#23. This is the final discovery exercise on Copyright and Creative Commons. When I finish it, I will go to the PA Online Survey to complete an evaluation.
It's interesting to me when I go to the School Library Learning site to find out about assignment #23 that I'm seeing the video "A Fair(y) Use Tale." I'd seen this video bookmarked on Del.icio.us in a friend's networked bookmarks, and I'd considered using it as the YouTube item I was going to embed in my blog, until I started to watch it and saw Disney characters and the Disney logo. I realize now, after watching the whole thing, that I didn't watch far enough previously to realize what the creators were doing. They took such small portions of each movie clip that they were not infringing on copyright, and they were putting the clips together in such as way as not to infringe upon the original work or retell the original work. They demonstrated how to put together a new creative work that does not break copyright law, and they properly gave credit to the original productions and the owner of the original copyrights, Disney Productions. It's really a very clever work showing how "fair use" can work for someone.
Part of our assignment is to find something that indicates that this video was changed from its original. That indication is on the screen that says, "The following film is not associated with, authorized by, or should be confused with any product produced by" and then the "Walt Disney Pictures" logo appears.
I just visited the Creative Commons Web site and I was surprised to see an entry about Lawrence Lessig having appeared on "The Colbert Report" on TV's Comedy Central channel on January 8th. Lessig is the founder of Creative Commons and he was promoting his new book, Remix, when he appeared on Stephen Colbert's show. I'd seen that show, but I didn't know who Lessig was, and I didn't know I'd be visiting Creative Commons and finding out about the connection. It just seems like an odd coincidence that I'm doing that within three days of the show.
Another coincidence: Even as I am in the process of working on this assignment and I found another blog I wanted to add to my blog reader, I see that my blog reader has brought me Joyce Valenza's "NeverEnding Search" blog about "Remixing: Lessig vs. Colbert". Talk about timely matters!
Creative Commons is a site with tools that lets people license their work and share it legally. It allows the owner to reserve all rights or only some rights to their creative work, so others can take the work and use it in a "remixed" way.
I visited the Arts Project Web site of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and found some interesting links there. I paged through a bit of the comic book about intellectual property, but I've never liked having to read comic books -- they take so much longer to absorb than just text. Nonetheless, some people like their instruction in graphic form, so it's nice to know that this comic book on intellectual property can be viewed online.
I enjoyed watching the short film called "Great Composers Steal", with Anthony Kelley giving examples of how the limitations of the Western musical scale can make many tunes sound as though they are borrowed from others but really are not. He played notes that sounded like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star when played at one rhythm and I'm In the Mood For Love when played at another rhythm, to give examples the audience would recognize as being very different works even though they use identical notes. When you have only 11 notes of a scale, and thousands (millions?) of tunes to write, some of them will have to have the same notes because there are no others from which to choose.
I've enjoyed this journey through the "23 Things" of Library 2.0 and am heading now to complete my evaluation on the PA Online Survey site.
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