No matter how many simplified five minute videos on the subject of creative commons – explained using “cool” digitalised graphics and animation and soundtracked to easily digestible Muzak or Fat Boy Slim aimed at “young people” – I watch, I can’t seem to wrap my head around exactly what I am and am not allowed to do on the Internet. Copyright law is hard enough to understand as a standalone; creative commons goes that bit further and says: “yes, you can use this… but only in this way. If you don’t use it exactly in this way you will be sued and will not win.”
I decided to do a bit of research. I came across this article on Spectator. Long story short, Buzzfeed used a photographer’s photo on their website, who subsequently filed a copyright lawsuit claiming $3.6 million. But that’s not the part that caught my attention. It was this:
“There are plenty of other sites that rely on others’ images—often without licensing or even giving credit—such as Pinterest and Tumblr. However, these sites are not subject to copyright lawsuits due to the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DMCA protects sites whose users upload images they did not create—including Pinterest and Tumblr—but not sites whose staff upload those images, including BuzzFeed.”
Given that one of the questions someone anonymously raised in this weeks tutorial (NB: it was me) surrounded the policing of copyright law on re-blogging focused platforms such as Tumblr, I found this paragraph extremely relevant. The DMCA (passed in 1998) limits the liability of the providers of on-line services by their users. Essentially, the act makes it a whole lot trickier to sue un-credited work on these platforms because it is the users who post the content, not the staff. It doesn’t help that there’s a “re-blog” button under every post, meaning that pictures can be re-blogged millions of times by millions of different users all over the world.
Luckily, Tumblr are very understanding and reasonable. If you happen to see your work floating around without credit, simply fill out this form and they will probably (maybe) (if they have a chance) look into taking it down for you! And that also saves you having to sue their staff as well as the 26 million fifteen year-olds who re-blogged your Instagram-filtered picture of your friend(s) smoking a cigarette.
Here’s one I took at the start of last year! (I won’t stress too much about posting this one, considering I took it. There’s no way I can get sued for that, right?)
