You might ask, Do I really have to know that much about copyright law, especially if I'm someone
who just wants to write a blog, make a video, put together a slideshow, build a class lesson, teach a
Sunday school class? Not really. You just need to know the right stuff—most importantly, that you
have rights. And then you need to know the real risks you take when you exercise your rights.
You then might ask, Shouldn't we really leave legal questions in the hands of lawyers? You can, but
that's a big decision. It's a decision that leaves you powerless to make creative decisions on your
own, and it is unlike the rest of your life. You don't expect to consult lawyers when you speak in
public, even though libel laws exist that incautious remarks might trigger. If you are attacked on
a dark street, you don't stop to call a lawyer to see if you have the right to self-defense. There's
nothing so difficult about the decisions people have to make about re-using copyrighted material
that requires you to keep a lawyer at hand as you work.
And then you might ask, How often, really, do these arcane questions of copyright come up for non-copyright experts anyway? More and more, both at home and at work. That is not only because people have more and more tools with which to make and distribute their own digital work. It's also because over the last century, copyright became both long and strong. Our whole culture is now copyrighted.
The whole world wasn't always copyrighted. But since 1978, in the U.S. all expression that ends up in a fixed medium (and that means everything--your shopping list, the inter-office memo, your kid’s homework) is copyrighted by default. There's virtually no chance that you will make even a home video that is not littered with copyrighted material, including your kindergartner's adorable picture of Mom (yes, that kid does own the copyright).
Copyrights didn't always last forever, either. And they don't now, but for most ordinary purposes they might as well. Copyrights now last generations beyond the life of the author. That keeps almost all current culture--X-Men, “Star Trek,” “Saturday Night Live” routines or Jay-Z or Stevie Wonder's songs—off limits until after not only all the participants but all the people who ever heard of them are dead.
As well, big media companies and their trade associations such as the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were not always huffing and puffing about copyright infringement. But they are now, and they have been ever since digital technology made it really easy to make copies. They have been watching their business models change without seeing a new one that works for them emerge. Their resort has been both to use copyright ownership in their favor and to scare people into thinking that ownership rights are even more stringent than they are.
Furthermore, scare tactics in one area scare people in another. When the Recording Industry Association of America sues downloaders, people who are repurposing bits of copyrighted culture to comment upon it get frightened. When a company challenges another about trademark claims, people erroneously believe this is a copyright problem. Problems that big media companies have with massive commercial piracy in China are confused with individual acts of copying. People are far more alarmed, in general, than they need to be, and they rarely understand exactly what is worth getting alarmed about or why.
None of that would matter that much if we were not becoming a nation of makers and sharers, not just consumers of other people’s copyrighted material. We are rediscovering the participatory, collaborative cultural practices that many of us forgot during the peak era for mass media. We create birthday slide-shows and scrapbooks, mix CDs and files, mashups and remixes, websites and self- published books. We expect programs such as GarageBand and Windows MovieMaker to come pre- installed on our new computers, and we turn to Flickr and Facebook for other people's memories to fill in when ours comes up short.
For centuries, no one much thought about copyright in daily life. Now, we don’t have a choice. We are both consumers and creators every day, and we need to use our rights to draw on our own culture as well as claiming rights to their own productions. We need to reclaim the conversation about copyright as one that belongs to all of us.
by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Techdirt | Read more:
Part II here:
And then you might ask, How often, really, do these arcane questions of copyright come up for non-copyright experts anyway? More and more, both at home and at work. That is not only because people have more and more tools with which to make and distribute their own digital work. It's also because over the last century, copyright became both long and strong. Our whole culture is now copyrighted.
The whole world wasn't always copyrighted. But since 1978, in the U.S. all expression that ends up in a fixed medium (and that means everything--your shopping list, the inter-office memo, your kid’s homework) is copyrighted by default. There's virtually no chance that you will make even a home video that is not littered with copyrighted material, including your kindergartner's adorable picture of Mom (yes, that kid does own the copyright).
Copyrights didn't always last forever, either. And they don't now, but for most ordinary purposes they might as well. Copyrights now last generations beyond the life of the author. That keeps almost all current culture--X-Men, “Star Trek,” “Saturday Night Live” routines or Jay-Z or Stevie Wonder's songs—off limits until after not only all the participants but all the people who ever heard of them are dead.
As well, big media companies and their trade associations such as the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were not always huffing and puffing about copyright infringement. But they are now, and they have been ever since digital technology made it really easy to make copies. They have been watching their business models change without seeing a new one that works for them emerge. Their resort has been both to use copyright ownership in their favor and to scare people into thinking that ownership rights are even more stringent than they are.
Furthermore, scare tactics in one area scare people in another. When the Recording Industry Association of America sues downloaders, people who are repurposing bits of copyrighted culture to comment upon it get frightened. When a company challenges another about trademark claims, people erroneously believe this is a copyright problem. Problems that big media companies have with massive commercial piracy in China are confused with individual acts of copying. People are far more alarmed, in general, than they need to be, and they rarely understand exactly what is worth getting alarmed about or why.
None of that would matter that much if we were not becoming a nation of makers and sharers, not just consumers of other people’s copyrighted material. We are rediscovering the participatory, collaborative cultural practices that many of us forgot during the peak era for mass media. We create birthday slide-shows and scrapbooks, mix CDs and files, mashups and remixes, websites and self- published books. We expect programs such as GarageBand and Windows MovieMaker to come pre- installed on our new computers, and we turn to Flickr and Facebook for other people's memories to fill in when ours comes up short.
For centuries, no one much thought about copyright in daily life. Now, we don’t have a choice. We are both consumers and creators every day, and we need to use our rights to draw on our own culture as well as claiming rights to their own productions. We need to reclaim the conversation about copyright as one that belongs to all of us.
by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Techdirt | Read more:
Part II here:
