Week 1-Copyright Issues

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Week 1- Reading/Videos

Copyright

This has been a topic of discussion throughout my education on the Master’s level.  Partly because one of my certifications was in the Educational Media field, otherwise known as learning to be a media specialist.  As a media specialist we work with all types of media but especially print and it is part of our Teaching Standards to teach copyright and plagiarism. 

So I have learned about Fair Use- at one time a person could only use 10% of a work to be considered to be fair use.  It may have changed.  I do remember that Fair Use is for teaching, news reporting, critical comment and parody.  It also depends on “the nature of the work, amount borrowed and whether or not it has a commercial impact” (from the video on Fair use).

I did enjoy the Fairy Tale using the different Disney movies.  My first thought after viewing it was whether or not the filmmaker asked to use the different Disney films, as from my experience, Disney is quite protective of their images. 

I did question the new “remix” culture and wonder how they could get away with it.  The other people that threaten copyright infringement is the Beatles, so my wondering about Dangermouses’ Grey album, is that if the Beatles found out, would they prosecute?  Unfortunately two of the four Beatles are dead, but their record company is protective of what they own.  Apple Computers had to make promises to Apple Records in order to even use the “Apple” name.  How much more protective the Beatles would be in order to protect “The White Album”.

If you noticed, most of the people involved in the remix culture are under 30.  They think nothing of taking someone else’s work and pirating it or borrowing it and changing it.  It appalled me that those Swedish folks thought that pirating our works was ok.  It surprised me too that the Russians also have a lot of pirated material.

Something else that stood out to me was the claim that the music produced by the techno producer was that the money was not being made by record production but by the shows that were being held by the producer to play the music.  In America, the record companies do make money from the artist, and many artists have shows, but the artist still makes money from records.   I am not sure if the current business model for the music industry actually makes sense.  I am in wonderment at those who can produce original music on a regular basis.

There have been issues when someone takes some music and claims it to be their own.  At least one lawsuit has been brought about when part of a song belonging to one artist is being used by another artist. 

If you listen to Brad Paisley’s newest song “This is country music” where he uses different country songs, there is about five to ten words from the song he is borrowing.  He also borrows some of the music.

The third part of the videos was also quite informative.  Not only did it explain more about the remix culture, the fact that young people would rather remix some old stuff than create new, it also explained more about Creative commons.

Creative Commons has been a source for images for previous work, although I prefer in many cases to use my own graphic images.  I will on occasion use that which is copyright free from either morgue file.com or other free sites.