Licensure, Gifs and The Man -- Oh My!

We have all, at one point or another, blindly signed our lives away in the Terms & Conditions. Be it iTunes, Facebook, or Gmail, I am sure we have all done it at least once. Today, even if you were to be equipped with the proper schooling to understand the language and you decided to read the terms and conditions, what would you do after? Your only option would, presumably, be to not utilize the site or service if you disagreed with their terms. But for something like email, how would you exist in 2020 without an email address?

I won't link it here (because it is wildly inappropriate), but if you enjoy the humor of South Park, there is a disturbing (read: gross) episode from 2012 that drives home the importance of reading the terms and conditions.

Uh-oh

Something that really shocked me from this week's reading was learning that by creating an account on many social media sites, that you are waiving your rights to creating a license for your work.

"By accepting, you’re usually granting a transferable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to the platform to use any content that you share. By creating an account on the site, you’re agreeing to give the social media platform a licence to use your content."

-Akber Ahmed (2018)

Of course, utilizing social media does not allow all users to basically screenshot your work to claim as their own. Giving the platform the utilize your content without final say on how that is used feels off-putting to me, however. Think of the commercials you see for things like Google and Facebook nowadays. I always assumed that they had permission to use certain people's videos and photos or assumed they were some kind of stock people. According to the information above, it doesn't sound like, legally, they would need this kind of permission if they really didn't want to obtain it.

Ahmed goes on to delve more into copyright and intellectual property. He muses that legislation out of the European Parliament could spell the beginning of the end for the sharing of memes and gifs. I did not feel satisfied in making a judgement on this based on his writing and looked into it further. Like much in intellectual property, it seems to boil down to two main issues: how are you using the property and how did you get the property?

In another course through FSU's ISLT program, we discussed copyright law through the lens of Open Educational Resources. When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) came into play, I found myself confused. “Even when a teacher can legitimately claim that the way he or she wants to use a copyrighted work in the classroom  is a fair use, the DMCA criminalizes the act of working around  digital rights management in order to make a fair use” (Risner, 2018) Luckily, a close friend of mine is an intellectual property attorney who was able to remove some of this fog. He explained that generally, fair use is still applicable to education. In the example he provided to me, he discussed how the “work around” is typically what is criminal. If you try to use a copyrighted image that will not allow you to save it to your desktop, but you screenshot it and remove the copyright watermark, this is infringement.

So, what about the gif I shared in this post? Based on the opinion of lawyer and blogger Mariam Tsaturyan, I believe my use of the work would qualify as fair use as it is intended to prop up my first point about terms and conditions. While I did not receive permission to use the gif from the creator, and I am unsure of the creator's permissions from the creators of South Park, I did credit the show and link back to the original gif. There have been no court cases surrounding the illegal use of a gif (yet) and I am not trying to undermine the original intent of the work.

As with everything, I feel it comes back to monetization. If I had ads running on my blog and paid sponsorships nestled within this post, would that then cause an issue? Could the creators say that my argument making me money was based upon their work and that I owed them?

Copyright and intellectual property is something that sounds simple in concept, but much trickier in action. I assume, like many aspects of the law, that is intentional. What are your takeaways in our copyright readings? Does anything you have recently learned change how you plan to run your class or facilitation?

References:

Ahmed, A. (2018). Intellectual Property & Social Media - a guide for content creators and meme sharers. Retrieved from http://www.ipcareers.co.uk/career-advice/intellectual-property-social-media-a-guide-for-content-creators-and-meme-sharers/

Reiser, R. A. (2018). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. (p.318) New York, NY: Pearson.

Tsaturyan, M., & Tsaturyan, M. T. M. (2020, March 22). What You Need to Know About GIFs. Retrieved from https://www.freelanceandmarketing.com/animated-gifs-subject-to-copyright/

(Here is an overview of the South Park episode on Wikipedia, but even it is still very much R-rated.)