Chapter Four

From my days uploading on YouTube or streaming on Twitch, I’ve become familiar with copyright and all the limitations they can impose upon creators, even under fair use. At the time, it just irritated me to no end when all my VODs were muted, or my videos couldn’t be applicable for any advertisements. Trying to understand why some songs were okay while others got immediately claimed didn’t compute for my 16-year-old self, but it makes sense in hindsight. Considering Fair Use is much more restrictive as the property becomes more creative, music is easily one of the most difficult to claim fair use on; even if you watch song breakdowns or reactions, they must skip around or constantly pause to avoid copyright infringement!

Branching from copyright, I never knew how the public domain functioned; copyrights having expirations never dawned upon me, so I figured it was a licensing choice or just a different way to protect their intellectual property. Plagiarism, as common as it is, seems to be getting easier with the advancement of artificial intelligence, since they just regurgitate responses without proper citations or links a majority of the time—doubly true for apps on PCs or mobile phones, since they don’t automatically link their sources like a web browser does. Thankfully, it’s painfully obvious to tell when someone uses it for a creative or subjective purpose, so we still have time to tackle how we’re supposed to combat that struggle.