I watched a lot of television when I was growing up. It was the golden age of TV, when we told our stories in new ways, broadcasting them as culture to wide ranging communities. I spent much of my childhood playing these stories. I would watch Errol Flynn play Robin Hood on our Zenith black and white, and then go directly to my fathers woodworking shop in the basement to find scrap wood and nails fashion it into a sword. I’d spend hours pretending to be the bandit knight of Sherwood Forest — playing the story, playing with my culture.
My son didn’t get very much sleep this past weekend. After capturing video of his former high school’s marching band performance at a football game, he spent all of Friday night cutting and editing the video and mixing in short video and audio clips from The 300, a recent motion picture about the Battle of Thermopylae. He then showed his quite impressive video to the band and later to band parents, to their overwhelming glee.
Now I know that this is not a new conversation. But I wonder about the fact that playing Robin Hood in the yards of my neighborhood broke no laws and caused no offense. However, my son did exceed the provisions of copyright law and fair use. Two questions occur. Is there a difference, really, between his experience at playing with his culture through his video editor and my experience with scrap lumber? ..And, do we have a right to play with our cultures regardless of the technological contexts of our times?
Now I’m all for intellectual property. I should have the right to demand compensation for the information products that I produce, including giving me credit or paying a financial fee. Yet, is there any good reason to prevent people from playing with their culture — even if our culture is often generated by the corporate entertainment industry?
On a slightly different note, eSchoolNews published an article (‘Fair use’ confusion threatens media literacy) a few days ago about the overly constraining guidelines that many educators use to determine their rights to use copyrighted content for instructional use. Yet they did not share a definative and comprehensive guide for teaches to use today. Does anyone know of a current fair use guideline?
I just spent the past day creating a “21st century copyright” workshop. The best explanation of “fair use” was “condensed” and only went 24 pages long.
Creative Commons. Let the content producers explicitly define how they want to share their work. It takes all the mess out of the equation.
Larry Lessig TEDTalk (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/187) says it all really. We were raised in a society where law abiding was a must. Our children, not so, particularly because the government’s view of copyright infringements is rigid and not practicable. I’ve been having an ongoing battle with my 17 year old son about legal and not legal use of material.
I see the issue as black and white, my son sees the grey areas. Lessig’s talk finally made me see the grey areas. I wish I had enough trust in my son to have seen the grey before now.
Lessig is certainly where a lot of my blog post comes from. It was watching my son’s video work that cause me to finally understand what Lessig’s been talking about for years.
Reminded me of this story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7010484.stm
I’m not sure there is a definitive resource for Fair Use since each use seems to be its own unique animal.
However, Tech Learning has a nice chart for teachers that I use often as a guide found here:
http://www.techlearning.com/techlearning/pdf/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_chart.pdf
As for the eSchoolnews article, see my reaction to the “Copyright Boogeyman” here: http://k12geek.com/blog/?p=87
David, this gives me a chance to plug our upcoming episode of It’s Elementary (http://itselementary.edublogs.org/2007/11/05/preview-of-show-10-copyright-its-the-law/) on copyright law with intellectual property attorney, Aimee Bissonnette. We’ll be focusing on “fair use” and “derivative work” the two issues that can play off each other most often when teachers post students’ multimedia projects. Hope some of you can make it.
Fair(y) Use Tale (http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=628442b3d4dc00fca434) is the most easily understood resource to my mind on fair use, but you have to watch it a couple times to get all the nuances.
I’m really glad to see that A Fair(y) Tale is licensed under Creative Commons – with detailed information at Stanford’s Cyberlaw site – because I was considering showing it a Nat’l Council for Teachers of English workshop I’ll be co-facilitating next week with Ewa McGrail.
Thank you, Mz. Mercer, for adding the video details on this workshop-friendly piece. I’ll be joining your Monday night session!