Punishment

Ok, so, even after having already completed an entire year's worth of education which included numerous teachings about copyright and how bloody important it was that you checked your sources, I totally forgot about all of this when making Quicken The Heart.

I think it was a combination of being totally disorganised and not really knowing what I wanted to do for the last video other than something poignant exciting for the last sketch film (I didn't know at this time that we would then be required to make 60 films for our next project). In the end, I came up with a silly little video set to the theme of Jaws about a woman's advances on an innocent biscuit. Again, I reiterate, I have no idea why alarm bells did not go off in my head at this point screaming "WARNING! WARNING! THIS IS COPYRIGHT!" but they didn't and it was only until we sat down for our interview with Seth (possibly the most embarassing time for this to come out) and he asked where the music was from. I brightly exclaimed it was the theme from Jaws and knew immediately from Seth's perplexed face that I was in the shit.

See, if Jaws had been made over 70 years ago, I would have been fine as copyright law (thanks to Walt Disney. Don't ask me how I remember that) states that any work that is 70 years or older is no longer covered by the protection of copyright law. Seth then told me I would have to go back to the original video, take out the offending piece, replace it with a royalty-free copy (correctly attributed of course), export the video again, and then update my blog post, Blip Dashboard, AND my K-Film. It also meant Astyn and Sarah would have to update their K-Films so as you can see, a lot of work for one little mistake which I shouldn't have made in the first place.

I've now decided that as punishment, I should research what could have happened to me and the university had MCA Inc decided to sue me for a copyright breach. According to the Australian Copyright Council, any piece of music is "automatically protected as soon as it is recorded in some way (for example, written down, recorded on audio-tape, or saved in a digital file)." The owner of the theme according to the AAC is "the composer, and the first owner of copyright in lyrics is the lyricist; however, there are some important exceptions." In terms of performance " the first owners of copyright in a sound recording of a live performance will be the performer and the person who owns the recording medium (such as the master tape)." In my case, I would have infringed upon the copyright agreement of John Williams, the songs composer.

Whilst I could not find a copy of the copyright agreement (pardon the pun), I did find this from the AAC: "Copyright is infringed when a person uses all, or a “substantial part”, of copyright material in one of the ways exclusively controlled by the copyright owner without the express or implied permission of the copyright owner... A “substantial part” is any important, distinctive or essential part of the original material, not necessarily a large part." Basically, the 30 seconds of theme I used was more than enough evidence to prove that I had infringed upon the rights of Williams in protecting his work.

Had Williams found out about my infringement upon his work, he would have had the following options to chose from in terms of how he would have liked the matter to be resolved. From the AAC again, he would have been entitled to demand and or all of the following:
• that the infringement stop (an “injunction”);
• that infringing copies of your material be delivered to you, or disposed of as you direct;
• that any master copies or plates used to make infringing copies be delivered to you, or disposed of as you
direct; and
• that either you be paid for the use of the work or you be given the profits the infringer has made from it.

Williams would then have asked a fee from me which he would have considered to have been an acceptable sum to cover the damages caused by my infrigement. On record, the largest fine ever handed out for a copyright infringement in the music industry was the Isley Brothers vs. Michael Bolton case in which "the infringement claim was based on musical and not verbal similarities between the two songs." as detailed by a notice from the UCLA and Columbia Law School. The brothers were awarded $5.4 million in damages from Bolton who still claims till this day that he had no idea the Brothers' song existed.

Apparently ignorance is no excuse and in my case as a film student, I don't think I would be able to claim this anyway. Had all of this happened, it would have been my responsibility to respond to Williams' claim of infringement which would definitely have involved a civil lawyer and possibly the judicial system had Williams decided take things further. In the grand scheme of things, I think having to change my original film and updating my blog and Korsakow project is a slap on the hand compared to what I could have had.