It’s nice to meet you! I’m Bryan Toth, an undergraduate student pursuing degrees in Computer Science and Classics. Copyright in general is a personal interest and worry of mine, especially regarding how it does and should transfer over to the digital world. Where is the fine line between a transformative and derivative work? Should copyright infringement for a small segment of a large video be enough to take down the entire video? Is it easy to fake a copyright infringement claim? If so, can that be fixed? Innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven innocent? When there are uploaders, hosts, viewers, and more, who should take the fall for an infringement? Intent doesn’t matter, but should knowledge of infringement? Can someone feasibly be expected to know the owner of every item they find on the vast internet?
Copyright is truly a large, dense, complicated subject, and covering it in its entirety is not reasonable. Thus, we have the topic of this blog: audio copyright. I’m going to focus on ContentID with YouTube and Audible Magic with Twitch, but I am willing to discuss anything at all copyright-wise if we get there. I may bring in tangential material for examples and parallels, but rest assured that the posts on this blog will focus on the relatively small part of internet copyright that is audio. Now, back to the big question: what’s my stake in this? Why me?
I’m a gamer. I love video games. I also love music, both in and outside of video games. When ContentID struck hard, I saw how it affected major Let’s Players on YouTube. When Audible Magic was implemented on Twitch a few months back, I saw the impact on Twitch. This affects what I do in my spare time, and when that happened, I started researching. Now, I’m writing my thoughts, asking for input, and looking for a solution. I know how bad false claims can hurt: I’ve been falsely accused of copyright and had an entire forum that I’d worked on for many months taken down. Even if the claim gets overturned, false claims hurt and can hurt badly. I lost members of my forum to that. YouTubers lose profits. Gamers and musicians lose publicity. If enough great minds get together and talk, we can surely figure out the best way to implement copyright enforcement to fix this. Are you ready to help?
audiocopyright 