When Copyright is Wrong

Abstract

While copyright legally protects the ownership of created works, fair dealing with copyrighted content has become a problematic topic with the rise of user-generated content. User-generated content can be easily produced with modern technology and shared on the internet. This has resulted in websites having complicated processes for dealing with copyrighted content and many have introduced automated copyright detection systems to limit their liabilities of copyright infringement. Since automated copyright detection systems have been introduced, they have fundamentally changed the way copyright infringement is managed online. However, a problem arises with automated copyright detection systems as they are incapable of detecting fair dealing. Fair dealing is a provision under New Zealand’s Copyright Act 1994 that allows the use of copyrighted content in certain cases. Consequently, this has turned into a controversial area between content creators and copyright holders as most user-generated content usually contains copyrighted content. Copyright laws also favour mass media companies as they control significant copyright properties, and this plays a key role in the economy. For this reason, copyright genuinely tends to focus on the rights of copyright holders and not so much for users of copyrighted content. Furthermore, New Zealand's Copyright Act 1994 has not been updated since 2011 and has become unsuitable for modern forms of creation on the internet. This research portfolio investigates the problematic issues concerning New Zealand’s Copyright Act 1994 with its application to user-generated content and YouTube’s automated copyright detection system called ‘Content ID’. To express research findings, this research portfolio contains a user-generated documentary and several other proposed methods of bypassing Content ID.