These videos address content ID with regard to music with a couple of salutary lessons. The first shows how an AI version of the artist would be able to claim copyright of a piece of work and then, theoretically, prevent the actual artist from using it; The second is more about streaming music which, for a writer, might compare with publication and distribution, but for a physical artist – a painter perhaps – doesn’t seem to have too much relevance.

But stop. Those of us who put our work online or manipulate it digitally, turn it into videos, or [deep breath] augmented reality, might at some stage find we’re encountering similar issues.

This happened to me recently in relation to my use of audio tracks in AR work, and in forgetting that putting the target images in a book, which would be on sale, meant it fell outside the Creative Commons non-commercial licence. To say I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about copyright and stripping every video I’ve ever made of anything I might have inadvertently misused would be an understatement, which is why these two videos caught my eye.

For me, the way to go is the use of my own audio, made up of, primarily, sound effects. Dripping taps, crunching footsteps, a one-note guitar string; those kinds of things. Putting these then into a music app (I use Magix Music Maker) and applying effects there can turn a series of inept chords played on an Akai MPK mini synthesiser into something satisfyingly spacey that contains no off-the-peg materials made by anyone else. It’s not music, it’s a soundscape, and it’s mine because MMM doesn’t claim ownership of effects such as ‘guitar’, ‘horns’, or ‘drums’; only the samples of music it also provides. I had to dig for that distinction, though.

At root, I believe and conclude that the elements or tools of, for instance, music-making apps, are there for us to use copyright-free, but the riffs or taradiddles someone else made are not. Much as a word processor app can’t claim copyright over the book you wrote with it, but pinching bits of someone else’s book and using that word processor to insert them into your text as your own, is theft of intellectual property.

The information source is Venus Theory, to whom much gratitude is owed.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill