|
Are You a Copyright Criminal?
It's getting more tempting to infringe on copyright when creating presentations, thanks to many new scanning and duplicating technologies as well as proliferating Web content. But writers, designers, artists and copyright owners are becoming more aggressive, using new tactics and technologies to enforce their rights. If you don't know the rules, you could end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.
You've seen them at work. Sometimes brazen, sometimes oblivious, they break the law without giving it a second thought. Maybe, without even knowing it, you're one of them.
They're copyright claim-jumpers - presenters who slip "Dilbert" cartoons, photographs scanned from magazines, graphics downloaded from the Web, photocopies of trade-journal articles, audio files, video clips or CD music into their presentations or handouts with little or no understanding of how they're trampling on someone else's copyright.
Some do it knowingly, assuming their chances of getting nabbed are a small risk for the big payoff of easy access to high-quality prefabricated content. Others are unaware of how their seemingly benign reuse of pre-existing material - articles, pictures, music, songs, scripts or film clips - violates copyright law.
?Autumn Bell, a training specialist and frequent presenter for the University of New Mexico, says she witnessed her share of copyright abuses in a past life working for a telecommunications company. There, she worked with managers who ordered people to copy other companies' training materials to save money. She also saw plenty of lesser violations, such as flagrant photocopying of manuals and books for mass distribution. In six years, Bell says, "Never once did I hear the word copyright spoken."
It can be easy for busy presenters to give copyright concerns short shrift; after all, there are deadlines to hit and rehearsals to do. And sometimes that article you read last week in Forbes Magazine or that photo you downloaded from the Web yesterday fits perfectly into the presentation you're giving - tomorrow. Copyright permission? Who has time? Some token attribution ought to do it, you figure. Surely the copyright owners will welcome the free advertising, right? And what are the chances that they'll even find out?
The reality is: Whether the bulk of your presentations are in-house or to external audiences, your odds of being caught violating copyright are improving every day, as are your chances of paying a stiff fine. Statutory damages for infringing on copyright can hit $20,000 per violation, and they can go as high as $100,000 in some circumstances of willful violation - and that's above and beyond the fine for actual damages. Furthermore, commercial copyright violation involving more than 10 copies and a value of more than $2,500 is now a felony in the United States.
? In one recent case, a corporation paid a seven-figure settlement for its unauthorized photocopying of articles from a trade journal and archiving those copies for internal distribution. With similar violations occurring almost daily in corporate America, and with an increase in piracy on the World Wide Web, licensing organizations, performing-rights societies and other copyright cops have stepped up activity to enforce their rights.
?The Training Media Association, a watchdog for training-video vendors, offers a $10,000 bounty for reporting illegal copying or unauthorized "public performance" of off-the-shelf training videos. A temporary-employment agency recently paid a six-figure out-of-court fee after one of its employees reported it to the TMA for making illegal copies of four videos (the agency had no license to do so) and sending the copies out for use in its 50 offices.
?United Media the distributor of "Dilbert" cartoons, has been asking people to take illegally imported "Dilbert" cartoons off their Web and intranet sites. ASCAP and BMI, two organizations that license the right to play copyrighted music in public settings (including most business-presentation scenarios) have reportedly added large conference centers and hotels to the list of sites they patrol to ensure that those using even small selections of pre-recorded music in presentations are properly licensed to do so.
?Is all this talk of copyright abuse overblown? Is the perceived need to protect yourself from prosecution just another anal-retentive legal formality? And aren't the most flagrant abusers a small segment of the presentation community? You'd be surprised at the answers.
Although many cases of abuse undoubtedly are small or accidental - busy presenters who in good faith give full attribution but don't seek permission; others who are unaware of public performance rights or who stretch the fair-use doctrine to its limits - interviews and research conducted for this article indicate a serious lack of knowledge about copyright law among frequent presenters. A two-month review of comments posted to listservs frequented by presenters and trainers, for instance, suggests that many people routinely violate copyright law, and that there is a general lack of understanding about what constitutes legal use.
Indeed, a 1993 survey by the Training Media Association found that more than 30 percent of videos in survey respondents' corporate libraries were illegal copies, and more than 75 percent of printed training materials in those same libraries were illegally copied. (Survey responses were anonymous.) And TMA director Bob Gehrke says the problem may have worsened in the six years since the study. A typical copyright violator, Gehrke believes, is someone "who thinks he can be a hero by saving his company some money, especially if faced with a tight budget."
|