PROTECTING RIGHTS, DECONSTRUCTING BRIDGES – THE DMCA

If you are a “creative” of any kind, who has, in the past, shared your performances of “familiar” (that is, copyrighted) material for no reason other than to demonstrate your skills, or your appreciation of the skills of the creator of the material, your time is past. 

Since the implementation of the DIGITAL MILLENNIUM COPYRIGHT ACT OF 1998 (DMCA), which is the legislation regulating content usage on digital media, there has been a conflict growing in a steady evolution. It has paralleled the development of a wide range of digital platforms, many of which, like YouTube and Facebook, have benefited greatly from user content creation. 

For that reason, media platforms, who are responsible under the DMCA for enforcing copyright protections, have played loose with that responsibility for as long as they have been able to, but the salad days are done. Platforms are now facing large fines ($150,000 and more for a single infraction) and over the past 18 months, the digital media world has changed. 

Now, anyone uploading a track to any media platform will find their upload digitally scoured by algorithms for signals that the work infringes on a copyright holder’s rights. There are automatic penalties for an uploader who fails these copyright infringement trials. You can be canceled, banned from the platform for life, with any content you may already have on the site permanently and irretrievably deleted. 

Okay, fair enough, you might say, because people are generally sensitive to the rights of others, and we would all want protection for something we have created, that is ours. 

“Protection”, in that context, equates to money – dollars and cents. You can contact the owner of the material you would like to “cover” and pay a mechanical licensing fee for how you intend to use that material. That fee can amount to very little, or a whole lot, depending upon the value of the material you wish to use. 

That dollar figure limits the use of material, even by well-financed operations, like movie studios. It is incredibly expensive, for instance, to license the use of a Beatles track, which is why they are rarely heard in the movies. 

Movie studios and big recording labels aside, mechanical licensing fees eliminate almost everyone else from using copyrighted material, even for purposes without profit. Creative types working in home studios can no longer legally upload copyrighted material to an internet site because they can’t afford it. 

Most creatives learn their crafts by emulating, recreating, and building on material that is familiar to them, and they test out their development by going public with their projects. And most have no money to pay expensive entry fees that will inevitably limit the playing fields – the content libraries – to a managed elite, which the jaded among us may equate to a corporate sponsorship of the arts. 

This new hard-edged copyright enforcement will have an impact on the culture of tomorrow. It might make one wonder how the media programmers will people their ivory elite in a world designed to protect creators who might never have developed without assistance from earlier, less distributed, less litigious generations of geniuses.