"Where Do Artists Draw the Line with Copyright Law?" YouTube Video
According to Stephen E. Weil who is the author of the article, Fair Use and the Visual Arts: Please Leave Some Room for Robin Hood, there should exist within the copyright laws, a 'Robin Hood' that "within limits,...permits the artist---not infrequently envisioned as a sort of rogue---to poach on the content-rich so long as excessive harm is not done and so long as something within a value beyond that of the original is thereby made available to everybody else" (181). In other words, he believes that there should be a fair use of copying and rennovating original texts to some degree, for it enables individuals to participate in the creative realm. But as seen in the videos above, especially in the second video, this idea of fair use in digital media has its implications such that the copyright laws cannot always draw a clear line on what is and what is not original. When you think about it, 7/10 of internet content especially on YouTube references and recreates past original texts/music/videos/events to entertain or educate current viewers. So it is rational and lawfully practical for a mother, who uses someone else's song in a private video of her son dancing, be charged with copyright infringement, when her intentions was not to bootleg music but to entertain a grandmother? In the end, I walked away from this article with the conclusion that the copyright laws are not always black and white depending on the specific situation and that they strongly influence the 'democratic', creative sphere of what-we-call, the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment