Touching on copyright in the lectorial reminded me of past struggles – namely an ignorant 11-year-old Tim trying to upload an original animation to YouTube that ingeniously included ‘Happy Together’ made famous by The Turtles and consequentially being confronted with blaring notices of copyright infringement and denial to the upload.

This frustrated me at the time because, firstly, this animation was part of a series and there was demand within my primary school friendship group for this instalment to be uploaded, and secondly, ‘Happy Together’ was the perfect audio for this particular moment, and in no way did I think I would be able to find a suitable replacement. It was problems like this however that, along with my growing obsession with playing and producing music, prompted my progression into soundtrack work, which later enabled me to avoid this problem with short films I produced.

Although this did allow me to evade issues of breaching copyright, it instigated the necessity to look into and acquire copyright protection on my own material. Now when some ambitious little 11-year-old decides to shit all over the blood, sweat and tears that I’ve put into my precious work by including it in their E-grade animations I can have YouTube get nasty on them and hit them with the biggest infringement notices they’ve got.