You recorded an interview. Somebody clipped it, put it on their site and credited you. Are you fine with that? Legally, it depends on where they took it from.
Richard Gearhart founded Gearhart Law, an intellectual property firm covering patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. Twenty years in business, around 25 contributors, and by his count they were about to hit their five thousandth client. I asked him what governs a podcast, because I could not find a clean answer myself.
A podcast is a copyright, and you get it for free
“the area of podcasting is most likely to be governed by copyright law. So it kind of falls into the same category as a book or a movie”
— Richard Gearhart, Gearhart Law, on Unscripted Small Business
And the part most guests do not realise:
“once you create the podcast you automatically get copyright protection on it you can always file a a copyright registration for the audio with the U.S. Library of Congress but you don’t have to you automatically get copyright protection just because you made it which is great it’s like the best deal in intellectual property law ever.”
— Richard Gearhart
Registration is not about ownership. It is about damages.
So why register at all? Because proving harm is the hard part of an infringement case, and registration removes that burden. Richard’s firm represents photographers on one side of this and recipients of cease and desist letters on the other, so he sees both:
“there’s a provision in the copyright law that if if the work is registered then they can get statutory damages which pretty much means if you can prove infringement the damages are automatic and you don’t have to prove the damages and that makes lawsuits much more attractive to copyright holders”
— Richard Gearhart
The range he cites for statutory damages is 500 to 20,000 dollars per occurrence of infringement. That number is why some photographers, in his words, make more money from enforcement than from selling their work.
Where you posted it changes what people can do with it
This is the practical rule for anyone guesting on shows:
“when you post content on Facebook or YouTube, the rules specifically give anybody the right to use that content pretty much how they want, as long as it’s not misleading or scandalous or something. And they can share it and say whatever they want about it. But if they take that content and post it on their website and it’s no longer on the social media platform… then that could be a copyright violation.”
— Richard Gearhart
Sharing inside the platform is one thing. Lifting the file out and hosting it elsewhere is another. And credit does not settle it:
“once you go outside the platform, attribution is is you know technically not enough.”
— Richard Gearhart
He was straight about the limits of his own answer when I pushed on podcast hosting platforms specifically: “to be honest, I don’t have a good answer to that… I really don’t want to mislead your listeners.” An IP attorney declining to guess is worth more than a confident answer, and I would rather print the gap than fill it.
Once AI is in the mix, authorship gets split
If you use an AI voice, a cloned host or a fully generated segment, the law has a view on it:
“according to the the the law, artificial intelligence cannot be an author… if it’s a mixed situation where you have a human being and AI together, then the parts of the podcast generated by AI would not be copyrightable, but the parts generated by the human would be copyrightable.”
— Richard Gearhart
Which raises a genuinely unresolved question he walked through on the show: if the questions were AI-generated and a human asked them aloud, is the transcript protected? His answer was that nobody really knows, and that it gets decided in a courtroom with an expert on each side.
What to actually do as a podcast guest
- Decide your default before it happens. Most guests want their words spread. If that is you, say so in writing to the host and stop worrying about clips.
- Know which version is which. The clip on the show’s YouTube channel is governed by YouTube’s terms. The MP3 on their site is not.
- If a piece of content has commercial value, register it. Not for ownership, which you already have, but for the damages provision.
- Enforcement is a choice, not an obligation. Richard’s point is that rights vest with the holder, and you can decline to exercise them if the use is helping you.
My own position is the opposite of protective — I hope people take pieces of these interviews and use them, because a citation without a link is still a citation. But hoping is not the same as knowing, and it is worth knowing which one you are doing.
This is not legal advice. Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcript, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More at Guests On Podcasts and Unscripted Small Business.