Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Linda Rosholt Hash asks Do you have to buy the rights to broadcast the little clips from movies, songs, or commercials you sometimes have at the ends of episodes? Are there other intellectual property aspects you need to deal with? And for the other angle, how is the content of your podcasts protected?

Let me provide a brief explanation of copyright law.

In the United States, the Copyright Act of 1976 creates exemptions for what is called Fair Use.

Under fair use exemptions, you can use copyrighted material for several reasons. This includes criticism and commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, and parody. The other overriding principle is that you can’t hurt the business of the copyright owner. So you can do something that would discourage people from purchasing or using the original copyrighted material.

With that being said, and I know I’m biased, I think I’ve established a very strong track record over the course of almost six years of this being an educational podcast. No one is coming here to avoid purchasing other content.

I have a strong fair use case for the content I use. In fact, I think you could make the case that a podcast like this falls squarely within the legitimate fair use exemption.

That said, the fact that I can make a solid legal argument for fair use doesn’t mean someone couldn’t make my life a real pain.

Practically, movie studios don’t bother to pursue copyright claims unless someone is trying to copy, sell, or pirate entire movies. You’ve probably seen screenshots or very short video clips of movies that have been turned into memes.A movie clip is not a substitute for an entire movie. It would be extremely difficult to prove that playing a clip would somehow be taking money away from a studio.

The music industry, on the other hand, will literally check every podcast for the slightest bit of copyrighted content. They are notorious for filing claims for the slightest things, even when they don’t own the copyright.

This is a major problem on YouTube. Channels that explicitly do music education videos often receive strikes from record labels. Go check out Rick Beato’s videos on the subject.

So, if I use music on this show, which I don’t do that often, I’m almost always using music that is in the public domain. This is a pragmatic decision because of how difficult record labels are.

For example, in my episode on extremely large numbers, at the end, I played a short clip of the song “Barney Google,” recorded in 1923 and in the public domain.

As for my content, there isn’t much you can do beyond claiming a copyright. As with fair use, if someone were to use a clip from my show, I wouldn’t really care. I think that is fair use. However, I’ve had people who tried to copy the entire show wholesale, and that would be violation of copyright.

Ultimately, anything and everything you want to enforce comes down to the law and how much you want to spend trying to enforce it.