Tag Archives: fair use

Recap of Monday 2/23, and reading/blogging assignments for Wednesday 2/25

Today we discussed copyright and fair use and used the copyright slider to determine if particular works were protected by copyright or in the public domain. Next time we’ll start with a quick overview of open access. We’ll spend most of our time Wednesday talking about privacy, how the definition is evolving, and challenges presented by networked digital media. Please read the following:
Price, Big Data and Privacy
Rainey & Anderson, The Future of Privacy
Wu, Why Monopolies Make Spying Easier
Your blogging assignment is to comment on at least one and no more than three blog posts. Be sure your comments total at least 100 words. To comment on a classmate’s post, click on the Leave a Reply link at the top of the post, type your comment, and click Post Comment when you’re finished. More help with comments on the OpenLab is available here.

~Prof. Leonard

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.

Wednesday’s a Monday, and reading/blogging assignments for 2/23

Today we discussed participatory media and open data. We ran out of time before we could discuss the differences between open data and big data; this article does a nice job with the concepts. I was hoping to discuss some of the participatory open data projects [Buiilding Inspector, What’s on the Menu?] of NYPL labs in class, so explore those projects on your own time if you like. Remember our collaborative writing on participatory media?

What does participatory media mean to you?

What does participatory media mean to you?

 

 

 

 

 

On Monday, February 23 we will talk about copyright and fair use and the open access movement. Please read and view the following:

Center for Social Media, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, sections Code and FAQ only

Jeanty, “US Copyright Office Rules that Monkeys Can’t Copyright their Selfies”

Videos: Grey, “Copyright: Forever Less one Day

Lessig, “Laws that Choke Creativity

Faden, “A Fair(y) Use Tale

Your blogging assignment is one reading/viewing response blog post.

~Prof. Leonard