Fair Use, Copyright, and All That Jazz

I love Fair Use and Copyright! Not. I don’t think that comes out of many people’s mouths. Fair Use, Copyright, Works Cited, and all that other fun stuff, is confusing, hard to understand, and kinda scary. If you do it wrong, there can be some serious consequences, even if it’s accidental. To me, that’s the worst part. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt, but it’s also freaky that if you accidentally plagiarize, consequences still exist.

I think the hardest thing to deal with as far as plagiarizing goes is music. You can’t alter a song in any way to make it your own. The song is the song, and most likely belongs to someone. If we want to choose a popular song that most people know, with a specific mood, or something that we feel adds to our project, there are a lot of things to think about. Here, the four factors come into play.

What is the purpose and character- Is there a purpose? Is the song truly necessary to our point? It probably doesn’t have much to do with our public controversy.

Nature of copyright- depends on the song I guess.

The amount and substantiality of the portion taken- are we going to use the whole song, or just the chorus. Or maybe a certain lyric or verse that touches on our issue. In this case, it would probably be acceptable to use.

The effect of the use upon the potential market- Will the artist use money if we make it public? I also think this question is closely related to the previous.

To me, the most important question here is the first one. I feel like for the most part, there isn’t going to be a specific purpose for the song, other than just background music. To get around this, there are all sorts of free music sites made just for this purpose. The one I’m most familiar with is royaltymusic.com, where you can even browse by genre. Hopefully, by using sites like these, we can get around issues with Fair Use, while still being happy with our music choice.

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3 Responses to Fair Use, Copyright, and All That Jazz

  1. magnificent points altogether, you just gained a emblem new reader. What could you recommend in regards to your post that you just made some days ago? Any certain?

  2. Kristen Laubscher says:

    I like your point about how even if we plagarize accidentally, there are still consequences. I wrote an article for my school paper last year about unconscious plagiarism, which is kind of an extreme version of accidental plagiarism. It really happens though…people plagiarize without even realizing it because they forget that the thoughts or ideas are not original. I know I would never plagiarize intentionally, but it’s definitely scary to think about accidentally doing it!

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