Podcast Copyright Best Practices Regarding Video, Music, And Images

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Hey everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard and along with my co host and partner, Tom Hazzard, we are going to cover copyrights today and we're going to cover it in a slightly different way. We're talking about pretty much music copyrights, any video rights in case you have stock footage or anything like that, image rights, and we're going to talk about it in that broad sense. And are you putting together the best practices for your podcast to prove that you have a right to use your images, your music, your video clips, that you have a right to be able to use those? Because there are a lot of cease and desist letters going around because lawyers need something to do. And so there's a whole entire firms and whole entire actually softwares right now that are trolling through all of this and sending cease and desist letters and other things like that. Or YouTube actually has a whole process by which if they don't see what they're looking for, it comes back and it alerts you and say, hey, you got to prove it. Do you have the rights to this music? Are you allowed to do this? Or we're going to take it off. And so takedown is a part of the whole industry. It's the dcma. So you have that process that it can already happen where they can force takedown of your content. Now it could go even deeper with liability. We've seen that with some clients before where they didn't have rights to images that belong to news media and other things. So. So that's what we want to talk about today is really make sure that it's clear to you what your process should be. This is not about copywriting your own stuff. We'll deal with that in the future.

Yeah, no, this is really critical for podcasters. And let me just give you an example. Here's one example that we see happen a lot is a law firm who is trying to make money for themselves, usually more than for their client. Although they'll say it's for their client. They'll do a reverse image search in Google, their client has copyrighted images. Maybe they're on istockphoto or Getty Images or some of these sites that people get images from and they end up seeing the image used on websites with no attribution to where they got it from. And that's pretty common. Not everybody would put attribution. But these law firms are going to reach out if there's one of these images on your website and say, hey, do you have a license for this image and please provide it to prove you do otherwise. They don't just then. One thing they might do is send you a cease and desist letter, but they're more interested in seeing how long you've had it on your website and making you pay a penalty for having used it without having purchased a proper license, without having the rights to do. And many of us entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners may not even realize this is a thing, that this is something that you can actually get in trouble for and end up being stuck with a pretty big bill for using a copyrighted image without permission, without a proper license.

So I just want you to think about this. It's worse if you use that as your episode image because of the syndication implications of that, that it's syndicated out there. It's been on Apple, it's been on Spotify, it's been in all those places. They're going to make a bigger case out that than they will your website. Especially if you can prove you really hardly have any traffic to your website. Or like that's not unless you had a big deal website with a lot of traffic on a monthly basis, they can't prove that it did anything for you. So that's less likely. Although they will still come after you for that. It's less likely to mean as much as if you used it in an episode art situation or a cover art situation. A cover art is really worse. It's representative of your whole show and it's used everywhere for as long as your show has been live. And so that's something that you really do need to watch out for. So this is something that a lot of you who go to Fiverr go to some of these other places to have your cover art created. You don't always know where they get images and you don't always know if they have given you images with full rights, what they've done with it. And so you have trouble tracing back to them and getting to that person and saying, hey, where did we buy this stock image? I know you charged me for it, but I don't have any number. I don't have any license number. This is where it will fall apart if you do not do that from the beginning, and you may end up having to replace your cover art immediately.

So this is just one example. But the big important message here is if you don't know where your images or music or video clips, if you're using stock video came from, it's time to figure it out. There's no time too soon. You need to know. You need to know where it came from.

You need to figure it out at the time that you it's created. That's something that's critically important. So at the time that it's created, so when we create them for our clients, we have a record of all of that. Where did that image come from? It's usually stored with the image. It's in the metadata that's there. We know where that came from, what site it came from, what license it is, and if there was something wrong with it, we could go back and look at the account and double check and say, oh, there was a typo in it. Even though we gave attribution, we did something wrong, we can fix that. And that can be done as well. So. So that's the first thing. The second part of what I want to tap onto, what Tom said here is that a lot of times you assume that your guest has a right to the image when they send it to you. Sometimes they don't even have a right to their own profile image and they don't know it. So if you're accepting images from your guests, make sure that it is in the metadata. Make sure you've asked them. That's the source time point at which you want to ask them. And hey, do you have a right to use these images?

And just to be clear, as Tracy was saying, our customers that we're doing production services for, when they provide us an image, say, hey, here's an image. I got it from my guest. Please use it for the featured image for the podcast. Use it in the blog post or however they want us to use it. We really don't vet that for them. They're saying, here's an image, you can use it, that's fine, we'll use it. But if there's any copyright issue that's on you, the customer, you provided the image, you're the source. We're not going to question you. We're understanding, great, you have the right to use this image. You provided it to us. So we'll go and use it. So just make sure you do. And for obviously headshots from a guest and things like that, if they're giving it to you, obviously you have their permission. They're giving it to you. Right. But we've seen it happen where other images a guest provides end up having some significant copyright issues even years later. And it can cost hundreds and even thousands. We've seen it cost thousands of dollars to pay a penalty when in fact the guest didn't have the right. And it's on your website. They're coming after you, not the guest, because it's on your website. So some not to overly alarm you about this or scare you off from using images. Using unique images for every episode and using them on your website related to the episode. If there's a blog, some sort of post for the episode is an excellent thing to do. Also for social media, share graphics, you definitely should do that. All we're saying is make sure you actually have permission and have the rights to use the photo before you do.

So. Tom, let's talk a little bit about YouTube, because YouTube has gotten a little more sophisticated with how they do things and require and have fields for putting in what you would call attribution or license agreements or anything like that. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So on YouTube, obviously some people are posting their podcasts on YouTube as an audiogram. Others actually are recording their podcast as video also like we are, and putting them in their YouTube channel. And this applies to both of those situations because most of you podcasters out there and most in. I think pretty much all of our podcasters have a prerecorded intro or outro for the show that has music. Now we've had people come to us and bring original music they had made for them. That's wonderful. It's rare, but they do. Other people have been podcasting for years and they provide us. They're already. They had a prerecorded intro and outro. We're not creating that. So hopefully they have the rights to that music. When we are launching a show, we have music sites that we pay for that. We have the rights to choose and download music, and we have a license for that. This is very important.

There's like a code that you have an ability to put in it's. And if you think of it like in an image, if you've ever bought an image off a stock image site, they have an attribution link usually, and that has all that information in it as well. In Music, it has its own same model, but it's a number and a code.

So over the years we've evolved which music sites that we use for our immersion, for the work we do on behalf of our clients. And there's lots of good ones. And I'm not saying one is necessarily better than another. I'm not making a judgment on that. The one that we use, we get a license number and it's called content ID number. And in fact on YouTube. So YouTube is better than a lot of places you would distribute your content on this particular issue. Because when you upload a video to your YouTube channel, just like you would enter in the title of your video, the description of your video, put keyword tags associated with your video, all those things you do to configure a YouTube video for publication. There's another field called Content ID and you put that number in there and you're telling YouTube, hey, there's music in this. Or there's also stock video footage. If you. With our. When we edit their video, we've also created a video intro which has music in it, but also a lot of times has some stock video footage that we've purchased on behalf of our client from stock video website. That intro is more visually dynamic and you also have a license for that. So whatever purchased music or video clips that you might have, and if you're a do it yourselfer out there, you may be doing this on your own. You want to make sure you have that license and in YouTube you enter that content ID, because then that's a part of the video. And in YouTube system, it tells YouTube and the world, hey, I've done this properly, I have the rights for this and no one's going to bother you.

Remember that all of these systems use a bot, right? So the bot goes through it. So when they hear music that they know is already licensed, it already knows that. And then when it doesn't see that content id, that code number in the space, that space is blank, they just assume you're not in compliance and you get that notification and it's all automated. There's no human until you get all the way up through the system. If you're fighting it because something's not right, it is just that, something systematize. So comply with the system. It's gonna make everything smooth, everything easy. The number one thing that will happen to you first is your monetization will be turned off on your YouTube. That's the first thing that will happen, is you'll lose your monetization ability, then you'll lose the access. They'll turn off access to the videos or to the channel to all of those things. You can cascade up in problems from doing this if you don't comply and then you don't reply when you do get a takedown.

And a similar thing can happen with your podcast episodes. It would be whoever the copyright holder is. If they believe you don't have the right to use the music that's in your podcast, then they'll reach out to the individual listening app and ask them to take your show down because you don't have the rights. Now, usually they'll reach out to you first and say, hey, prove you have the rights. Now, the podcast ecosystem does not have as good a proactive system as YouTube does for asserting that, hey, this music I'm using in my prerecorded intro, I do have the rights to it. So sometimes you may get an email from a copyright owner or agency or an attorney saying, hey, we see you using this music. Do you have the rights to it? And you should have the rights to it. We're for that. We don't think anybody should be using any music in a podcast they don't have true permission to use. And you want to as you go on, especially if you're self publishing your episodes, maybe editing your own audio, you want to keep records of every episode. If you use different music in different episodes or at minimum, hey, your prerecorded intro and outro, I'm using this music and here's my license. Keep it in a folder somewhere on your computer that you have it or in the cloud somewhere where you can access that. So when anybody asks, you could just go and copy and paste. Yes, I purchased the license. Here's when I purchased it, here's the information. And then they'll say, okay, thank you very much, and they'll leave you alone. You're not going to bother you again.

A lot of times the problem with that is that, that a producer made this for you, somebody else made this for you, someone on Fiverr, someone, some contractor, freelancer made this for you and you didn't get it at the time. That's more common the problem, and they know that. And that's how they are generating more income for themselves. Because then it'll be cheaper for you to pay another 50 bucks to them to buy it again and be in compliance than it is for you to try to track it down and find it. And you won't be able to. And because their choices and they could Even try to extort more out of you. Their choice is to tell you you have to shut, you have to take it all down and then they're going to sue you. Their opportunity is to take down first and that takes down your entire show. And you have to replace it all and you have to do it all. Which is yet another reason why we utilize that intro outro mixing. Because when we can do a custom intro outro, we can remove it and we put a brand new one in. So if there's ever a problem, we've got a solution for that. And it's one of the reasons we did that was a quick and easy way for us to replace those intro outros if we ever had an issue or if we ever needed to update them.

So for those of you that may be new to the podcast or new to feed, you're new to Podize and what we do, I want to explain that a little further. What Tracy's talking about is using our platform to add your intro and outro on your show and then not have it edited in, baked into one MP3 file that you upload and publish. Our system gives you the opportunity to do that differently. Upload that prerecorded intro and outro and our system adds it to the episode before it publishes. But what that leaves the flexibility for is easily retroactively replacing it with a new one without having to do all the hard work of re editing and re uploading every episode.

Wow.

Of hosting on Politize.

While we're saying that let's do that right now. So this episode will probably fall into. And I'm pretty sure it will. Is the new updated intro outro that we've created where we decided to get updated music.

We decide, Tracy, that we're gonna start with just the new episodes going forward of that or are we replacing them on past episodes also? Cause that's a choice.

That was the choice. And I don't know what choice we made and we'll have to figure it out. But either way, you could hear the transition. If we left it in and if we didn't, we actually have the ability to switch em all out. And I think that our team is just flagging me right now in the chat, which is wonderful. Telling me that we wanted to replace them on all episodes because we wanted to do just this show. Everybody how easy that is for us to be able to do that. So we are gonna replace them on all episodes. So when you listen to this episode, you will hear the new intro outro that we've recorded with.

More to the point, you've already heard it because you've already heard it. Yeah, you heard the beginning already, right?

So listen to the end and you'll hear the outro. So yeah, we updated our music at that same time. Now there's also a couple of other practices you might want to try here. And this is what I'm going to refer to and say, if you just want to make this really easy on yourself and you don't want to forget and you don't want to lose it, put it in your default episode call to action. And a lot of hosts have this. We definitely have it on the Poditize platform. But basically you have a default sort of description that goes into every episode and you can add in to the bottom of that a code that says, here's my license ID for the music and give attribution to whoever the music is. We've had people do that for the image that they use was a photograph taken of them or something. And they give attribution to the famous photographer for their cover art image, and they put it right there in their episode description and in their show description. So you could do that in either way. So at least you have it set, set into your feed somewhere. So you'll never lose it then. So either use your show description or your episode description, or both. And depending on what it is that you're using, you can do that way as well. Then it's there. The one issue we also have heard from musicians who have podcasts, and this is a little bit different. If your music is already being sold on Spotify and you use a segment of that music on your podcast, you are more likely to get nasty letters and messages from Spotify or from Apple because they already have a system that is checking for duplicate music and music that is already licensed because they want to make sure that you're paying Apple for it or paying Spotify for the access to that music. So when they hear that duplication of that music, they know it. And so we have had the musicians that I've worked with so far all put them both in their show description and in their episode description, making sure that everyone knows that I am that author of this, I am the songwriter, I am the musician. And that way there's a tie to those two things. And I think there might even be an account number that sometimes they reference.

We definitely have some podcasts that are for musicians and interview musicians and they're talking about their music and paying clips and things like that. And fortunately, musicians, probably more than any other type of individual who might be podcasting, are very well aware of copyright laws and rules, and they're usually on top of.

Exactly. But it does work a little bit differently. And I'm going to say the bots in that system pick it up a lot more easily if you don't have your reference numbers and you don't have what you need. So you do have to be careful with that.

I hope really, any of you podcasters out there listening to this episode have not had to deal with this, because it's not fun. It takes time, takes energy. You're on the defensive when anybody asks you about it to prove. Because it is up to you to prove you have the rights to the music, the video clip, the image that you're using, whatever it is. And so all we're saying is stay on top of it and be proactive. And if for some reason you're out of compliance, let's start fixing it before someone discovers it.

Before someone notices. Yeah, if you know it, then go fix it. Right now, I just want to recap a couple of best practices that I find. The easiest way to do it, the easiest way to do it is whenever you buy a video clip, you buy a music clip, you buy a image of some kind, or you get it from somewhere that somebody you contracted for it immediately put the information in the metadata of the file. So you go get more info, and you can type it in manually if you need to, but put it in there from the beginning because that's the easiest storage place for it, and you will always be able to access and find it. And nine times out of 10, the bot that's searching for it will also look at that metadata and see the compliance there. Now, they may not be able to associate you, having purchased it, with that number, and that's something that it will may ask you for proof on. So then the other side of that is to make sure that you keep even if you no longer use that stock photo account or something, but keep your account open there to access the library at any time, even if you're not paying for new credits, almost all of them allow you to go into some free mode on all of them so that you can maintain the library of what you purchased. And so they should always be there. So keep access open to those things. You're going to need them at some point in the future. So those are a couple of best practices. And then again, like I said, if it's an ongoing thing, if it's something that goes throughout, like cover art images or episode art images or music. Put it right there in the descriptions in your feed and save yourself some time and energy.

One other little tip that can help you. This is going to be unique to images. Okay, this won't work if you're taking music and putting it into your intro because that gets saved as its own file name and a part of every podcast that has a unique file name. But if you're using an image, and this would be more like in your blog, as a reference image, if it's part of your cover art, again, you're gonna alter it, use a portion of it and SA as something new. But if you're using an image just the way it is as a reference image and you've purchased that image from one of These image websites, IStock or Shutterstock or Getty Images, any of those, there's a file name that they give that photo. Save it and don't change the file name. Because if you publish that on your website and that file name is the same, that while not conclusive proof that you purchased the license, is pretty darn good. And they usually won't bother you because they'll see, oh, that's the same file name as what we put up on iStock. And you could.

That's in their account too.

You couldn't have gotten that. It's very likely the only reason that image file name is the same is cause you downloaded it from that platform and paid for it. If you didn't pay for it, it would have a watermark in it. It wouldn't be the same. But if it's the pure image, it has that file name, it's pretty good circumstantial evidence that you did the right thing. Even if you haven't put the license in the metadata like Tracy suggested, and.

It will be easier to find in the account later. So you are. I do have your account open. It's hard to figure it out.

But if you change that file name, then they get a little more suspicious and some. Where'd you get this? And now I want to know. I want to see the license. So the bots, I think, tend to leave you more alone if the file name's the same. That's all I'm suggesting.

That's such a good point. Now, I do want to say one last thing. Just because you're using an AI image generator or an AI music generator, those exist out there. Although I have to say I think the music is really crappy. But that's my own personal viewpoint. And but even though you're doing that, those are not copyrightable, that doesn't mean that you won't have a copyright infringement problem because some of these images that are being created already infringe somebody else's copyright. So just be very cautious that you could still end up in a takedown situation over some of those AI images right now. You're not home free with them at this stage of the game yet because how they're generated is still controversial.

But they image generation is still a little bit of the wild west right now, isn't it?

Yeah. It's just that so many of them have learned off the Getty library and there's a big lawsuit going on between Getty and one of the image creator systems. And the problem with that is, is what they've done is you can actually see, see in the AI version of the image, you can see a warped Getty water. They had to use that image as a basis for whatever they generated. And so that's where you could get into trouble from doing it. But the great news is that when they all work it out and you finally get into somebody who has the rights to use their library and all of those things are worked out one day, those are not copyrightable. So you can't infringe on somebody else by having a bot create an AI, create your images for you, for your image library, for your podcast, for your blog, for any of those things. They're not copyrightable by human because they're not created by humans. And so the copyright and trademark offices do not allow us to copyright or trademark anything that is not created by a human being. That's already the law. It's been the law for quite some time. It's not new. So in that particular case, we won't have as many copyright issues in the future. But if the library that's generating it or the system that's generating it is infringing, it still puts you at risk. So just be cautious. There's add that one last copyright alert in here.

Very useful, Tracy. I'm sure that many of our listeners will appreciate that.

We will be back next time with another topic on feed you'd brand here that is focused just for podcasters and videocasters who are trying to make more out of everything that they do. That is our absolute obsessive focus here. Tom and I Eat, Breathe, Live, everything, podcasting and everything in this. And so we're always interested in what, what you are looking for answers for. And so please reach out to us. Let us know what you would like us to cover on a future episode. Reach out to us on anywhere on social media or go to the Potitize website and send us a message right through the website. We'd love to have you. And if you would like to check out all of our episodes, we have a fabulous showcaster player right on the Potitize website for you to catch all of the episodes of Feed you'd brand and see what we've been doing for the last few years for all of our clients. And you can also go to the blog post for each of those episodes and access even more detailed information. Sometimes we have tutorials we add and masterclasses and deep dives into things that we just touch on here in our coaching calls that we are now turning out as podcasts as well. So thanks everyone for listening. We really appreciate you.

Absolutely. Thanks so much Tracy. Very well said. We'll leave it there. Thanks so much everyone. We'll see you next time. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazard on Feed. You'd brand.

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