Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Copyright And The Harlem Shake: Selective Enforcement
Techdirt: For those of you who have managed to avoid the viral sensation of February, known as "The Harlem Shake," consider yourselves lucky. People still seem at a total loss how this became "a thing," but it involves the opening 30 seconds of a song released nearly a year ago, called The Harlem Shake, by Baauer, with the first half involving someone in a wacky costume (often involving a helmet) dancing while others around them ignore it, followed by a bass drop and suddenly everyone around is dancing crazily, often involving costumes, stuffed animals (or real animals), people in sleeping bags and much much more. It's gone quite insane (and, yes, we know it's not "the real Harlem Shake" but so what?) with way, way, way, way too many people, companies and organizations all doing their own versions. There were reports of 4,000 Harlem Shake videos being uploaded to YouTube every single day, and over 60,000 being on YouTube already. If you want (and I warn you to be careful), you can spend hours going through video after video. The KnowYourMeme link up top has collected some of the most popular ones. I cannot vouch for how many such videos it takes before you are driven insane, so be forewarned.
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Back in high school, I took a video production class in which we often used popular music to spice up our videos. The main problem with this being that we never got he rights to any of this music that we used. The teacher told us we could only us 30 seconds or less of each song to prevent copyright infringement, and that we had to credit the musician/artist within the opening or closing credits of our video. When I was a sophomore in high school, I didn't really see a problem with this. A few years on now, I understand a bit more about copyright laws and such, and I know that using 30 seconds of a popular song in a video really isn't something one should do without some sort of payment towards the musician. But.... that's just the rules we're all supposed to follow. There's a large part of me that feels as though the free sharing of music from one person to another is the greatest thing about technology and music. I burn CDs for my friends all the time based on music I own that they also really like. It spreads the art around, and I know that within my group of friends, the indie sort of music that I listen to, I share to them, which then causes them to purchase the album (just as I did). Just as art museums can be free to the public, so should lots of music. The sharing of art and music stimulates culture and allows for more creativity over the free top 40 radio prevalent in the background of our grocery store shopping.
Copyright laws are so selective and convoluted that one needs a lawyer to truly understand them. The problem is though that its so easy for anyone to produce content now especially to make videos for youtube including adding songs to them. And with how easy it is to purchase a song on iTunes or other means it would be understandable to think that it would be ok to put a song you paid for in your video but unfortunately even if the original author is credited your video could be infringing on copyright laws and the video you put lots of hard work in to could be taken down.
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