The subject of the legal ramifications of playing music and audio film clips in your podcasts is a complicated one. Perhaps we can learn something by looking back at what our fellow Internet Broadcasters went through.

Many years ago I "accidentally" became one of the voices that spoke out to save Internet Broadcasting. At the time the powers that be were deciding on how Internet Broadcasters would be charged for music licensing. It was something that we all knew was coming as Ingernet Broadcasters had been given several years as a grace period to play licensed music as it was decided what they would be paying. When the word finally came down the only sound left in the Internet Broadcasting world was a large gasp! The new law, as it was stated, would put nearly every Internet Broadcasting company (such as Live365) out of business! There was no way they could make the back payments, nor keep up with future payments.

We had all hoped that we would be charged on a per-listener basis. But as it turned out, they wanted to charge us even more than they do a radio station!

To make a long and involved story short, with much letter writing and phone calling, the law was over ruled and a new, more affordable licensing fee was inacted. As a result, all Live365 broadcasters began paying a $5.00 a month charge. And they all kept broadcasting.

Will the same thing happen to Podcasters? I predict there is a verty good chance that it will as Podcasting is very much like Internet Broadcasting.

As far as using clips from movies and (in our case)cartoons, there are laws that prohibit it and laws that allow it. But as it won't monetarily effect any certain industry in a negative way, I feel this is something we won't have to worry about. As long as the clip is not used to defame the character or program that it came from I don't feel we will have to worry too much about this subject.

There's is one thing that I did find interesting. If you have a podcast and you run the audio from movie trailers it is interesting to note that most movie trailers sent to the press have a "usage life." After this date expires the user is not suppose to run the trailer. I thought this was interesting and wondered how this might effect anyone using trailer audio.

As I said in the opening of this e-mail, the copyright world is very complicated and not always very clear. But, in its simplist form, if the use of a song or clip in your podcast does not cause someone to lose money (i.e. doesn't cause you to make money!) or defame a person or product, you will probably be okay. If not, you will get that nasty little "Cease And Desist" letter in the mail. And in that case, unless you have lots of money or dad is a copyright lawyer, it's best to stop using the material and move on.

Hope this helps! It will certainly be interesting to see what happnes as podcasting gets more popular in the future.

Sincerely yours,

Don Schockow
Cartoon Radio Network
DVD Weekly Podcast

Thanks Dr. Don! Good comments.