Beginning with a personal connection, I found Professor Hobbs’ Grateful Dead reference to be pretty transparent. I say this while glancing over at the very DK publication in question as it sits prettily on my bookshelf (/):/ This Fair Use case was news to me & I couldn’t resist exploring it a bit more deeply. As it turns out, I found a great detailing of the ruling and how it is specifically covered under each of the four factors of fair use. This Law.Justia.com case-review even gets into Fair Use details such as the reduction of Bill Graham’s original poster image size and the fact that the images in question only account for one-fifth of one percent of the entirety of the book. Another rich source for the copyright & fair use question would be the interesting case of how the Grateful Dead attempted to control widespread taping & distribution of their live shows in the 1970s. They finally gave up when they realized that stopping this primitive version of file sharing would actually inhibit the cult-like diaspora of their art. In other words, “the progress of science and useful arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it’ “ (Hobbs 47).
Overall, “Copyright Clarity,” made clear the idea that Copyright & Fair Use are there to protect free dissemination of knowledge and “to help educators understand & apply the principles of copyright & fair use to develop students’ critical thinking & communication skills” (11). Unfortunately, our fear of properly using copyrighted material, such as creating remixes & using clips, chokes innovation. On the one hand, teachers recognize that we need to connect with our students via popular culture, while on the other hand we remain willfully ignorant of Copyright & Fair Use.
One of the major takeaways from Aufderheide’s “Copyright, Creativity, & Authorship” is his suggestion that copyright & fair use are “interpretable and can change through practice” (20). In other words, each case presents a new challenge for the teacher or librarian seeking to share or transform knowledge. He dates the evolution of the individual ownership of creative work back to the genius-author of 18th-century Romanticism. He states that “copying, quoting, and repurposing are crucial to creative acts” (20). Previous to the fame and notoriety of the British Romantic poets, fame was typically linked to an artist’s wealthy patron or to the church. But with Lord George Gordon Byron, the club-footed ladykiller who chose to drink his wine from a human skull, the cult of personality was born and with it the belief that creative works spring fully formed from the poet’s singular imagination.
Finally, in the “Remix Awakens,” Kirby Ferguson questions whether master remixer, J.J. Abrams’ is updating & refreshing old material or whether he is creating a stale retelling of old stories? Ferguson starts by defining “Remix” as the process of Copying, Transforming, & Combining and goes on to plot out all of Abrams’ “borrowed” elements. Ferguson’s YouTube video draws some nice comparisons between The Force Awakens and previous Star Wars iterations. His conclusion seems to suggest that Abrams’ remix has reached its limit.
Media Literacy-EDC534 