The day an intern nearly ended everything taught me more about intellectual property law than any lawyer ever could.
There is a particular breed of professional euphoria that arrives only after months of late nights, missed weekends, and the kind of low-level domestic tension that comes from turning your marriage into a business partnership. You have pushed, cajoled, argued, stayed up until 2am and still somehow emerged on the other side with something you are genuinely proud of. You have delivered. The work is done. And for one brief, golden afternoon, the world is yours.
I was in that state on the day an intern nearly bankrupted us.
Sharpshooter – our independent TV documentary company – had recently won an award. A Channel 4 commissioning editor had just publicly described us as one of the most innovative independents in the UK. His exact words: Sharpshooter can do things larger companies can’t. They can take risks and move quickly. The assembled audience of fellow filmmakers – all competing for the same dwindling pool of commissions – turned as one and produced what I can only describe as a collective, low-frequency snarl. If you have ever worked in a creative industry, you will recognise that sound immediately.
Chris and I were, at the time, among the early adopters of multi-skilling. We stretched budgets by filming and editing a great deal of our own footage. He shot, I did sound, we edited jointly, and we brought in specialists when needed. We also had an intern – a Friday girl, as we thought of her – whom we paid and who helped with the kind of essential administrative groundwork that keeps a production from falling apart.
One of her jobs was to go through the music cue and clearance sheet: a document that accounts for every piece of music used in a film, tracking what you own, what you’ve licensed, and what still needs permission. Music is not decoration. It is architecture. You cut to music. It carries mood and meaning in a way that dialogue often cannot. This matters enormously.
The final cut of our latest film had been delivered to Channel 4. We were in full celebratory mode. After months of evenings and weekends, I had slipped out to do some window shopping – with half an eye on buying a dress for an upcoming holiday.
Then my phone rang.
I picked up with some irritation when I heard it was Chris. For heaven’s sake, I thought, can I not be left in peace for one moment? He cut me short before I could say any of this. “We have a problem. I mean a real problem. Get back here. Fast.”
He was not in husband mode. He was in television director mode – the one where every sentence is a command and the expectation of immediate results is total.
Annie, our intern, had been going through the music cue sheet and discovered that one track – a track threaded through one of our longest and most important scenes – had never been cleared. Never submitted for permission. Never licensed. Just… there.
This predated full digitalisation. Chris and I got on the phone. We were anticipating inconvenience: a re-cut, a grovelling conversation, some humble pie. What we were not anticipating was the voice that came back at us.
Absolutely not. The Rights Manager’s answer was immediate and precise. This track is not available for clearance.
Chris, in his most diplomatic register, asked what it would take to change that position. The music was integral to the scene. It was already in the cut. We really needed it.
No. The answer was a plain, flat no. And then, ominously: As a matter of principle, this company never clears this particular track for this type of use. Not now. Not ever.
The worst possible answer. The programme had to be recalled. We had to find replacement music fast, cut it in, resubmit. For months afterward, I ran a very specific scenario in my head: a rights manager, mid-workout in a gym, suddenly recognising the track playing in our film on a TV across the room. The legal pursuit that would follow. The scale of the potential damages. We could have lost the company. In the worst version of events, we could have lost our house.
All because one piece of music slipped through a clearance sheet.
For legal reasons that are still very much in force, I am not going to tell you the name of the track, the company, or every detail of what followed. What I can tell you is that it was the closest brush with the law I have ever had – and that I have never thought about intellectual property in the same casual way since.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
You may not be running a TV documentary company. But if you are building any kind of content business – a blog, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a course, a social media presence – you are navigating the same territory, and the risks are more real than most people realise.
The internet has created a pervasive and genuinely dangerous myth: that if something is online, it is available to use. It is not. It never was.
A photograph on Google Images belongs to the photographer. A clip from a TV show belongs to the production company. A piece of music on YouTube belongs to whoever holds the rights. A meme – even one that has been shared a million times – may well belong to the original artist who created the artwork. The fact that something circulates freely does not mean it has been released into the commons. It means people have been copying it without permission, which is a different thing entirely.
Copyright is not a bureaucratic technicality designed to frustrate small creators. It is the mechanism by which creators – including you, if you make original work – retain control of what they have made. When you use someone else’s work without permission, you are not bending a rule. You are taking something that does not belong to you.
Here is what you should not use without explicit permission or a licence:
Photographs or video taken by other people – including anything you find on Pinterest, Instagram, or Google Images. Popularity is not the same as permission. Music tracks or sound clips in any video content, including background music in reels, vlogs, or online courses. A track that sounds ambient and anonymous almost certainly belongs to someone. TV or film clips, regardless of how short. “It’s only thirty seconds” is not a legal defence; it is a hope. Art, illustrations, infographics, or designed assets made by other creators. Screenshots of copyrighted digital content, including ebooks and editorial layouts.
The Fair Use Question – And Why It’s Not a Get-Out-of-Jail Card
At this point, someone in the audience always raises a hand and says: But what about fair use?
Fair use – or fair dealing, as it’s known in the UK – is a legitimate legal doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material under certain conditions. Commentary, criticism, parody, and education can all qualify. But fair use is not a formula and it is not a guarantee.
In the United States, fair use is assessed across four factors: the purpose and character of your use (is it transformative, or just copying?); the nature of the original work; the proportion of the work you’ve used; and the effect on the market for the original work. In the UK, fair dealing follows a similar logic but with specific statutory categories.
What fair use is not is this: a fixed number of seconds. There is no universal rule that says thirty seconds is always legal or always safe. There is no “Disney rule” allowing thirty-second clips, despite what you may have read in YouTube comment sections. There is no threshold that automatically exempts you from liability.
Fair use is a defence you can raise in court, after you have already been sued. That is a meaningful distinction.
The advice floating around online – “fifteen to thirty seconds is fine without audio,” “just apply a filter and flip the image” – describes ways of evading automated detection systems, not ways of complying with the law. Being too small to catch is not the same as being legal. And the idea that you have to be caught breaking a rule before the rule applies to you is precisely the kind of thinking that ends in crisis.
My rights manager didn’t catch us through a bot. He was a professional, doing his job, and his answer was no before we had even explained the full context. Rights holders do not owe you creative flexibility.
What To Do Instead
The good news – and there is good news – is that the legitimate options are more extensive and more affordable than they used to be.
Use royalty-free and Creative Commons licensed material. Sites like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay offer high-quality photography under licences that permit commercial use. Read the specific terms for each image, because even within these platforms the conditions vary.
For music, use licensed libraries. Platforms like Epidemic Sound, Artlist, and YouTube’s own Audio Library exist precisely for content creators. A subscription gives you access to thousands of tracks and the legal clarity to use them. It is not expensive relative to the alternative.
Commission original work. If you are building a content brand, original photography and custom design will serve you better in the long run than stock images anyway. Brief a photographer, illustrate your own graphics, hire a composer for a signature intro track. Own what you use.
When in doubt, ask. This sounds obvious, but many content creators simply do not try. A direct message or email to a creator asking for permission costs you nothing. Many small creators will say yes to proper credit and a link. The answer might be no – but unlike the alternative, asking first keeps you on the right side of the law.
Protect your own work. If you are creating original content, you automatically hold copyright the moment your work is fixed in a form – written, recorded, filmed. You do not have to register it for the rights to exist. But adding a clear copyright notice, watermarking images, and monitoring where your content appears online (reverse image search is your friend) gives you a clearer position if you ever need to pursue infringement.
The Lesson From the Gym
When I replay that rights manager in my mental gym scene – the one where he recognises our music through a layer of endorphins and righteous fury – what strikes me most is how easily it could have happened. We were not careless people. We were professional, experienced, award-winning filmmakers. We had a clearance process. We had someone whose specific job it was to track this. And one track still slipped through.
The lesson is not that you need to become a copyright lawyer. It is that intellectual property is real property, that the rules apply to you regardless of your size or profile or good intentions, and that the gap between “probably fine” and “catastrophic” can close very fast.
Women building content businesses are, by and large, operating in good faith. We are trying to make something valuable, reach an audience, build something that lasts. The last thing any of us needs is to have that work derailed by a rights claim we could have avoided with a bit of prior attention.
Don’t be the lamb. Know what you’re using, where it came from, and whether you have the right to use it.
The dress I was shopping for that afternoon, by the way, was never bought. I went home, crisis was averted, and the holiday arrived without any new outfit. Some lessons cost you more than others. This one, mercifully, cost us only music, a recut, and the permanent loss of a few months off my husband’s life.
