Episode 747 - Copyright
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 747 of Screw the Commute podcast. Now, in this episode, I'm going to try to save you legal trouble that you might never see coming. Some of it's legit, but some companies may just be trying to scare you to pay up for legal stuff. All right. That's today's episode. So now I hope you didn't miss episode 746. That was multiple and bulk sales. This can really add a lot of money to your bottom line. That was episode 746. Anytime you want to listen to it back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 746 and today is 747 now. Hey 747 that's an airplane too. All right, Follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And you will thank me because it'll save you hundreds of hours in the future if you just did a few of the things in that book. screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:33] All right, let's get to the main event. So I was watching a video by a guy named Tom Scott. Now, you know, he has to be a good guy because of his first name. I tell you that right now. Now, this video is pretty long. I think it's about 42 minutes. But he gives you a really good picture of what you can and can't do when it comes to using other people's material.

[00:01:58] Now, he's not a lawyer, and neither am I. So everything I say today is not giving legal advice. It's just my opinion and some of my personal experiences. So I got the link in the show notes for that. Okay, but I'll give you some basics. You must have the rights to use other people's pictures and videos and text or whatever else they invent in the future. Now, if you don't have the rights, you're opening yourself up to a federal lawsuit. And look at this. Fines can be up to be imprisoned for five years and up to a $250,000 fine or both. Now, I put the link to the Department of Justice website there. Archives. Now, these laws change frequently, so maybe it's 150,000. Either way, you don't want to be in that position to get the feds coming after you for infringement. So check that out. All right. So how do I know about this? Okay. Well, I had a nightclub. They investigators slipped in, and just one song we played got me a federal lawsuit. And in 1980s dollars, I think it cost me $4,700 to settle. Not counting the legal fees. Believe me, you do not want to be in this position. I've had two people come to me recently with. They had pictures on blog posts that didn't even get that many views.

[00:03:33] Settle for $4,300 and $6,700. You do not want to be in this position. Now, these companies that come after you have software that can detect where their photos and videos and stuff are being used online. And they can find you much easier than a normal visitor can. All right. And you may have gotten or heard of someone that's gotten a letter from a company called Pixie. Pixie. Now, some people consider them kind of spammy. I don't know personally, but I'm including a link to a legitimate law firm that has an article about this company. And I highly suggest that you read that article. It suggests in that article that this company, in addition to sending legitimate copyright infringement claims, is also sending scary threats to people that are using material legitimately. I don't know if this is true or not. Just read the article and it's a law group that's put it out. There's another company you might want to research, Jukin or Jukin Media, which was recently purchased. And this is this is rich by a company called Trusted Media Brands. Anyway, this video I was watching goes into gifs and parodies and videos and a discussion of the legal concept of fair use, which has many gray areas. See, Fair Use says you can use a little bit of someone else's work.

[00:05:15] And so I put another link to copyright.gov and this is what I'm going to read you now is directly from their website. Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright protected works. Listen to this. In certain circumstances. Okay. Well, good. Good luck trying to figure out what those circumstances are. And even if you're totally within them, the copyright holder can still sue you. See, that's what I'm saying about this minefield of copyright infringement. You can be totally right and still lose a lot of money in legal fees. So this video says that legal precedent shows that gifts are mostly fair use. But again, do you really want a chance it now? Thank God I had the sense to not not distribute some hilarious parodies that I wrote where I just changed the words to highly recognizable songs. Well, guess what? Apparently, this is not cool at all. And thank God I didn't put him out. I mean, even the parody artist Weird Al Yankovic licenses songs, which is much cheaper to him in the long run than defending even one lawsuit. So I have a rule of thumb, or I guess it's my opinion that when the legal system comes to you or maybe say at you, all right, it's going to be a bad day for you or a month or a year or even multiple years.

[00:07:02] So try to avoid that situation. So what do you do about this? Well, get legal advice on anything that's iffy and get it from an IP attorney. That gives you a level of protection in there. You can also purchase licenses to stuff you want to use. You can also use sites that clearly state in their terms of use or service that you can use the intellectual property for commercial purposes and make sure, you know, if you have to give attribution to the to the the person that created the Internet, intellectual property or or not and whatever their terms are, you know, follow them. One of the things I do is I purchase a yearly subscription to clip art.com and it has millions of photographs and cartoons and clip art that I can use without worry about copyright infringement. I use that subscription all the time. I buy it every year and it's cheap. I also like Pexels Pexels.com for gorgeous photographs. I've used them in my quizzes for my school. It's imtcva.org/quiz where it's a college rip off quiz. So I love that site and there's a bunch of others that you can use for free images and stuff. But just make sure no matter who it is or what site it is, you read their terms of service, I'd say print them out and keep a copy because still somebody could come after you.

[00:08:39] You just never know. Now, my big overall suggestion is to use your own stuff. This kills? Well, let's say two lawsuits with one stone. Okay. First, there's a big backlash against stock photos. You know, the one with the obligatory Asian person and black person. And I don't know. Now it'll be transgender person and 500 by nonbinary. I don't know nowadays. But the thing is, is they're obviously stock photos that make your company look vanilla and like everyone else's site and and also it gets you out of problems with copyright infringement. But listen to this up to a point, if you use your own stuff. So. So I want you to use your own stuff, but you still got to be careful with that, too. For instance, you can't go to Sedona, Arizona, take pictures of you in front of the Red Rocks and then use them for commercial purposes even though you took the photos. All right. So you got to check all the time to make sure you're not infringing. See, I'd rather see a photo of you working with a client. Of course, with their permission, on your website, which will make you look real and involved rather than the BS provided by an ad agency that no one relates to or believes in. So I highly suggest you slog through Mr.

[00:10:08] Scott's long video and visit the other links in the show notes, because I don't want to hear that you got slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit. And you know what? I can assure you, you don't want to hear that either. Okay. All right. So if you like this and all the other kind of things that I can do to help you be successful online, check out great Internet marketing Training.com. It's the longest running, most unique, most successful ever mentor program in the field of Internet and digital marketing and also have a new program on how to make you a great podcast guest. This can put you in front of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people with a warm introduction from the host. But it's not just, you know, the thing is people saying, well, I'm good, I'm funny, I'll do a good interview. Well, there's that's only part of it. There's thousands of people that can do that. If you do all these other things that I'm going to teach you in this course, you will learn the things that impress the heck out of the host. So they have you back over and over and they promote you to other podcast hosts and all that stuff. So check it out at Screwthecommute.com/greatpodcastguest and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.