things
that are unpublished or creative.
That means if you find yourself in possession
of Nicki Minaj's new album that she has not released yet
and you really want to write a quick paper
about the imagery of rocks in her new album,
"My goodness,
it's so powerful the imagery she's working with."
Time out.
You can't actually claim,
that you can't actually incorporate that album
into a published paper before the album itself
is out in the public.
It's just not allowed.
It would completely fail the fair use test.
And then, the amount of the work differs
between types of media.
So, film or video.
It should be no more than 10%.
So remember, we're talking about films,
which can be two hours long,
and internet videos, which could be 30 seconds long.
So, no more than 10% or three minutes,
whichever is less, of the finished product.
Songs.
Should be no more than 10%
and absolutely no more than 30 seconds.
Text.
No more than 10% of a text.
Photos and images.
No more than 10% or 15 images from the same source
and no more than five images
from any one artist or photographer.
Again, you're talking about fair use.
You're talking about not having had a conversation
with this person, not having the person's consent
to use their stuff.
These are your guidelines
in order to be able to check the box for amount of the work
for fair use.
And then finally, effect of the use.
Will your use of a work
mean that others do not have to pay money to copy the work?
Does it impact the market for the work?
Will the copyright holder effectively lose money
if you do this?
Fair use always applies
when you have the consent of the copyright holder.
If you're having that conversation,
writing the conversation down, agreeing to terms,
it can be as simple as an email
where you're talking about how you're going to use it.
And they're like, "That sounds great.
Just gimme credit, like somewhere in the poster.
That would be fantastic."
Save that as part of your dot documentation.
Or it can be something like UVM's own consent form,
which is really, really specific
and was drawn up by general counsel.
And it specifies until the end of time
forever and ever, Amen.
It's really formal.
So, have that conversation with folks.
Okay.
So here are are three examples
where we're gonna try and think about
whether things qualify for the fair use test.
Now, if you remember Cabbage Patch Kids
back in ye older day.
Cabbage Patch Kids were these squishy giant dolls
that presumably looked like babies you would find
laying about in a cabbage patch?
They were all the rage.
They came out around a big holiday
and everyone wanted them.
And they were supposedly they're so...
Okay, whatever.
They were toys with, they're dolls.
And then while they were really popular,
the Topps Trading Cards Company
came out with Garbage Pail Kids.
So on the left side of the screen,
I have a photo of these Cabbage Patch Kids.
They're doll.
Basically, they have big squishy faces.
And on the right side,
I have a photo of a Garbage Pail Kid trading card.
And this one is called Geeky Gary.
And it's a child with a TV for a head,
surrounded by TVs.
Eyes spiraling, all goggle box out.
This was the nicest the Garbage Pail Kid I could find.
It was the 80s.
There was a lot of body horror in the Garbage Pail Kids.
There was a lot of inappropriate,
just plain inappropriate imagery
that today we would find very objectable
in terms of race and ethnicity and ability.
So, this is kind of an example of Garbage Pail Kids.
They were released as a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids.
So they had the same type of facial structure.
They had that same rhythm of the title of them,
Cabbage Patch Kids, Garbage Pail Kids.
They were really meant to evoke
as a parody these Cabbage Patch Kids.
Do Garbage Pail Kids fall under fair use?
So, you're thinking about what was created,
the work that was created.
Was it informational? Was it scholarly?
Was it news reporting?
You're thinking about the work that it was based off of.
The work that was based off of
were these dolls that were someone's creative work
that they had released.
And it was for commercial purposes.
These Garbage Pail Kids cards were sold in packs of gum.
And the amount is kind of, that's a judgment call.
And then, what was the effect of on the market
of selling Garbage Pail Kids trading cards?
Spoiler.
Topps Trading Cards, who put out the Garbage Pail Kids,
they got sued into the ground.
So, when you're thinking
about documenting your fair use cases,
you're thinking if someone complains
about the way that you're using copyrighted materials,
if they think that you've infringed on copyright.
And so, the makers of Cabbage Patch Kids
absolutely felt Garbage Pail Kids
infringed on their copyright and they sued Topps.
The case was settled in a sealed settlement.
It's still sealed.
This happened in like 1987. It's still sealed.
I couldn't find any information
about how much Topps had to pay, but it was not like $5.
It's an interesting case study.
Interesting case study number two.
On screen, I have two photos of the late rock star Prince.
Now, the photo on the right is photo realistic.
It is a photo taken by a photographer Lynn Goldsmith,
who is still alive.
This will become important.
She took photos of Prince.
"Newsweek," paid her to take photos of Prince.
They never used her photos.
But then, "Vanity Fair," came along and they said,
"Oh, great photos."
We'd like to license those photos for us.
And so, they paid money
to license Lynn Goldsmith's photo of Prince
to Andy Warhol.
And Andy Warhol,
Soup Cans, Marilyn.
His whole entire art was based off of taking photos,
blowing them up really, really big,
and painting over them,
which is what he did with these photos
that Lynn Goldsmith had took of Prince.
And she knew nothing about it
until all of a sudden these paintings
were at an exhibition and she was not thrilled.
By this point, Andy Warhol has passed away.
And so, she is now in the process
of suing the Andy Warhol Foundation
for copyright infringement.
And so, does the foundation have a case for fair use,
in terms of what Warhol created with
from Goldsmith's original work?
Spoiler.
We don't know.
This is going before the Supreme Court at this fall.
So, so far,
the Appeals Court has ruled
that Andy Warhol was in the wrong.
He violated the photographer's copyright
because he didn't give her credit for the original image.
But the Warhol Foundation did appeal.
It's now going to the Supreme Court this fall.
Very interesting case.
By the way, the photos of Prince
and the photo of the painting,
the Warhol painting of Prince,
you'll notice both of them have a ring of blue ink
around the eyes.
And that's because there, this particular image
is part of the court filing
that is around the images themselves.
Court filings are part of the public domain
if they are made public.
If we all know if like court filings that are sealed,
that's not it.
These are part of the public court filings.
And then, they are part of a screenshot
from Artnet, artnet.net, talking about this particular case.
Screenshots themselves,
you have to think about fair use categories.
But in general, you are allowed to use them
for things like talking about why,
how this particular copyright case is unfolding.
But yeah, you can see how it gets complicated.
There are levels within levels pretty quickly.
Fair use or not? This is the last one.
This is Weird Al Yankovic.
He has spent 30 years making music
that are straight up parodies of popular songs.
And so, he keeps all of the music
but changes all the lyrics.
So if you think about the amount of the work
that's being used, it's pretty large amount, right?
It's the whole song.
He's just changing the lyrics and the title.
Is he making money off of them? Absolutely.
He's certainly making money off of them.
He's built a career off them.
He's coming to the Flynn theater in May off of them.
So, you think along those lines.
Spoiler.
Weird Al Yankovic asks for permission every single time.
He believes in consent.
He talks with the artist.
He doesn't make parodies of anyone's songs
that he doesn't have consent for.
Fair use always applies when you have consent.
Consent, folks.
But again, fair use is not cut and dried.
You're trying to make sure that what you're doing
hits all four of those
tests for it.
This is a Aman Gebru,
who is a Duquesne University Law Professor
specializing in copyright law.
And he says, quote, unquote,
"Basically, fair use is so complicated
it has to be this side every time on a case by case basis."
So, keep good records.
Make sure you can figure out what the copyright terms are.
Don't be afraid to content,
to contact folks and ask.
And realize that the internet is very, very large
so you could probably find something else as well.
All right.
Copyright friendly materials.
Copyright friendly materials are those
that are licensed to reduce inequity around copyright.
Again, copyright's about money.
And a lot of folks are working
without the same access to funds.
So if you're making copyright friendly material,
if you're lowering that bar to have materials
be available to be used, that's part of inequity.
And that is that's part of fighting against inequity.
And you can do this with a Creative Commons license
or making material explicitly available
for educational purposes,
or just waving the licensing fee.
A great place to find copyright friendly materials
is government websites.
And everything that your US government
puts on their websites.
That's images, that's videos, songs, articles,
all of it is in the public domain by default.
Your taxes pay for that.
The exception is if the government website
specifically exercises copyright.
But as a default, you are allowed to use things
like everything on the National Park Service website.
National Park, they got a bunch of folks
running on beautiful outdoor settings
taking images and videos,
and making them all available
because they're part of the government.
This is one I made earlier.
It is a video that I made
using some webcam footage from a lake
that I found on the National Park Service website.
And I just fed it up and put titles over,
grabbed some music to go underneath,
and boom, nice little opener for my video.
It's interesting to note though,
if you look up this particular video on YouTube.
So, I didn't have to give credit to the nps.gov
for their footage, but I wanted to
'cause it's a nice thing to do.
And then, the music that I used underneath
absolutely did need to include that licensing information.
I was looking for Creative Commons specific music.
And that's part of giving attribution
is just throwing that credit in YouTube.
Vermont.gov is one of the few government websites
that explicitly withholds their copyright.
Nothing on the vermont.gov site is available for you to use
without their express permission.
So, that's their right.
They can absolutely do that.
How would you know this?
That's because if you look down
at the very bottom of the site, you can see
that they have an explicit copyright statement there.
And so, that's what you're looking for
when you're looking at government websites
to make sure they're available to you.
Fair use or not?
This is Amy Wheeler-Sutton, works at the CDCI.
She testified before the Senate Committee on Education.
It was live streamed and it exists as a YouTube video.
Now if we were to take some of the footage
of Amy's testimony and remix it into a video
kind of showcasing the impact that CDCI has
on legislative matters, would that be fair use or no?
Spoiler.
I think it would be fair use
because the Vermont Senate Committee on Education,
that's part of our government
and they have put this footage up on YouTube.
And if you dig into the actual link itself,
you can follow the link here and go check it out,
they have not included
the YouTube standard copyright statement.
They have included nothing about how it is copyrighted.
I would absolutely reach out to their PR person
and say hi, I would love to use this,
this is how we're thinking of using it.
Just wanted to run it past you.
If only because hey, let's have a conversation,
but also for PR purposes.
Because then you can send them the finished product
and say like,
"Here, if you wanna share this through your own networks,
please feel free."
Be our guest.
So, you can work the angles there.
If you're looking for copyright friendly materials,
here are two good search engines.
Openverse is at creativecommons.org.
That is the Creative Commons specific search engine
and it will look for everything
that has a Creative Commons license attached to it
or is in the public domain.
600 million items.
600 million copyright friendly items.
Surely, we can find some things to use through Openverse.
So, creativecommons.org, the Openverse search engine.
And then, Unsplash is I would consider it a commercial site
'cause they have ads on their site.
But it's just a search engine for images
that are copyright friendly,
and they've got a ton.
So, don't be shy about going in and grabbing some.
Flickr.com.
I'm trying to remember being really big in the 90s.
I don't know. Feeling old.
You can actually use their search
and change the conditions of the search
so it only searches items that are copyright friendly.
On the left side of the screen,
I show you where the dropdown menu
that you would need to look at
to figure out how to change the different parameters
of copyright.
You can see the last option in the dropdown
is US government works.
On the right hand side of the screen,
you'll see that Cabbage Patch photo we had earlier.
This is the gentleman who took it.
His name is William McKeehan.
And underneath each item, when you drill down in Flickr,
there's the date it was taken
and then the copyright licensing terms.
And in this case, it's some rights reserved.
That's actually a link you click through,
find out more about it.
But you can also see the Creative Commons icons there.
There is the little body meaning attribution.
He would like to be listed by name.
That's William McKeehan who took this photo
and that's the share-alike arrow.
I wouldn't be able to turn around and copyright that photo.
I wouldn't be able to put
a additional copyright restrictions
on that photo just because I'm using it.
If you're looking for music,
you can actually go to SoundCloud.
where all the cool kids drop their mix tapes.
And use their search engine
to restrict the search results
to things that you have the ability to reuse.
There are tons of folks who are making music
in the privacy of their homes
or in the just making music 'cause they enjoy it
who would love to have their work used
in whatever you're doing.
They just want attribution.
That's all about influence, baby.
And you can just, you can search
by things you can use commercially.
You can search by things that you can use
for non-commercial purposes.
And then once you get to an actual track,
it lists very specifically
like how you need to respect their copyright.
A lot of times it's like,
"You have to follow me on SoundCloud.
You have to link to my channel."
It's like, okay.
That's their copyright restriction.
Heck, I can't make any type of music
on using just garage band and a Casio keyboard,
so I'm happy to link to someone's YouTube channel
if they've spent 12 hours whipping up
a completely awesome tune I would love to use for my video.
Psst, yeah.
And then, it's important to be clear
how you license your own work.
At CDCI, we have a copyright policy
listed on our About section of the website.
And the copyright policy reads in part,
"The CDCI respects copyright
and commits to using materials with consent,
giving credit went asked
and being transparent about fair use."
And there, we've included the icons for creative,
the Creative Commons license that we're operating under
for our own work.
The CDCI licenses all our materials
with Creative Commons 4.0.
We are letting folks use it with attribution,
only non-commercially and with that share-alike license.
Creative Commons also has a licensed chooser if you're,
it's a plain language license chooser
where it's like okay, how do you want your stuff used?
Just click these boxes
and it (gags) spits out a license at the end
that you can just embed in your website
or you can just write out in text somewhere on the site.
Now couple foibles about copyright at UVM.
Only use materials you have a license for UVM productions.
If you need materials that are licensed
that you don't immediately have access to,
go talk to the library.
They'll either find a way
to use their existing subscriptions
or tendrils to go get you an availability
to use the material or they'll point you to,
they have a whole library.
Did they mention library?
Large library.
Have a whole bunch of things in their library.
Help you find other things that might do the,
accomplish the same goal.
If you ignore a copyright and someone pursues you legally,
you are personally responsible
even if what you were making
is something you were making for UVM.
Here's the scariest stories portion of our presentation.
A UVM staff member made, assemble a gallery of materials.
They had checked the copyright
for every material in their gallery.
It's a gallery of songs and they were sharing it out.
And they used an image they found online
to promote that gallery.
They did not get permission from the photographer
to use the image.
And the photographer pursued legal action against them.
And UVM was like good luck with that.
They wound up having to pay nearly a thousand dollars
to make it, make the legal action go away.
Copyright, it's about money.
It's really, really about money.
There was a different UVM staff member
who's pulling together an event
for a department.
They were partnering with an outside Vermont organization.
The Vermont organization had licensed some photos
from a photo photographer
and gave the photos to the UVM staff member and said,
"Please, please use these to promote the event."
And the staff member
put together a bunch of social media posts
and went back to the director of the organization,
of the outside organization and said,
"Is this acceptable? Is this okay?
Based on your understanding of the licensing agreement
you have and the photographer."
And the director said, "Yeah, that looks great."
Well, the photographer and the organization fell out.
They stopped speaking with one another.
There were other issues at play
and the photographer withdrew consent
for their materials to be used in any way.
And so, it became a whole thing
where you had to scrub all the materials
from the internet because consent had been withdrawn.
It's their right to withdraw consent,
but there's just a whole bunch of places
where more documentation could have been used
or how to ascertain
who was included in the licensing of those materials.
Did the director have the ability to turn around
and give, transfer the license to a different person?
It gets really complicated.
Anyway, the last part
is that work you create while being paid by UVM,
technically belongs to UVM.
Reach your HR manual.
But if you write, say a book,
while you're on the clock at UVM,
UVM technically holds a copyright.
Songs.
UVM has a particular quirk about songs.
If you're gonna play a song at an event,
including an online event,
like if we'd started this workshop
with like a sing along to a hot new track,
that would be considered public performance of a song.
In order to do that,
you have to have the license available for the song.
There's a new group called Global Music Rights group
that's sprang up in 2019
and their licensing terms are ridiculous.
And UVM has said that they just are not here for it.
The radio station here on campus holds licenses
with other licensing firms for songs.
And so, there's just a ton of ways to access those.
But Global Music Rights group
bought up a lot of song licenses
for really, really hard hitting artists,
really big, big names and classic names.
So off the top of my head,
it's Bruce Springsteen.
It's The Beatles.
It's the Eagles, Post Malone, Lizzo,
Bruno Mars, Prince, Guns N' Roses, Metallica.
So, that level of bigness.
And so, UVM just says that you just cannot use them.
That link goes to the catalog for GMR.
So, you can check if you're if you wanna use...
Oh, Nicki Minaj is a GMR artist as well.
Can't use her songs as well, ha.
These are just some handy links.
This is UVM's official copyright policy.
And this is UVM's media copyright guidelines
as laid out by the Howe Library here on campus.
And this is very interesting
in that it is UVM's specific terms of use
for their websites.
And in a nutshell,
they expressly reserve all right, title and interest to
and all copyright, trademarks, logos, patents,
and other intellectual property and proprietary rights,
(inhales) including but not limited to any images,
photographs, animations, video, audio, music,
text, and quote unquote, applet.
Along with the overall quote unquote,
look and feel, processes, software,
and technology, and other materials.
They own everything.
I'm not sure how this would come into play
unless they actually decided to exert that copyright
in a court of law,
but they put it right out there.
It's linked right here.
So, you can see more about it.
Thank you for your time.
This presentation itself is licensed
under the Creative Commons license 4.0
that the CDCI uses for all of their work,
which is CC-BY-NC-SA,
which means Creative Commons license with attribution,
for non-commercial materials only.
And it share-alike so you can't actually put,
can't actually copyright it yourself.
Find these slides at go.uvm.edu/accessibility.