Substantial People and Moments in Copyright is my latest post on my Substack at the time of this post. It is far more story-oriented than my previous post on Substack, and I had fun researching lawsuits and individuals I thought people would find interesting. The important details of the article are apparent within the article itself, so this Inquiry post focuses more on what decisions I made and how I did them during the creation process of the post.
My personal favourite detail of the article is the backing track made by Good Kid that I decided would be perfect to have in the background while reading. Good Kid have made all of their works DMCA free and actively support the use of their music for content creators, so I thought having songs from their EP Good Kid 4 would be a great way of showing what can be done with an understanding of your copyright rights and how you can use them to help benefit others
I decided that the individual I wanted to focus on for my first iteration of the article would be Kevin MacLeod of YouTube fame. His extensive library of music is all under the Creative Commons licence, making it a popular source of music for a large number of content creators to use to avoid having music in their works that would get them into copyright legal trouble. Since I aim to have younger creators use my articles the most out of any other audience, I decided to use what is likely to be a key source of childhood nostalgia as a way to grab their attention and get them interested in reading the rest of the article.
The next sections of the article focus on two different types of lawsuits, one more serious and informative, the other more comedic to continue creating interest in any potential readers. The serious one talked about the Viacom and YouTube lawsuit about copyrighted material being uploaded onto YouTube’s platform. The reasoning behind this inclusion is to explain to the reader why the YouTube copyright system works the way it does, and to warn them that just because copyrighted material is currently on the site, that doesn’t mean it’s safe or that it will continue to stay there later. The comedic lawsuit focused on one of the most blatant acts of plagiarism in the music industry, with Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” pulling directly from David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure.” I knew that I wanted this piece in to include Vanilla Ice’s hilarious defence of the music sounding nearly exactly the same. While this decision was to engage with the reader in a comedic manner, I also used this opportunity to add a small comment explaining how this lawsuit was one of the foundational decisions regarding how the music industry deals with music sampling in the future. While I intend to add more lawsuits, I think these two lawsuits are the two standards for lawsuits I want to add in the future; either super pivotal and critical to a large part of copyright laws in a specific industry, or comedic to show how little effort people will put in to steal and replicate works for their own opportunities.
For my final section, I have a timeline of the Canada Copyright Act, although I am currently unsatisfied with the state it is in. Official sources only go up to 2017 for important moments in the act itself, and the official source that I could find didn’t go deep into why certain changes were made. This section in particular will be a focus for improvement in the future, as I believe adding context for the changes would massively improve the quality of the timeline. While the piece is an important part of the article, there is clearly work to be done to bring it up to a standard I would be proud of.
One piece of either article I wish I could have added was a section on artificial intelligence laws regarding copyright. However, due to my poor scheduling and the complexity of the topic, I did not feel comfortable giving any advice regarding it in detail. This, alongside the Canadian Copyright Act, will be my primary focuses of improvement past the end of my time in this class.
While my two Substack articles are at a somewhat decent level of progress and information included in them, I plan on adding more and improving them to a much higher standard. I also want to see if there is some way to add an index or some similar feature in Substack so that readers can jump to sections that are of interest to them or that they require more information on. This project will be something I can definitely see myself having fun updating and improving upon as a way to maintain and upgrade my writing skills. I also hope to be able to share with content creators who want and need to be careful around copyright laws, as we are in a time where indie works have never been both more supported and stolen from by the internet at large.
While I know this will take a lot of time and effort to get right, I don’t think I’ve been more excited to work on a project than I have with this effort to clear up and explain copyright to people who need to understand it.