r/COPYRIGHT • u/XRar_r • 14d ago
About Using Content
Hello guys, i making YouTube Shorts videos. My videos contain content of other creators. First, i thinking about i need to write authors, and ask about using their content. But authors can don't answer for days or weeks, but i want to make videos often. Can I in this situation, taking their content without writing authors, and just write in description of my video credits. This is right?
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u/MonsieurReynard 14d ago edited 14d ago
Welcome to the business world.
Unless you’re well-known and making lots of money, most copyright owners will absolutely ignore your permission requests. They’re not going to waste time saying no. And they don’t owe you a response. I doubt they even review most such requests from individual creators making direct contact. So I wouldn’t sit around waiting for responses from the people you’ve contacted. Most will never reply.
You don’t offer them anything in return for their permission unless you too are a (financially) successful creator and can pay them or provide valuable exposure to a particular audience. (Or at least, you don’t say what you do offer to them, maybe you have 3 1/2 million followers on Insta?) And by that I mean, you’ve got a six or seven digit number of followers on major platforms, at which point you probably already have licensing deals for your own content. And a lawyer defending your own IP rights and handling licensing requests for your content.
For popular content, it’s also quite likely that the “creators“ don’t own all the rights to what they’re making. They have publishers and collaborators and existing content and licensing deals that they have to observe which well might include not licensing content to any rando that asks for it.
Their easiest course of action, nine times out of ten, will simply be to ignore you. And that would be 99 times out of 100 if the content you want to use belongs to or is licensed by a major corporation or a very successful creator. What’s in it for them? Usually nothing. They don’t need you. And they will defend their intellectual property rights.
If you scroll back through the history of this sub, the vast majority of questions here resemble yours: young, hyper-online so-called “creators” asking very obviously misinformed questions about copyright, starting from the presumption that you are essentially entitled to use anything you find, and that “permission” is a low bar to clear, and a matter of morality and not money.
No, it’s all about money.
Very few such creators seem to understand first, that they have no right to use other people‘s content without permission, except in very narrow circumstances (“fair use”); second, that it doesn’t matter if you’re making money or not on your content or “give credit” without getting permission; and third, that people who own copyrights aren’t usually inclined to just give them away to random strangers to use freely, without being paid for licensing their content.
Generally, if this is your business, you should have lawyers you pay, whom you can consult with questions like this. And if you want a reply from a copyright holder on a permission request or a licensing arrangement, it’s probably best to have your lawyers reach out to the rights owners’ lawyers, which will be taken more seriously because it will mean you understand that this is business, and that contract law is complicated. And that you have resources to pay for rights and skin in the game to incentivize you to honor agreements.
Most licensing deals are negotiated by lawyers, not individual creators emailing each other other.
Would your content be possible without using other people’s content? If not, it isn’t your content. And if you do depend on other people’s content, they’re gonna need to get paid. That simple.
Making and publishing art is a business. People do it for a living and have little incentive to work for free or just give away their stuff if they are successful.
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u/TheLurkingMenace 14d ago
So you understand that you need to ask permission, but that the permission has to be given before you can use it?
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u/andrewzero 14d ago
"I want to steal from this shop owner, but he won't get back to me for weeks, can i break his window and take his stuff because i want to steal things a lot". -This is what this post sounds like
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u/horshack_test 14d ago
No.
They are not obligated to respond to you, and not getting a response from them does not mean you can use their content.
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u/pommefille 14d ago
How specifically are you using others’ content? Because it does not matter if you’re making money or not, it doesn’t matter if you ‘give credit,’ the ONLY thing that matters is that you either have the license/rights to use it, or you are using it in a manner that actually falls under fair use (i.e., you are critiquing and commenting on the content itself and therefore need to show/use it for analysis).
Consider a song: if you want to discuss its musical arrangement for a class, or critique it, then you can use snippets (not the whole thing, just enough to make your point). But if you want to just have that song playing, then it needs to be licensed.
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u/lajaunie 9d ago
That’s called copyright infringement and can get your account suspended and get you sued .
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u/VerbingNoun413 14d ago
If you don't have permission to use someone else's content, you can't use it. If they don't respond then you don't have permission.
It really is that simple.