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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker
You share music, rip DVDs, make Hitler whine about your first world problems, and much more in the course of your regular online activities and more often than not, you do these things without giving a thought to the fact that you're actually breaking the law. Here's a look at how you're inevitably circumventing copyright law and what you can do to protect yourself.
Why it's almost impossible to avoid breaking copyright law Copyright law is extremely complex. It's so complex that lawyers, lawmakers, and experts heavily argue over how it's interpreted and applied. Nonetheless, if you commit a crime, you can't use ignorance as an excuse. The law doesn't (officially) offer leniency for misunderstanding or lack of knowledge. So how can you comply with convoluted copyright laws when you can't realistically understand them all? You can't, and so you may end up breaking these laws on a regular basis without ever knowing it.
To make matters worse, a spectrum of illegality makes it acceptable to break the rules in some circumstances yet not others. Experience tells us that uploading a home video to a video sharing website (e.g. YouTube) that features a copyrighted song is sometimes okay, but downloading a television episode is not.
Both of these actions are similarly illegal, but the first example is regularly tolerated while the second can lead to a loss of Internet connectivity, a fine, or even jail time (depending on the number of offenses and how often copyright holders decide to "catch" you).
Just as it's easier for us to circumvent copyright law online, it's easier for copyright holders to come after us. I spoke with Derek Bambauer, assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, who explained this is particularly problematic because infringement is often only a byproduct of the way we communicate and bears no intention of doing anything illegal:
The tricky thing is, if you and I want to share a recipe then I photocopy it and then come over to your office and give it to you so it's just you and me. If I want to do it online, the odds are pretty good that we're going to do it on a social network or a blog or something like that. That means that the blog is all of the sudden a choke point something that people who want to keep us from doing this can exert control over. The way the law deals with this is with the notice of takedown under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but that's just on the copyright owner's say-so. The copyright owner says "That's infringing!" and the site should take it down. You can get it back up, but you have to file a counter notice and it takes somewhere between 10 and 14 days. It's a lot of hassle. Copyright owners, through the DMCA, have a good deal of control over the way we communicate.
But because rights holders are often fickle about what they choose to have removed and what to leave alone, it's difficult to rely on the law for guidance. The result is that we the average users and consumers of the Internet are unsure of how to proceed when dealing with copyrighted works and either have to assume we have no rights or make our best guess and hope it doesn't lead to legal consequences.
It all comes down to this reality: you will often have to circumvent or ignore copyright law to go on with your regular activities. Fortunately, there are ways to handle these circumstances better and keep yourself out of trouble. In this post, we're going to look at specific situations you encounter on a regular basis and what you can do to protect yourself.
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How you break digital law daily (and what to do)