Today in class, we’ll listen to some important discussions about the complications of copyright and trademark law in our digital, mashup, remix world, as well as the implications of the rules on our lives as media consumers, bloggers and website builders.
1. NPR Discussion, 2/21/08: The Basics of Trademark Law (as distinguished from copyright).
2. “Larry Lessig on Laws that Choke Creativity–a TED Talk,” March 2007. Lawrence Lessig is the author of Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Lessig has been called the “most important thinker on intellectual property in the digital age” and claims that our country’s “war of prohibition” on file sharing has been a failure, turning teenagers who share music files into criminals. He urges us to ditch old, restrictive copyright laws and formulate new ways to ensure that “stuff that should be paid for” is paid for and “things that should be free” are freely shared. Do you agree with Lessig? Where do you see merit in his argument? Where do you see problems or snags?
3. Creative Commons video: “A Shared Culture.” When have you come up against questions about whether and how you could use someone else’s creative work? What did you decide?
Terms and concepts you should be familiar with:
fair use, Creative Commons, copyright v. plagiarism
My earlier blog entries that address this issue: “Copyright in a Remix Culture”.
Taking notes in class today, and examining some of the material in the links, will help you as you pull images and other material into your blog entries and final projects.
TO DO: Add a Creative Commons license to your blog:
Copy the code generated by the Creative Commons license chooser (http://creativecommons.org/choose/) into a Text Widget and place it on your site’s footer or sidebar widget area.
(originally published 3/1/12; reposted 10/27/14)