Urs Gasser and Silke Ersnt’s essay From Shakespeare to DJ Danger Mouse: A Quick Look at Copyright and User Creativity in the Digital Age explores the recently problematic and ever-evolving relationship between long established Copyright and Fair Use laws and the Internet as we know it today, an endless source of user-created content. As digital technologies and the Internet continue to grow and foster an environment of “participatory culture” among its countless users, more and more often creative works, new and old, are being are being integrated into practices such as fan fiction, remix, sampling, and mashups. The way that Copyright and Fair Use laws stand today, many users who are simply looking for a creative outlet are subject to lawsuits, fines, and in some cases even jail time for violating laws that are simply outdated today. The origin of Copyright Law was based upon print material of the last millennium, a time before it was quick and easy to find content on the Internet, modify/remix/sample it (ie. a “derivative work”), and make it your own in no time at all. Gasser and Ernst argue, and I agree, there there is great potential for reform of these laws that will bring them up to speed with the current state of our new digitized world. The old guard of Copyright and Fair Use advocates would argue that allowing our new participatory culture to pick and choose from any media that is available and make it something new disincentivizes the creative process by possibly decreasing the monetary value of an original creative work. However, some specific changes to the structure of Copyright and Fair Use laws would inherently dissolve the problem. Legislation that would ensure that derivative works would not interfere with the monetary value of the original work and/or be non-commercial works themselves would certainly lessen the tensions between original creators and active receivers/remixers because in the end, creators get to make their money and everyone else gets a change to create derivative works. This “Top-Down” approach, and many of their other suggestions would require a vast overhaul of the entirety of Copyright and Fair Use laws, and with the pace at which Congress typical works, this could take years to finalize and cost many people and companies on both sides of the issue a lot more money. On the other hand, a “Bottom-Up” approach in which content creators authorize that their work be shareable (such as the idea of the creative commons license) would avoid governmental interference from the start. The problem here is that large corporations that like to make large amounts of money would worry that their revenue streams would diminish. This approach is much more practical for independent creators/companies. So my question is, where is the middle ground? How do we make creators, active receivers, remixers, samplers, the government, and the money counters all happy? Or, can we at all?
Related Links:
This is a guide to acceptable practices of Fair Use in creating online video.
A collection of remix videos that constitute Fair Use.
No comments:
Post a Comment