PAB2007 – Andy Kaplan-Myrth and Kathi Simmons
A New Mindset: Creative Commons Licensing presented at PAB2007 by Andy Kaplan-Myrth and Kathi Simmons
As Podcasters, you create and incorporate creative works – audio recordings, both your own and those created by others. You are dealing with the bread and butter of the incumbent media industries, groups that push for more restrictive copyright laws to protect their property.
Learn about Creative Commons licenses, copyright licences that you can easily use to make your podcasts available with only some rights reserved. This session will include the official release of the Canadian Podcasting Legal Guide, the first guide of its kind which speaks to Canadian law.
Photo by Laurent LaSalle.
Transcript below…
Bob Goyetche: I’m Bob Goyetche.
Mark Blevis: I’m Mark Blevis. This is special coverage of Podcasters Across Borders 2007 right here on the Canadian Podcast Buffet.
Bob Goyetche: This episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust. Stay tuned at the end to see how you can get a free iPod.
Mark Blevis: Podcasters Across Borders 2008 is taking place in Kingston, Ontario, Canada June 20 through June 22. Don’t forget to stay tuned to the Canadian Podcast Buffet and keep watching Podcasters Across Borders for details on registration, accommodations, speaking sessions and social activities.
On this episode, we’re going to hear “A New Mind Set: Creative Commons Licensing” presented by Andy Kaplan-Myrth and Kathi Simmons. One of the big treats of this session was the release of the Canadian Podcasting Legal Guide.
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: So thanks very much for having us come and speak here. I’m Andy Kaplan-Myrth and I’m one of the project leads for Creative Commons Canada. I’m going to start off the presentation here and give you some background information about Creative Commons and some of the logic of the organization. And then I’m going to describe how the licenses work and how you can get them to work for you, how you can get the licenses. But the main reason that we’re here is to unveil the Podcasters Legal Guide as Mark mentioned. And Kathi Simmons is going to take over. And she’s been working very hard on that and she’s going to unveil that.
So copyright. I don’t have great sense…it’s always difficult when you come into a new community and especially a community as diverse as this one, to know how much people already know about copyright. And I don’t need to spend a lot time going over a legal issue like that. But I do know that many people don’t really understand how copyright works because I get questions like, how do I copyright my work? And I know that people think that sometimes they need to register their work. So for my purposes, I’m just gonna say that copyright applies automatically to creative works. So if you’re an artist or an author, you’re podcasters, you record material and music, any types of sound, copyright applies automatically. You don’t need to do anything in order to, you know, get copyright for your work. I don’t have a lot of space up here.
Copyright actually involves a lot of rights and we usually refer to it as a bundle of rights. So copyright gives those rights to the copyright owner. Only the copyright owner can, by default, distribute, copy, modify their work and other sorts of adaptations. And that’s why authors typically write “all rights reserved” especially in printed work. When you write “all rights reserved” on your work, you’re just emphasizing that you’re holding the default rights and you’re not. Even though you’re publishing your work and putting it out there in the world, you’re holding on to the other rights that go with copyright. Of course, at least in the book world, book publishing world, people don’t just say “all rights reserved”. They give notices like this that basically say you can’t do anything with my work other than read it. But this is, you know, it’s really redundant in a way.
Now that’s true in the offline world for CD’s or for books. But it’s also true in the online world. You get the same copy protection when you publish material on a website, whether your website is a professional website like the Kingston Whig Standard or an independent blogger, such as the Kingston Blogger or a professional podcast like Queens University, or independent Podcasts. Are these guys here, This Week in Geek? It’s a Canadian podcast. And people like this may not know anything about copyright and they may not really care. But they may know exactly what, I mean, I don’t know about these guys. They don’t use a Creative Commons license, I now that much. So their podcast is “all rights reserved”. And what that means is, I’m probably not infringing their copyright when I download their podcast and listen to it on my computer, just ‘because that’s what podcasts are for. And I’m probably not infringing their copyright when I copy it on to my MP3 player and listen to it. But I am infringing their copyright if I give a copy of that to my friend, even if it’s to listen to it on their computer. And I am infringing it if I post it on my website. And I’m infringing their copyright if I take it and sample it and use it in my own podcast, even if I just clip out short, you know, short excerpts from an interview. And certainly if I take their podcast and I adapt it into a completely new work, like I turn a podcast of theirs, I add video to it and post it on U2, so it has, you know, it has their audio and my video animation or something like that. That’s definitely an infringement of their work. Especially if I then go and sell it somehow, and right, make money from this. You can see how the scenarios, how the scenario goes.
Now they may want that kind of protection, which is fine. But they may not. They may imagine that they want wider distribution of their work, especially; I mean it’s the nature of audio files and distribution on the internet. They may want more distribution of their work. So the fact that every work, whether you want it or not, gets that default protection, can be a problem in new media. And people like Larry Lessig started to think about that and develop new tools for people to be able to use to distribute their work more broadly, and allow other people to have some of the rights that copyright holders hold exclusively by default.
So that’s where Creative Commons comes from. That’s the set of tools. It relies on the exclusive rights of copyright, but it licenses them out to users to make their work available with less than all rights reserved. And the key words that Creative Commons uses is “some rights reserved”. So it’s not for everybody in every situation. And I’m not here to tell you, you should give your work away for free. But especially in the online world, you might want to do that, and then Creative Commons is a tool that can enable you to distribute your work more broadly. So different people want different, want to license different uses of their work. And Creative Commons Licenses accommodate that, with a variety of Licenses. We have six different standard licenses and they’re created through a combination of these license elements. I will go through each of them.
The first license element that you need to know about is attribution. Every Creative Commons License requires attribution. And that just means that when you license your work and you stick an Attribution License on it, people can use your work, but they need to, they need to attribute it to you. So using Creative Commons Licenses doesn’t let people claim that your work belongs to them. If you use a license that has the non-commercial element, people can use your work but they can’t…they can distribute it, they might be able to modify it, but they can’t then sell it or use it primarily for profit. If you use a license that has no derivatives in it, then people can use your work, they can distribute your work, but they can’t modify your work. If you’re already familiar with the free software world, the share-alike element will be familiar to you. That’s the…if you use a license that has the share-alike element in it, then people can modify your work but their modification has to be re-licensed under the same Creative Commons share-alike license. And so by, you know, if you take your podcast, you put a Creative Commons share-alike license on it, then you’re encouraging the Creative…you’re…encouraging the Commons to grow because anybody who uses it has to license their work back into the Commons.
None of this affects anything about fair dealing and Kathi is going to, I think, talk more about fair dealing. But if you’re familiar with that, which I think you probably should be as podcasters, some amount anyway of your content is going to be okay under fair dealing. And that applies regardless of Creative Commons Licenses.
So the different licenses, the six different licenses that we have are created by a combination of these different license elements. And my slide didn’t convert into PowerPoint properly, there you go. These are the licenses: Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives, Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike, Attribution Non-Commercial, Attribution and No-Derivatives, Attribution Share-Alike and the simple Attribution License. So I’ll just pick one, for example, the second one down is Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike. So if I have a podcast and I apply an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License to it, I’m allowing people to download it for, you know, download it and listen to it, but also to distribute it, copy it among their friends and even put it on their website for distribution, as long as its attributed to me as the author. And as long as they don’t distribute it for commercial purposes. So they can’t sell it. Many people think that they can’t put it on their website if it has ads on their website. That question’s still sort of up for grabs. But they can’t do it for primarily commercial purposes.
They can also modify my podcast and they can distribute that adaptation, but only if they license their adaptation under the same Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License. So you have your podcast and you want to license it under Creative Commons say. This is how you do it. You go to our website www.creativecommons.ca and you get…you click a link, I think, that says Get a License. And then you get this form that has two simple questions, “Do you want to allow commercial uses?” and “Do you want to allow modifications of your work?”. And when you answer these, you get an icon that links to three different versions of the license. The one at the bottom here is the digital code. And that is metadata that goes into the HTML if you’re, if you’re publishing a blog. It goes into the meta. You can put it in the meta-tags of your…of images…or of audio. Not so much of video. That’s been difficult because of standards. But the digital code basically allows search engines to find Creative Commons material based on the license. So you can use Yahoo to search specifically for material that’s licensed under an Attribution Share-Alike License if that’s what you’re looking for. Because you want to make commercial use of it, say.
On top of that, there’s the legal code, and that’s a legal contract. That’s the license that the lawyers have already sort of signed off on so that you don’t have to spend the money and the time to get a lawyer and write your own copyright license. The legal code is the legally binding instrument under all of this. The Commons Deed is the part of the license that’s the most visible to people. When you first see a work and you click the icon, you get the Commons Deed. It’s the so-called human readable version of the license and it summarizes in plain English and, for that matter, in I think, 37 other languages, what the license…what that particular license allows. So this is the Creative Commons Deed for an Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License. You see it very clearly with the license elements, but it also says exactly what you can do. You’re free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work. You’re free to make derivative works under the following conditions.
And then you get this icon that you can stick on your website and it links back to the license. And typically, you write “some rights reserved”, but you don’t have to. It has become sort of the key words. The licenses have become wildly popular on the internet since 2002 when they were launched. There are 159,000,000 links back to Creative Commons Licenses as of March. It’s still…the number of licenses out there is still increasing exponentially, which means that people are still…more and more people are using them, not just more and more people publishing works under them. The number of Creative Commons Licenses out there or licensed works doubles every 115 days currently. In Canada, there are over 300,000 licensed works. So there are Creative Commons International sort of licenses. There are…then there are licenses in each jurisdiction. There’s a Canadian version of the license. Many Canadians don’t use the Canadian versions of the license, probably because they don’t realize that it’s there and they don’t realize that it’s different. But it is different. It’s been customized for Canadian law. And it’s…and if, you’re a Canadian using Creative Commons Licenses, I would encourage you to use the Canadian versions of the license, not just because it would help us to keep any statistics, but because it would be better. It would be more legally binding for you in Canada.
And this is a breakdown of the Canadian use of the licenses. And you can see that more than half of Canadians using these licenses are using the…or more than half of the works are licensed under Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike. And the next more popular…which do allow modifications by the way, so more than half of the licensed works out there, you are allowed to modify. The next most popular are the Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative Licenses which you can think of sort of as an advertising license. You put your work out there, you let people distribute it, but you don’t let them modify it. So you’re basically letting them do your advertising for you which is, which is a business model in this case. I’m going to pass the microphone over to Kathi and she’s going to introduce the Legal Guide.
Kathi Simmons: Well, I want to start by thanking you for inviting me to this. It’s the first time I’ve been really this close into the podcasting community. And I’m finding it very exciting and very interesting. And so far, I’ve really been enjoying myself. So I…I’ll try not to make this too boring, but I will warn you in advance it’s a legal presentation. So by its nature, it can’t really help it. But I’ll do my best…I’ll do my best.
So this is basically what I’m going to go through: What is the Guide? Where did it come from? What’s in it? And what is it good for? So very basically, what is the Guide? Its an educational resource. It’s here to sort of highlight the legal issues that are relevant to you as podcasters and give you a little bit of information about what it is, what your rights are, what rights you’re implicating, and those sorts of things. And we also hope it will be an advocacy tool because as you’ll see, if you’re not already aware, our intellectual property laws are quite complicated and perhaps unnecessarily so. So if you find that there are legal issues that apply to you and don’t really make sense, then please, by all means, take this opportunity to address these issues with your Government.
So where did it come from? Very briefly, it’s very closely aligned with Creative Commons. This is because Creative Commons in the US originally created the Podcasting Legal Guide. And Mark Blevis has told us that we really need…there’s a hole…we really need to know what the Canadian laws are because the Canadian copyright laws especially are quite different from those in the States. So what we aimed to do with this Guide was create a Canadian version so that you’d be…Canadian podcasters would be more aware of what their legal rights are and what legal rights they’re implicating. And it’s also come from the Law and Technology Program at the University of Ottawa where both Andy and I are affiliated.
So very briefly, what’s in the Guide? It’s primarily a copyright document. I’ll let you know that right now. But there are issues of publicity rights, trademarks, a couple of other things and some background on Creative Commons Licenses. So I apologize in advance if my copyright discussion is, is sort of very basic for people who are familiar with it. But I thought I’d err on the side of intro to copyright for those who aren’t aware. And if you are then, by all means, dig into the Guide.
Basically, in its most basic form, copyright protects the expression of an idea. However it’s written down or recorded or things like that. It’s more artistic and it’s basically how artists and creators get paid for their creativity. So because of this, permission is generally required. That’s sort of the default rule when you’re dealing with recorded works, or written works, that you should get permission to use them. However, Andy mentioned fair dealing, which I’m sure some of you are aware of. Fair dealing is the Canadian version of fair use. It’s slightly more limited than fair use in the US. And a good example is parody. We don’t really have…parody is not really allowed under copyright law in Canada. Depending on how you do it, but basically with written content you almost always need permission unless it’s fair dealing or unless it’s under a Creative Commons License.
Now what fair dealing is, is it’s limited to uses of research, private study, criticism or review and news reporting. So if you can sort of fit what you’re doing into one of those categories and you’re not using too much of the work, and your work is not sort of exploitative or things like that, there are a whole list, there’s a laundry list of things to consider that are all in the Guide. But if you can fit into one of those categories, then your use is probably safe under fair dealing. In terms of audio and video content, again the default is you almost always need permission. But one of the good things about the Guide is that it sets out a bit of a road map for clearing the rights to use music and to use video content.
So this is the Guide. And we’ve got one for everybody, which we’ll give you after this. But one of the things I wanted to draw to your attention in the Guide is the “Using Music” section. It describes different types of music, using your own, using stuff under Creative Commons Licenses, using your own recording of another person’s performance. Sort of breaks down all the different types of music and the ways you can use music and goes through how you clear the rights of the song writer, of the record labels, of the performers. All the different layers of copyright and all the different owners of copyright. It should be laid out fairly clearly in here but the basic default is figure out who owns it, check with them, check with their copyright collectives. Or in the event you can’t find them or you don’t know which collective they belong to, you can’t find their publisher, you can always just go to the Copyright Board and ask them. Because the Copyright Board is responsible for issuing the tariffs that set out how much you have to pay for the use of this sort of stuff. So if you can’t find the artist, you can’t find the recorder, you can’t find the publisher, just go to the Copyright Board and they’ll be able to help you out.
So, in terms of publicity rights, this is not really that big an issue in Canada. We don’t…it’s not codified, it’s not, it’s not really laid out that clearly. It sort of fits under the tort of misappropriation of personality. But it’s really not that big a deal. It’s quite big in the States. So that’s why we’ve included it in the Canadian Guide. But it’s basically…the main idea behind publicity rights is that people should be entitled to make money off their personality if that’s their thing. Sort of…sort of a way to protect celebrities so they can make money from their image. But the big issue here is that…well, two things. The identifiable use that the person has to be identifiable in order for them to be able to make a claim. But the biggest issue is the subject versus sales. This means that if you do your podcast about a famous person and they’re the subject of your podcast, then you aren’t necessarily infringing their rights. But if you’re using their name in such a way that it suggests they’re endorsing your podcast or you’re using them to sell your services, things like that, then you’re probably crossing that line in terms of publicity rights. The trademarks…again, I’m not gonna get too far into it because I’m being told I have five minutes left…great, ten…perfect…
Okay, so for trademarks, basically what I wanted to do was a lot of people, even just some of my friends I’ve talked to about this presentation…what’s the difference between trademarks and copyright?…So I’ll do my best to clear it up. It’s, it’s not that clear a distinction. Basically, copyright is more protection for artistic works. It’s the expression of ideas, however they get fixed, get protected under copyright. Trademarks is more about big money and big branding and…what do I have here? It sounded good when I wrote it down. Trademarks protect the use of a brand or a mark in association with a particular good or service. This means that Macintosh for example, their Little Apple…they’ve…that’s their trademark. But it’s their trademark only in use in association with their electronics, with their computers, their iPods, all of the different goods they make. The Apple is their trademark for that. They don’t necessarily own The Apple per se. They couldn’t. There’s no way trademark law would give you that broad of a monopoly. So it’s all about the use of the mark in association with. And one other thing I wanted to mention about trademarks is, don’t be afraid of trademarks. Don’t be afraid to mention the name of a corporation. Don’t be afraid to use a brand. You’re talking about things. Those sorts of things won’t get you in trouble in trademark law. What’ll get you in trouble is if you call it “The Pepsi Podcast Hour”. Then you’re sort of suggesting that Pepsi’s on board in endorsing what you’re doing. And that’s probably crossing the trademark line. But feel free if you’re talking about something, you’re reviewing it, you’re talking about a product, don’t be afraid to use the brand name.
If there are any other legal issues in addition to what I’ve talked about or anything that’s…you feel is missing from the Guide…these are a couple of good sources to go to. CIPPIC (www.cippic.ca ) is the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. It’s located at the University of Ottawa in the Law School. And what they are is a public interest advocacy group. Any issues relating to internet use, the online environment, privacy, copyrights, trademarks, all those sorts of things they deal with at CIPPIC. And they are more than happy to answer any questions that you have. Their website has tons of good information on it, FAQ’s, resources, things like that…excuse me…things like that, that are related to legal issues that you might face. And if not, go to their website, send them an e-mail…some…they’re super friendly people. So someone will get back to you.
The other, the other issue, Creative Commons Canada, Andy talked a lot about that. Creative Commons is a good way to find content to use on your podcasts. It’s a good way to license your podcasts for distribution so you can share them and get more exposure. And finally, what’s the Guide good for? So because I just finished Law School…and I’ve been told to use a big disclaimer every time I talk now…NOT LEGAL ADVICE…but…no, I’m kidding. It’s…it isn’t legal advice. What it’s aimed to do is give you legal information so that you know what your rights are, you know the areas of the law that are implicated in the work that you do, so that you can make sure that you’re, what you’re doing, you’re doing legally and you’re protecting yourself. The Guide is good for getting to know the law, getting to know the areas of the law that relate to you. And we’ve done our best to write it in normal people language so it’s not all convoluted and crazy and not useful to anybody at all. So we’ve done our best to write it in plain English. And if you have any questions, you can certainly contact CIPPIC, you can contact Creative Commons, Andy or myself and we’ll do our best to clear it up.
And finally, it’s good for galvanizing support. The podcasting community, as I’m discovering, is quite vibrant, quite involved in a lot of very important issues. And you have a unique means to make your voices heard. So as I mentioned at the outset, our copyright laws in particular are quite complex. There are layers and layers of people involved who own the rights, who own half the rights, who own a part of the rights. And all of them need to get cleared in order for you to use music safely. And really, if you ask musicians, they want their music to be heard. So the two things don’t necessarily go together. So if you’re finding that this is very frustrating and you’re banging your head against the wall just trying to help somebody get their voices heard, then perhaps you could use your position, your unique position, to advocate for change in our copyright laws. And to come together to address technological issues that our Copyright Act is sorely in need of addressing.
So that’s it. That’s all we have. There are copies of the Guide we’ll make available out at the front desk for the next break. And there’s enough for everybody, so help yourselves. And thank you very much.
Bob Goyetche: Thank you, great job. Okay, we’ve got some questions.
Kathi Simmons: Okay, we’ll do our best.
Bob Goyetche: Alright, I’m going to start with who’s hand I was pointed out to first; the other people keep your arm up if you want to talk.
Whitney Hoffman: Hi, Whitney Hoffman, the LD Podcast and I am a gringo. So I guess the question that I have as an attorney is: If you’re a Canadian because you live in Canada, does that mean you need to use the Canadian Creative Commons License? If you’re an American, you need to use that? Or really should we be moving towards an international license? Because I have people listening to my podcast from Vancouver, from South Africa, from Japan, from France. And really, because the law is so specific per jurisdiction, how do we really cover all of that?
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: I think this is on, right?
Bob Goyetche: Yeah, it is.
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: That’s a very good question. It’s very complicated to answer in a few, in just a few seconds. But here’s the way the licenses basically work. Now there is a Creative Common Central Organization in San Francisco. And they make a license that is no longer just a US license. It’s a template for licenses as of the version that, that’s just coming out now. So that’s what I’ll address. It’s called un-ported and you’re not encouraged to use it to license your work. What you’re encouraged to do is…well…then there are now jurisdiction projects in 38 countries now. And they take that un-ported license and implement it in their home country. So I’m on the team that takes the un-ported license and writes a Canadian version of it. The Canadian version is specifically designed to work in Canada. But the way that copyright law works, if your work is protected in Canada, it’s protected in basically every other country in the world. And the way the license is designed is that they’re all compatible with each other. So the, you know, Attribution Share-Alike License can be, you know, people can license their work. Someone in South Africa can take your work, they can license it under a South African Attribution Share-Alike License. They’re all designed to be compatible. But the Canadian one does address things in Canada that the other licenses don’t. I’ll…and one quick example is moral rights. Because of Canada’s bi-juridical system, we have moral rights in copyrighted works that they don’t have in most other…well many other common law countries. Notably, the US. This is going to be something that many of you don’t know about. Okay…you have…so you have the right to publish your work first, to copy it, to modify it. Those are called economic rights. But you also have the right of integrity of your work, which means someone else can’t take your work and use it in a way that…I can’t remember the way…the way the law is worded. But that violates your personal integrity as an artist in association with that work. Okay, so…pardon? No, you wouldn’t be able to do that. Well…my…I’m just…I don’t know the case…that’s the case.
Bob Goyetche: We’ve lost control…
Kathi Simmons: That’s the case at the Eaton Centre, the guy with the Canada Geese….
Bob Goyetche: Okay, we’ll try to…I just want to say we’ll try to keep the questions to the microphones because this is great stuff and people are going to be listening to the audio through the summer on the podcast feed. And it would be great if they could hear the question and the answer. Another thing I want to point out is that we’re almost at 10:30. We’re supposed to go into a 10 minute break at this point. If Kathi and Andy…if you guys…there’s a few questions for you here apparently. So we could run the question period through the break. If you have no questions or aren’t interested in the answer, have your break. But we’re going to keep going and we’ll do the question period through the break.
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: I hope that addressed the question.
Bob Goyetche: With the mike.
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: It’s hard to talk about details of copyright law…
Bob Goyetche: Yeah, so we’ll keep it high level. And you can assault him. He drives a green…so Joe wants to ask a question here.
Joe Chisolm: Hi, Joe Chisolm, Indie Can Music. And Jay, I’ll listen to your show. And if I’m on a date, I’ll get her to listen too. I’ve a question about playing a small portion of a copyrighted song. I understand that when you’re doing a little news story, like if I did 54/40 is playing Downsview Park on Canada Day and played like 30 seconds of one of their songs, I don’t have to call Bernie Finkelstein from True North Records and get permission to do that. What are the limits as far as that’s concerned?
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: Do you want to try and answer this one?
Kathi Simmons: Okay, well technically, you do have to call and get permission. But if you…we’ve laid out a road map of clearing the rights to use music. And as I mentioned, if you’re doing fair dealing, what you’re suggesting is, is maybe you’re news reporting. In which case it might be fair dealing and the laundry list of factors that are considered in fair dealing, I mentioned before, are things like the purpose of the use, which, in this case, would be perhaps news reporting. You might be able to slot it in there. To look at the amount of the work you’re taking. So if you’re using the whole song, then obviously you’re infringing. But if you’re just using a little tiny snippet, you might be able to make the case for it. If there are alternatives to the dealing, the nature of it, the effect of the dealing on the work, whether or not you’re taking their money, those sorts of things, like I said before, the default with using music is get permission. But if you can slot it into a fair dealing category, you might be okay. If not, you can always call the artist, ask them is it okay if I do this? You can contact their publisher, those sorts of things.
Peter Windborn: I’m Peter Windborn from Trinidiary. I’m beginning to think Trinidad is the centre of the podcast universe because, you know, yesterday Todd mentioned a clip from a Trinidadian and today Ted mentions one. But the question that I had was, you know, you were talking about the frontier side of things. And a lot of what we’ve been talking about is freedom of speech and ease of use. But ultimately, do you think there’s going to become a need for regulating podcasts? Despite the idea of, you know, we have this freedom, we can say what we want to who we want. But the reality is, throughout history, that’s always been controlled. And will podcasts, as they mature, have to have that sort of control?
Kathi Simmons: It’s, it’s hard to say. I mean, I certainly don’t want to make predictions on how our laws are going to get written. If I’ve learned anything in law school, it’s that you can never really be sure. But I would like to say I hope not. But the cynic in me says that if the podcasting community can figure out a way to make money, then you might anticipate some regulation. I don’t know, Andy, do you have a better answer to that?
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: Well its…I mean…in a way, you’re right that speech has been regulated. But speech as an industry has been regulated, right? Speech as the soap box, standing on a soap box on Speakers’ Corner, has not been regulated. And it sort of depends on how podcasting goes. And maybe the podcasting community is diverse enough to accommodate all of that. And some of that speech will be regulated and some of it won’t. I mean, it’s hard to say. At this point, I think that a lot of the drive for regulation is industry protectionism, to a large extent.
Mark Blevis: Just a quick reminder. There’s 8 minutes left in the break. If you guys want to go while the questions are going on…if you want…because the next session is going to…holy cow…how to clear out a room…
Drank to much Bob.
Robin Brown: Hi I’m Robin Brown, I’m, I guess one of the few people who doesn’t have a podcast yet here. But, so I’m curious if…if…but as somebody thinking about having one, if somebody then does something to my podcast that I don’t want, is my only recourse to go hire a lawyer and sue the people? Like what do I have to do? What can I do?
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: Generally speaking, I mean, enforcement of your copyright can be a complicated thing to do. The first thing to do is to write to them and say you are infringing my copyright and try to work it out with them. And many people, especially, you know, if it’s a podcaster doing it, I mean many people in this room could probably give you their opinion about how they would respond if somebody wrote to them and said “hey, you know, there’s a clip of my song in your podcast” and would they be willing to take it down or not? They’d probably give you a good idea of that. If they won’t and you want to keep enforcing it, then yeah, you hire a lawyer and you send them a cease and desist letter. It’s not the kind of thing that necessarily goes over very well on the internet, or is very effective. But yeah, enforcement of copyright can be complicated and difficult.
Sean McGaughey: Hi Sean McGaughey, For The Sake of the Song Podcast. I’m not a completely unusual creature. I’m a podcasting musician. And my show is structured. I do a song writing show with just one song writing guest every episode. I’ve always licensed. I’ve always had most of my music up on the net, Creative Commons No-Derivatives Attribution Non-Commercial. And the way I explain it to people on the street is I’m a solo folk singer, male folk singer, song writer, 28 million people in Canada, 14 million male singer/song writers. The reason I use the Creative Commons License is to say share it, I want it to be shared. But if there’s any money to be made in this, I’d like a piece of it, I’d like my fair share. Now my concern with my podcast and when I was starting up this music podcast is okay, the musicians I have on the show are good with it, they’re…they say go ahead, release it, Creative Commons. We do No-Derivatives so that it’s as tight as it can be and still be freely shared. But I’m also quite aware that SOCAN could come knocking and…or other things could happen in the future to regulate. So my question is, what’s in your crystal ball, with that sort of regulation, I know it’s outside of Creative Commons, but…
Kathi Simmons: Well what SOCAN does, is they represent artists to funnel the money back to artists. SOCAN is a copyright collector. They take a part of your copyright and they administer it for you. They sell…they basically sell it for you. They collect the money on your behalf and they cut you a cheque so you get the royalties. So SOCAN won’t necessarily come after you. But if you…if you ever got to the point with distributing your music that you wanted to protect your copyrights and you wanted to have your music out there, and you wanted an efficient way for people to find your music and to make sure they can pay for it. That’s the benefit of the collectives that people can just go to one place, they pay their license and all the artists under SOCAN’s sort of catalogue get paid. So if you wanted to get paid for your work, you might want to sign…you might want to contact SOCAN and send it off that way and see if you can get some royalties funnelled back. But I don’t know if that addresses your question. Maybe we can talk about that later, I’m not sure I…
Bob Goyetche: Okay, we have a question from Charles.
Charles: Hi there.
Bob Goyetche: We’ve got two more, two more…..
Charles Hodgson: Hi there. Charles Hodgson from Podictionary, the podcast for word lovers. And my wife is a technology executive and so she said, oh you better get a trademark. So I trademarked Podictionary and unlike copyright, this is just a Canadian thing. And so now if I want to, most of my audience is in the States, if I want to have a trademark there, I have to re-trademark there. And I have two questions related to that. One is, when I received my trademark from Canada, I got this nice pretty thing that I didn’t feel like hanging on my wall. And I’m not sure if I recycled it or if I saved it. It’s somewhere, I can’t find it. But I now need it to get the American trademark. Do you know if I can get that again?
Kathi Simmons: I can’t guarantee it, but I’m pretty sure if you registered your trademark, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office will have you on file.
Charles Hodgson: Yeah, yeah.
Kathi Simmons: You can probably just contact them and they’ll let you know what your registration key is.
Charles Hodgson: Okay. The second thing is a number of people have said “oh, it only has one D in it, Podictionary, I thought it had two “D”s in it”. So I thought, I’d better register that domain name with two “D”s. Someone else has already done that and all it is, is sort of a thing to collect ads and to make money on. And it’s clearly because I have enough listeners, that…I have the same kind of material that they’re trying to get a link through. So should I trademark that as well? Can I go after them, just because they have two “D”s in Podictionary?
Kathi Simmons: You can. Domain names are sort of in the family of trademark law. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority, they’re CIRA. They’re the ones that manage the .ca domain names. So if you have domain name questions, you can probably direct them to them. But they’re…I mean if…there are sort of tests for people who are just sort of domain name squatting and just trying to sell them and those sorts of things. You can…your best bet would be to talk to them directly about that.
Bob Goyetche: Great, thank you Andy and Kathi. And you guys are going to be around for awhile?
Kathi Simmons: Yeah.
Bob Goyetche: Because people have questions, ‘cause there’s so much. The Podcasting Guide, is it available as a download?
Kathi Simmons: It will be.
Andy Kaplan-Myrth: Yeah, it’s gonna be…yeah the Guide will be available as a download and at least as a PDF file for now. Hopefully at some point it will move to a WIKI format which is what the American one did. We’re getting feedback on them whether that was useful or not. But watch www.creativecommons.ca and you’ll see the Podcasting Legal Guide listed there. Otherwise we have a box and we’re going to put it out on the table. We’re going to put it out on the registration table and the next time you take a break, you can head out there and get one, thank you.
Bob Goyetche: Wonderful, thank you very much.
Bob Goyetche: This episode of Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust. When you switch your main chequing account to TD by August 3rd, you will qualify for either a Free Shuffle, iPod Nano or a 30 gig iPod. Visit www.tdswitch.com/pab for details.
Mark Blevis: Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.
Bob Goyetche: For more info on Canadian Podcast Buffet you can go to our website www.canadianpodcastbuffet.ca.
Mark Blevis: For more information on Podcasters Across Borders visit that website www.podcastersacrossborders.com.
Bob Goyetche: To contact us you can leave us a voicemail, area code 267-220-3701 or our e-mail at: canadianpodcastbuffet@gmail.com.
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