Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

but who will educate the copyright educators?

2010-03-17T19:24:20Z

from the YALSA blog: "Whose Line is it Anyway? or Teens and Plagiarism Within Creative Works". This essay discusses the Helene Hegemann and Nick Simmons cases, and makes me a little uncomfortable in the way it does so.

Excerpts from the post:

"The past month has brought us two stories from the publishing world that highlight just how little most people understand copyright law.
...
From scanalations to fanfic and fanart to blatantly stealing someone else’s ideas, most people just don’t understand copyright and why we have it.
...
I’ll be the first to admit, it can be confusing. Sampling has long been an accepted technique in electronic music and Hip Hop, and major artistic figures like William S. Burroughs and Robert Rauschenberg have based their careers around different techniques of borrowing and re-purposing the creations of others. Add to it things like fan videos on Youtube and you have a climate that makes people think it’s okay to take someone else’s ideas whenever you want and do whatever you like with them without obtaining permission."

The post author doesn't draw any explicit conclusions himself about copyright and fair use. I admit that I have no knowledge of the merits of either Hegemann's or Simmons' cases. But there's something about the phrasing -- "From scanalations to fanfic and fanart to blatantly stealing someone else’s ideas, most people just don’t understand copyright and why we have it" -- that strongly implies that scanalations, fanfic, and fanart come out of a complete lack of understanding of copyright, just as blatantly stealing someone else’s ideas does. "Add it to things like fan videos" to you create "a climate that makes people think" it's okay to steal?

I don't know whether or not the post author has such a simplistic idea of fair use and transformative work, or whether he has a very complex understanding and was just careless in his phrasing in this instance. But either way, the whole blog post makes me uncomfortable.

I 100% agree that people need to be more educated about copyright and why we have it. The number of people who don't understand that you can't just rip passages and images wholesale off Wikipedia and put them in your own book is just ludicrous. But part of educating people about copyright is not frightening them. Fair use and transformative works -- from sampling to fan fiction to machinima -- is not the same thing as a copyright violation.

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We Are Creators Too. Francesca Coppa on vidding

2009-10-01T16:31:24Z

I've been enjoying Public Knowledge's 4-part video series "We Are Creators, Too," but I never expected Francesca Coppa discussing vidding to come across my blog roll!

Kudos to PK for treating vidding like any other form of video remix, not as some weird dysfunctional female behaviour. And kudos to PK for doing the shockingly unusual behaviour of not normativizing male video creation; 3 of the 4 interviews are with women, and video remix not treated as a male activity that some women do as well.

And of course, kudos to Francesca for for an excellent interview which touches on so many of the key points of vidding culture, history, and law.

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linkspam: archives and copyright edition

2009-09-18T18:40:34Z

I'm trying to close out many of my tabs, so I'm going to break this into two posts, one which is mostly about archival/open scholarship/library issues, and one which is about children's literature -- because I think my readership is kind of divided down the middle.

"diaries are a window into life of Kennedy daughter" was a story which really resonated with me as I struggle to learn the ethics of archivists. On the one hand, the diaries are an important part of the historical record, teaching us incredibly troubling things about Joe Kennedy in giving insights into many of the causes supported by Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. On the other hand, their potential for harm to (at the time) living people was not small.

"Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers to the Public" : closing the loopholes in copyright law which might make GPL and Creative Commons-type licenses unenforceable

"Newsflash: professor visits library" really gets at the heart of the problem libraries have, from my perspective, which is an utter failure of advertising. I don't know how many times people have told me about this great new service that allows them to e-mail or text in a question and get an answer back.

Peter Sefton's comments on trying to understand Elsevier's license terms are truly hysterical.

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