In IST618, "Survey of Telecommunications and Information Policy", we are required to find relevant YouTube videos of the two topics we choose and submit a short description for the video.
Here is what I found for "Intellectual Property Rights"(IPR).
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The video is a clip from a live discussion of the emerging remix culture and the complete video of the discussion could be found here.
The discussion were given by Steven Johnson, Shepard Fairey, the street artist, famous for his "HOPE" poster of Barack Obama, and Lawrance Lessig, founder of Creative Commons.
Steven Johnson asked Shepard how he defined the boundary of creative remix and copyright violation. Shepard said it was a case-by-case basis. Shepard preferred to allow people to use his image transformative or even not transformative but not used for commercial profit. Shepard encouraged inspirations from his work and he had lots of images on his website for free download, he would only go after the real straight bootlegging.
Lawrance agreed that it was an important line to draw and emphasized the line should draw the distinction between people who inspired and celebrated that inspiration and the people who simply "rip you off" instead of the distinction between profit and non-profit. Lawrance took Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube as an example. Viacom said they would take the video down within 24 hours after the user uploaded the video clip from a show. But if the user remixed the clip with creativity, Viacom would consider it as a celebration of their original work. Lawrance believed that before coming to any conclusion of "violation of copyright", the question “Does it really help our business or hurt our business that people are creatively remixing and spreading our creativity?” should be asked.
In IST511, we were introduced a very interesting comic about copyright. It was about a filmmaker who need to use materials in her film but had no idea about which materials were copyrighted and how to clear the right. The comic introduced several lawsuits. For example, filmmaker Jon Else Ran needed to cut and replace 4.5 seconds from "The Simpsons" from his film. If every artist runs into such copyright clearance, it surely will infringe remix and hinder artist's creativity.
Copyright law protects intellectual property rights and encourages original ideas and innovations. But what must be recognized is that remix work also present innovations and celebrate the inspirations from the original work. Fair use should be encouraged and that is the reason we have "Creative Commons". While straight bootlegging must be punished, anyone who "fair use" the materials should not find themselves falling in complicated licensing agreements and lawsuits and thus impede their creations.
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