Ah, Copyright, something that most everyone in the internet age is at the very least aware of thanks to the ease of copying media in the digital age and the ubiquity of “issues” people have tended to have, primarily on YouTube, involving the concept.
The strange thing is that for often the subject comes up it seems virtually no one even has a basic grasp of the concept. Everywhere on YouTube, especially, you see people say “no copyright intended” when they upload, let’s say, a lyric video to a song, or will claim the most random things about something as “trying to avoid copyright” or similar oddities. Hell, just the fact that people phrase things in such incorrect ways (usually never saying “copyright violation” for example, or saying someone “gave him a DCMA” which equally makes no sense like the above (it would be “DMCA Takedown” or something similar) shows how little of the concept is grasped by the average person online.
Also, yes, it does look like the “Capsule Corp” logo from the Dragonball series.
This was so surprising to me that a few years ago I started what was supposed to be a series on the things you get wrong about copyright. It was a good idea that I never followed through with beyond the first entry, and I’d like to change that and start the series over again, this time with a little better focus on the concept itself; one that I find incredibly simple, but the legalities surrounding it indeed can be complicated.
That’s getting a bit ahead of myself — the best thing I could do is, honestly, try to educate others, in my own way, about what the concept actually is. That would be quite a deep subject in and of itself, and I do intent to get a bit into the rabbit hole on it, as one might say, but for this article I want to just touch on the basic idea and why I feel it is an easy concept to understand.
Do understand, this is more of a laypersons take on it – I’m not a copyright lawyer and this is certainly not legal advice in any capacity — it’s only me sharing my understanding of the concept as I have studied it, for what that’s worth to you, the reader.
It boils down to this: copyright is, quite literally, the “right to copy” something. It’s similar to the concept of “owning” something, but in this case the owned object is more of a concept — a created work on a medium, rather than the medium itself. Things like songs, stories, television shows, films, and the like, as opposed to the physical book a story may be in, the physical television set something is watched on, or the physical Compact Disc which holds music.
Again, the subject can get incredibly complex thanks to the laws surrounding and protecting copyright, and there are well know exceptions to these laws provided for special cases, that doesn’t change this basic premise — Copyright is the right to copy a creative work.
This right can be transferred, shared, restricted, or anything else you can think of, even eventually revoked by laws over a period of time, but it still exists as a concept with everything that has ever been created unless otherwise removed.
That itself is a strange concept, to many, as well — Copyright is granted in effect at the creation of something — this article, by virtue of existing, for example, has its copyright held by me. I own it as a concept, and own the right to copy it, share it, what have you. If you were to take and copy this text and put it on your own blog without my permission you would be in violation of my copyright to this work. The question of if I would actually do anything about this or not really doesn’t matter — the above principle is what the laws regarding the concept start with, and I’m all in favor of it. There is no process to “apply” for copyright – it’s just granted de jure, so long as it doesn’t violate the copyright of someone else, of course.
It really is that simple at the core. If you make something, you own the right to copy it. It’s “yours” in that sense, no one else’s. The same is true of the work of others, they own it, not you. Perhaps now you see just why the phrase “no copyright intended” makes no sense.
That, of course, is just a very quick glance at the topic, one that gets incredibly complex as you dive into regional laws regarding it. I’d like to cover this in more detail in another article coming soon, and would equally like to continue the “things you get wrong about copyright” series, so expect to see those entries soon enough.
For those who do want to read more, the obligatory Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
For now, though, the usual saying: More to come, as always.