Copyright geek? Guilty.
January 16, 2009So, a good friend of mine was telling me the other day about a piece of software her husband had downloaded that could take clips from DVDs and embed them into other types of media. My first thought was, “Very cool, but I wonder how much it violates anti-piracy laws… unless it may fall into fair use… is it for school, I wonder?” This is not because I fancy myself a member of the Copyright Police, as I most certainly do not. But, having worked for a while on a thesis involving copyright in higher education, such thoughts tend to jump up there at awkward moments. Luckily, this friend is already familiar with this particular quirk, so it was completely acceptable.
I do think it’s interesting, though, to consider how the whole copy/paste, click-to-share, mash-up culture will affect copyright law and practice. Clearly, a rule governing the allowable audience size for a film on laser disc would be pretty irrelevant in the face of a “viral” internet video, but how will they (whoever “they” might be) balance the rights of creators with the rights of users? If everyone is Creator and Marketer and Disseminator and User, what happens to the traditional conceptions of ownership?
In educational contexts, traditional intellectual property demarcation lines may be growing even fuzzier; although, perhaps, with the mass confusion, education will ultimately be granted a more open approach to the use of content. It’s nearly impossible to tell. And who even wants to define what constitutes “educational” contexts? Don’t we learn from basically everything we do, regardless of the electronic connectivity? Everything we read? Everyone we meet? If education exceeds the traditionally understood, brick-and-mortar boundaries, and the process of creation and consumption now forms such an interconnected, unentangleable web, I would argue that copyright must also be adapted (and further adaptable), well beyond the scope of its more recent (~10 years) developments.
