> How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
[snip]
> On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.
The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
> people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless.
Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
Not my field, but consider law as a codification of custom. If a community practices "nonsensical disclaimers", adapts that practice to stakeholder concerns, establishes that practice as socially viable and worthwhile, and proliferates it as custom, then I suggest that yes, the law may well change.
Even in the short term, "nonsensical disclaimers" might impact 5-factor fair use decisions.
And consider the scientific community. Massive ignorance of, and disregard for, the letter of copyright law. There is instead a different social norm, built on acknowledgement. Are those "nonsensical disclaimers"?
Even when creation of law is corrupt, and especially when enforcement of law is corrupt, societal norms do matter.
Perhaps one might usefully examine the youtube copying and "nonsensical disclaimers" as a semi-aware form of civil disobedience?
