Go Free Culture!

I find this documentary The Revolution Will Be Animated really interesting. It showed how Nina Paley encountered many copyright issues while making the film Sita Sings the Blues and how she dealt with it. I like how she has used Creative Commons to free her work into the Free Culture. The idea of Free Culture totally appeal to me as it’s really true from what Nina said in the film, “the more you control it, the less far it can go, so by giving it to the audience, the audience will help to spread the film and they will spread it with your name“. This whole concept of freeing your work is about sharing your work to the audience and by doing so, you are reaching towards the audience and hence, audiences will give their support in return by distributing your work or even donating some money.

I think copyright laws needs amendments as they are too restrictive. New talents and creativity are being restricted because they have to pay for their copy of work to be distributed to the audience. It cost way too much money. Fortunately, there are many websites now which supports free sharing and many people actually gain fame from these free sharing websites such as Youtube. I have seen so many ‘Youtube Personalities or Youtube Stars‘ started off sharing their videos as part of broadcasting their talents and their community just started to grow. Once that happens, it caught the attention of corporate sponsors and what not potential film producers and music record companies. My favourite Youtube personalities would be Philip Wang, Wesley Chan and Ted Fu which makes up the wongfuproductions and also Australian born Janice and Sonia better known as Jayesslee. The more famous Youtube personalities which are now in the entertainment industry would be Justin Bieber and the most current, Rebecca Black. What I have written here reflects back on my thoughts on Free Culture and how it has changed the freedom of distributing creative works and how it has been rewarding these people.

These are really new and interesting information for me that it makes me wonder what have I been doing till I wasn’t aware of such issues going on. I have so many tabs open now on Free Culture and copyright questions. I’m documenting this down because I’m really awe-inspired now and I hope I won’t forget about this. From one documentary video, it led me to so many related topics which I didn’t even intend to write on this entry and I probably went off topic but oh well. Now I’m off to watch Sita Sings the Blues.

Reflections on copyright

I have learn heaps just from the one hour online lecture on copyright. I have always see this term ‘copyright’ but do I actually know the meaning of it? Well, not really till this lecture. Copyright protects your works, your creativity whether its your stories, songs, films, etc. It restricts people from using your work without permission. I have always thought that copyright is where someone claims that the work is done by them and other people can’t alter the contents. I never realize that when I search for images to use for assignments or personal use, these words ‘the images may be subjected to copyright’ seem to be non-existent.

This lecture has definitely altered the way I use people’s work for my own purpose. From now on, I’ll try to search for sources that allows other to reuse. It’s really a form of a respect. If the authors of the content do not want other people using their materials, we should respect them as it is their hard-work. But I do like the idea of Creative Commons organization set up to allow people to alter copyright license allowing people to use the content under certain conditions. I do believe that by sharing your work, it does bring it further as people from different parts of the world are reusing your work and mixing it up with their own idea. I think it’s pretty cool and the best part is your identity will be preserved. You the original creator of the work will be credited.

So after going through Creative Commons website and answering some short question regarding licensing. I have selected the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license which will be use for this blog and also my group’s hypertext essay.

 This license allows people to freely distribute, reuse and remix under the following conditions that they attribute to the author, use the work for non-commercial purposes and distribute it under the same license.

Online Copyright Lecture

Copyright is:
- giving you the right to make copies
- preventing people from making copies

Things we can copyright:
1) Works
- Literary (books, articles)
- Artistic (photographs)
- Dramatic (choreograph, dance)
- Music

2) Subject matter other than works
- Films
- Sound recordings
- Broadcasts

** You get copyright automatically once you create work, you don’t have to register with Australian Writer’s Guild or Australian Film Permission.

2 criteria to get automatic copyright:
1) Must be original
2) Must be in material form (ideas are NOT copyright material)

Copyright does not last forever:
- Once author dies, the copyright last up to 70 years after the author’s death then it will be release to the public domain and anybody can use it.
- Good example are Jane Austen novels remake into films.

Exceptions to copyright (fair dealing exceptions):
1) To purpose of study
2) For criticism and review
3) For reporting news
4) For parody

** If you think it is worth stealing then it is worth protecting. (I just love this phrase. So short yet powerful!)

Creative Commons
- Part of a movement called ‘free culture’
- Don’t have to pay for it
- Freeing it up for public to use
- Give limited permission for certain things
- Tell the world you can use copyright for limited purpose (untime the copyright restrictions)

Reference: Shaun Miller, ‘Copyright’, Networked Media Course, Media Department, RMIT University, August 6, 2007.