The below Blog post is a reprint of a blog post by a classmate, Heather Taylor. The original post can be found at http://chibigoatess.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/week1copyrightassignment/#comment-3.
It is followed by a response that I posted to her post.
Copyright has always been one of those kinds of topics that I was unsure of, especially since I was part of the Napster generation. At that time, I felt like that if you really liked a artist, you would still pay to see him/her/them perform and buy their stuff regardless if you could download it online. During that time, I was also under the impression that as an artist or musician that getting your music out was more important than the money, but now a little older, I can realize and understand the financial implications.
While as an artist, I don’t want people taking credit for and making money off of my work, I don’t take any offense to someone remixing it. Being an artist after years and years of artists before me, makes me feel like artists are recyclers and remixers in a way, by nature. That doesn’t mean we should lose the ownership of our creations though. I remember hearing about the Shepard Fairey story when when Obama was elected but I didn’t follow up on the conclusion until now. I think it’s truly ironic that after having made such a big deal over him stealing the photo, now the AP are going to work with him on projects. I don’t agree with Fairey’s actions, but it follows right inline with what Larry Lessig said about a generation that doesn’t care at all about copyright. Mayer and Bettle made me much more aware of how much Creative Commons stuff there is out there, I think it would be valuable to show my students in the future as well. ”Good Copy Bad Copy” really opened my eyes to how other countries view our digital “pirates”. The Fair(y) Use Tale” was too clever in using Disney characters to describe “fair use”.
As a teacher, in the past, I’ve been worried about how I’ve used copyrighted items in my class, and felt that “fair use” was really vague. If you talk to my high school students they download illegally, even when I’ve tried to explain why they shouldn’t, they don’t care. I think that Creative Commons is a happy medium so that artists/musicians/etc. have a choice what happens to their work and the consumers can take on the mantle of creators.
This is my response to Heather’s above blog post.
@Heather
I too have always been too vague with regards to what was covered under fair use, and have always shied away from repurposing other people’s works out of fear of violating copyrights. While I still feel pretty vague over exactly what is covered by fair use I definitely have a better understanding of it now as opposed to just a week ago. I also think I am still just as likely to shy away from using other people’s works, with the exception of content found through Creative Commons.
No comments:
Post a Comment