Below is my response to Berengaria Navarre's blog:
Berengaria's post:
In viewing the video and articles, I appreciated the broad range of materials provided on the copyright issue. One thing I noticed right away was the Stanford video on The Fair(y) Tale of Fair Use. This was created entirely from short clips from Disney movies. So this would be an example of fair use for teaching purposes? Obviously, this subject matter could be taught without using any Disney clips. We are being told that the narrow range of fair use for teaching purposes is: can the subject matter be taught without using any of the copyright material; well, mostly the answer will be yes. So how is the Fair(y) Tale of Fair Use complying with fair use? Are we being warned off for our own good from using copyright material or is Stanford violating copyright or is it a different application of fair use?
I work at a very conservative institution and all my courses have warned me away from any use of copyrighted content so I am overly careful. Personally, my views are quite different. Much of our culture has been created and sold to us by media giants. And yet, we are still humans and as the cave art shows us, stories are an essential part of who we are and how we make sense of ourselves, each other, and the world at large. We sat round campfires and told tales. Our stories come from archetypes and basic story types. How can we not remix our media to tell new stories as we sit in front of computers and connect up? I want to see the stories that others want to tell. I think the present copyright laws violate the intended purpose of the law and that if we don’t complain, the situation will only get worse as the media conglomerates pressure the government into giving longer periods of copyright.
In the meantime, places like Internet Archive are helping to keep Public Domain alive. I love the Archive and we have been using this site for years. In a recent blog post, they are trying to look into some type of peer to peer networking to speed up downloads and reduce their costs. Creative Commons is another site that is a godsend when you are looking for resources, particularly images. Their system is easy to understand and easy to comply with.
My response:
Berengaria,I completely understand your view on current copyright laws. By nature, we share. We share our ideas, thoughts, experiences. I believe that it is important for the public to have access to these. You talked about Internet Archive. Did you post this on our assignment this week? I would like to visit the site and poke around a bit.
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