Copyrights, public domain and us
This week’s readings while interesting did not provide me with a lot of new useful information. Bound by Law in particular, while it states the positive points and negative points of copyright law and many of the most common pitfalls of creative expression in our day and age. One of the most intriguing statements from Bound by Law was that “several filmmakers’ organizations have jointly produced a statement of best practices in fair use to clarify how professional filmmakers interpret fair use in daily practice� however, this actual information was only available after additional searching. While this is understandable for the purposes of story telling actual definitions of commonly accepted fair use practices would be significantly more informative given the subject matter. This subject matter is very important for us in particular since we are working on a collaborative document for access by a wide audience, and knowing what rights we have as creators and what obligations we have as users of others creations will help avoid many problems that could show up later in the creation process.
On the scale of varying levels of licensing and limited reserved rights more specifically; use by attribution would be ideal for our situation since most if not all of the material we will be using will be by attribution. The idea of using other people’s knowledge and information by attribution without allowing others to do the same of our own creation seems to be a seriously problematic double standard towards our view of public knowledge and use of that knowledge.
Comments
While agree with your assessment of Bound by Law, I thought the reading from Wikinomics did a really complete job of bringing all of our material into perspective with regards to copyright. I personally really enjoyed the Creative Commons video because it approached the subject in a very appeasing way. I thought Creative Commons really stressed the idea of maintaining your material as your own in its original form but allowing others to grow and build off of it.
On another note you comment about the sharing of our material on the wiki was hit the nail right on the head. I completely agree with you. I would even like to take it a step farther and point out that although the collection and the organization of the material will be strictly our own, we do not actually posses any of the intellectual property such as the news stories, video, etc., they all have been constructed by someone outside of our class (with the exception of Jim's material of course). I do think that our class with its focus on collaboration and "public knowledge" as you so aptly put it, should encourage the use and evolution of our own material. So yes, I agree, we should allow others to actively use our material. However, how to you feel about letting them actively contribute? Maybe not to the entire post but perhaps a discussion board where they can contribute new material.
Thanks for the great post, it really inspired a little deeper thought on my part!
Posted by: Stephanie V | March 29, 2008 2:00 PM
I agree with your point that whatever degree of usage we allow should be consistent with what we end of doing and that which we espouse (if we do in fact have a consensus on that.)
Posted by: Sara McDonnell | March 30, 2008 6:22 PM
While I agree with you that learning what the actual standards are would be helpful when working on our project, the purpose of the bound by law text seemed more to be an introduction of sorts. I think they did give a great overview, and left us with a starting point for gathering more information (for instance, you knew what to start searching for - or that there even was something to look for).
For me, the story works because they told it as just that - a story - and didn't get too dry with it all. Perhaps I was less informed about copyright law then you to start...
Posted by: Jessica L | March 30, 2008 10:22 PM