Some Liabilities Might Come Up

In having your own business related to the entertainment industry there are several liability issues that you have to be specially carful about. Especially when it comes to copyright, fair use, defamation; everything that sums to infringement of original work. 

Following up on my business plan, the website, I have to register and police copyright of literary work, visual arts and newsletter among others. But since my website is meant to provide information our writers might at some point have to use another person’s property. Whether information from official sources, pictures, and possibly even music. So having this in mind I searched for podcasts of professionals in the field providing information about real cases that have served me as example and also to clarify some doubts or reinforce information that I might’ve forgotten and that at the end of the day is important to know.

The first case I want to talk about is mentioned in a podcast by Gordon Firemark in January of this year (http://www.entertainmentlawupdate.com/2011/01/episode-17-can-kanye-write-songs-140-characters-at-a-time/) is about American singer-songwriter, Josh Groban, action of using Kanye West’s tweets and make a song out of them. Although it didn’t get to court using West’s tweets can be considered infringement of copyright because Groban did not solicit permission. Contrary to Firemark’s opinion, he believes that Josh could claim fair use as in parody. In this same podcast, Firemark also speaks about a defamation case of literary registration that did get to court. It was presented as a counter claim by author Hachity when another author, Morris, registered a claim in her work that she thought she owned when in reality there another registration in place (Firemark, 2011). In the central district court Hachity claimed under summary judgment that Morris had defamed him through that claim but the motion was denied.

And finally I would like to comment and share with you about a podcast made by Wesly Fryer in 2008 available in http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2008/03/02/podcast235-copyright-fair-use-intellectual-property-and-podcasting-ncce-2008/ and it’s about a conference he dictated on that year’s Northwest Council for Computer Education. Oriented to teachers on their journey to educate students to correctly make a citation when publishing in any of the Internet tools or social media websites available. The reason? Because there’s been cases of students being sued over another’s original material that was improperly cited or not cited at all. Fryer comments, “all file sharing and remixing is not illegal” if a person properly gives credit to the original author.

So this was just a little demonstration of real life events from which we should all take as an example and to remember no to underestimate the fact that there is always someone reading what we publish.