We Still Have Fair Use.

I have always believed that if you come up with an idea it is yours to do with as you wish.  This belief is the reason as to why I don’t completely agree with the Grey video.  The video by Grey talks about the longevity of copyrighted works; you can tell from the tone of the video that he is for a shorter duration of copyright protection. He used Star wars which is George Lucas’s work as an example for something with a long copyright protection but I believe Mr. Lucas should be allowed to reap the benefits (money being the main one) of his work for as long as he wants since it was his idea.  Also as the creator he should be allowed some control in how his work is used and thus should be compensated for that work.  According to the Faden video you can still borrow a small portion of George Lucas’s work if you intend to use the work for teaching, news reporting or to even parody which all fall under the Fair Use doctrine.  Faden’s video actually captures the perfect use of the Fair Use doctrine; he created the video to teach the public about fair use, he did not change any of the works and lastly he only borrowed short pieces of each films.  Fair use still protects the original creator of the work because it doesn’t allow you to change the commercial value of the creators work; only the original creator should be allowed to do that.
“The code of best practices in fair use for media literacy education” reading does bring up the problem of the rapid rise of participatory media and how it will affect copyrighted works.  Participatory media such as YouTube and others do take some liberties with copyrighted works for example – the animated music videos (AMVs) mentioned in the Lawrence Lessig video or the millions of cover songs you will find on YouTube sung by a multitude of different artists. I believe Lessig had a great idea on how to solve the participatory media problem; the idea was for the original artist or creator to allow for their work to be used freely for non-commercial use.  This approach makes sense because the original creator can still profit from his work while allowing others to still use their work in an amateur way.  Also allowing this amateur use to their work can expose a wider audience to their work, I can’t begin to count how many cover videos have led to me actually purchasing the original work.  If that doesn’t work we can teach a monkey to use a camera and have him film a movie and the public can freely use that because according to the Jeanty article U.S. law as of 2011 claims that “copyright cannot vest in non-human authors”.  I joke but there is a part of me that would like to see Planet of the Apes 4 or 5 filmed by an actual ape.

2 thoughts on “We Still Have Fair Use.

  1. William Maldonado

    I completely agree with what you said that the creator of any work should have control of their work. Also I feel like Lessig is stepping in the right path but something that would be more secure would be a law that allows free use of works and ideas of people for educational and creative purposes as long as there is no altered version of the original works that is making a profit. If the altered version is making a profit they must buy copyright license or face a law suit.

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  2. fatih

    I disagree to some extent- with arguments that have been presented regarding the right of ownership and disposition of any work for any individual. That might be due to the lack of justice and then judgement in interpreting basic human concepts.
    I normally- believe that ideas are not private ownership for any one, yet they are originally “common”; they haven’t been initiated from nothing, but they are consequences and cumulative experiencies of mankind.
    if we think a such way we might justify why copyright law has stated doctrine of fair use which is a “limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work”. In other words, the law permits “limited” use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders.
    Focus in the word “limited” which is interpreted as credit for rights holders in term of giving them unrestricted “priority” !

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