On IP and Copyright Through the Ages - Debbie Bennett

Once upon a time, before the dawn of the World Wide Web, the internet was in its infancy. Some of us had computers with modems – those little boxes that sat next to your pc with whizzy lights and beeps that kidnapped your telephone line and charged you money for every minute it took to upload/download emails and read a few online text-only forums. 

I’m talking late 1980s into the early 1990s, when monitors were green-on-black and gaming involved answering simple questions and hitting <RETURN>. I had an email account that was linked to a site (not a website, they hadn’t been invented yet) called CIX. It was American, I think, and had several interesting forums – the most active one for me being Cult TV. Remember, this was way before the age of digital streaming, when TV shows were broadcast once, maybe again if you were lucky and after that you had to see if it was available on VHS video somewhere. Cult TV was a discussion of all things sf and nerdish. From Doctor Who to the Tomorrow People and all the 1970s and 80s programmes we loved. And back in a pre-social media time, when I was working long hours and commuting, it was great to have like-minded people to chat to. 

I met a lot of interesting people back then. Some spilled over into real life – I spent a day at a disused warehouse somewhere in the East End of London, playing a complex freeform role-playing game loosely based in the Star Wars universe. That was my first (and only) experience of laser-tag shooting and I remember coming home through Waterloo station with some of my new friends and dressed in some weird and wonderful costume. I also did a day in Surrey somewhere on a fantasy quest adventure. 

But the purpose of this blog was to introduce a take on intellectual property rights. A lot of pre-amble, but that’s generally how I write my posts as a stream of consciousness. Does anybody ever read this stuff anyway? 

So – another event from my CIX Cult TV days was a trip up to Solihull in the West Midlands where about 30 of us got together in some guy’s very large house to watch videos. People who knew people contributed stuff that wasn’t even available to the general public; we brought alcohol and snacks and had a great day.

Fast forward twenty-fours hours or so and suddenly there we were in the national papers. Not headline news, but more than a few lines buried inside. I can’t recall if there were photographs and it must have been a slow-news day, but our entire event was laid out in all its apparently illegal glory! One of the group was The Traitor – a journalist who decided that this private party was in fact a public event, and therefore we had violated the copyrights of all the videos we’d watched, by not having the correct permissions for a public showing.

I don’t remember what the exact legal situation was back then. But it was my first introduction to copyright and intellectual property rights. Since then, I’ve watched the explosion of YouTube and TikTok content and never quite understood how or why ‘content creators’ think it’s OK to just use any images or music they find online. When I was working on a community radio play series, I would often record my own background sounds – dishwasher, birdsong, traffic – or else use a subscription site with sound clips you could use with just an attribution. But background sounds including the tv are an absolute no-no. My daughter is a television production coordinator and as she has often said, the cost of permission to use a short BBC clip can run into thousands of pounds and come with very specific strings attached. Local organisations look at me blankly when I say they really shouldn’t just play whatever they like on a big screen at public events. 

So what to do? It was surprisingly easy to get permission from the BBC to use the opening music to The Archers for the radio play project – a simple email and it was no problem. But now I have some ideas for a new writing project that necessitate obtaining permissions from one (or possibly more) places/people in the music industry. The internet and now the web is a huge pbeast and while I’ve found several different avenues to pursue, they are all coming up as dead ends. People don’t reply (I’m a nobody, I get that – but hey, good manners only cost five minutes to say no) or else they are lovely and super-helpful but just don’t have the answers I am looking for. I’m not going to do this without the right permissions and it’s not something that would work as fan-fiction, even if that was something I’d consider doing. 

So here’s a new job for somebody. There are gazillions of content creators, an equal number of marketers and promotors of dubious provenance and quality and thousands of people who can apparently help you with writing, formatting, pushing buttons on KDP, selling you ISBNs (don’t do this). Why are there not people who can legitimately connect you with people you want to talk to?