Copyright And The Dope*

About This Message Board
1

I am reading Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen right now and I came across a poem called “Good Germans”

It’s a 12 line poem whose first eight lines are, I think, key to getting the last four lines.

I don’t entirely get the last four lines.

I want to ask about the poem and get some ideas about them but they’re meaningless without context. I also don’t want to impose on people by making them find it on their own. For example;
*
You and me in a little toy-shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got
Set them loose at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they are gone.*

This is by Nena it’s called 99 Red Balloons Google it.

So instead I do something like quote the above four lines and say that it’s 99 Red Balloons - Nena.

Now, this is perfectly fine and common practice - despite the fact that sweepyx** most likely did not, at any point, obtain the rights to this song or video.

So, I can’t post a 12 line poem*** without infringing on copyright but I can link directly to something that, presumably, is violating copyright.

Many You-tube clips here are no longer extant for that exact reason.

So how come we can hand someone essentially an illicit copy and remain within propriety, but we can’t post the entirety of a song lyric or poem if we include all of the proper information that would be acceptable as a reference in a university level paper or a direct link to such?

It seems to me that handing you an illicit copy without citations is worse than giving you the full text - a 12 line poem as published - with full citations

I am truly not bitching and I don’t mind the current set up. It just seems incongruous to me and I am looking for some insight.

With that I bow out and let better then me educate.

Zeke

*If I have chosen the wrong place to post this, please move. I’ll report it myself just to be sure. Sorry if I have.
**sweepyx - It is entirely possible that he has the right to - there’s enough advertising before the video to make me wonder. If Sweepy is a bad pick I’m sure there a re a thousand that aren’t.
*** Please don’t give me shit for it being a 12 line poem. That’s why I used the example of 99Red Balloons. I’m not complaining; it’s just something that occurred to me when I was thinking of asking about Good Germans here.

2

We can’t control what people do on other sites. We do have a say in what people do here, and that means the Reader/various ownership entities will respect the copyrights of others because they want the copyrights on their own material to be respected.

3

Cool enough. It just seemed like an odd dichotomy to me.

Thanks for the response :slight_smile:

4

There’s also the matter that material on YouTube or other sites sometimes is legal, and there’s no easy way for us to tell whether it is. So that becomes YouTube’s problem, not ours.

5

I know mods have pulled links to obvious copyright violations in the past, as I have complained about them. I think it’s safe to assume anything on YouTube that’s not obviously by the owner (some media group, the artist, etc.) is a copyright violation. Those should be posted and removed.

The argument I’ve used in the past was that The Straight Dope is under copyright and nobody wants anyone to rip them off or use obvious workarounds to rip them off (link to some site that rips them off), so why should The Straight Dope allow people to rip others off.

The only thing that gets even slightly debatable in my opinion is when someone says oh, it’s easily Google-able online instead of linking to it. This site is not responsible for Google results, but it sure is responsible for the links it allows to be posted on its own site.

And, frankly, anyone posting such links ought to be strongly warned and then blocked for a bit if they continue to do so. Copyright is important for writers and other creative professionals and part of fighting ignorance is getting posters here to understand that.

I hope the mods have not relaxed their stance on this to allow such links. If they do it’s functionally equivalent to allowing people to post the stolen content here, regardless of whatever rationalizations someone can come up with.

6

No, we’ve no relaxed our standards. We understand and emphasize the importance of protecting creative work.

However, monitoring on the internet is very difficult. We’re OK with “fair usage.” But if someone posts an obvious copyright infringement on these boards (such as, quoting material in its entiretly), we delete it and tell them to find a legit source and provide a link. If someone posts a link to a site that we KNOW (have definite proof) is violating copyright laws, we’ll close down that link.

But we don’t go out of our way to check every link that anyone posts; we haven’t enough staff for that, even if we wanted to. We trust the our posters will do the checking and post only links to legit sites. That trust may be blind foolishness, but that’s our posish and we’re stickin’ to it.

7

YouTube also removes videos because they might be conflicting, not just because they actually are. I’ve seen a lot of short clips removed that have commentary and thus should be fair use. And everyone who links to a copyrighted video here is almost certainly using fair use–other than those videos that contain the entire work.

I will admit that the Reader is falling into the Just World fallacy if they think avoiding infringement of others will prevent infringement of their own content. It’s magical thinking to think that one would affect the other. The vast majority of infringers have no idea about this board at all, let alone its copyright policies.

8

That’s not what they think. The idea is that, one, respecting the copyrights of other people is the right thing to do, and two, it makes sense for the Straight Dope/the Reader to respect other people’s copyrights if it’s going to ask other providers to respect theirs.

9

Do note that there is a significant exception: because of its very nature it is entirely fair use to use the whole of a mathematical proof. Previous thread.

Of course, it’s usually better to link to it.