Flutterby™! : Lane Hartwell on copyright 2007-12-18 16:08:33.362642+00

Lane Hartwell on copyright

2007-12-18 16:08:33.362642+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Lane Hartwell: My statement regarding the Richter Scales "Here comes another bubble" video dispute:

Photography is my livelihood. It's how I pay my bills. I'm not treating the band any differently than any other group that uses my work without my permission.

I linked to Here Comes Another Bubble, this link comes courtesy of M. Kelley.

The debate in the comments Lane's blog is more telling than the blog entry! There's obviously a lot of confusion surrounding IP. In academia, IP follows very different rules. It's considered an gross ethical error (plagarism) not to properly cite prior work. It's also customary for academic publications to begin with a history (lit review) of prior work in order to establish the proposed work as new. As for the Richter Scales' claim that it's too much work to cite everyone who's work they used, they obviously never heard of EndNote...

Maybe the answer is some kind of intelligent watermarking such that an image embedded in a video maintains metadata about the original creator. Then, as part of the final export in the video editing software, would be to summarize the metadata contained in the included media in the general metadata for the video.

When I write academically, I use the EndNote tools to insert citations for works I'm drawing from. EndNote also generates the bibliography for me - like the metadata schema I proposed.

Another advantage of this kind of schema would be the ability to backtrack to an embeded piece of media so it can be replaced or removed. In this instance, the Richter Scales could have pulled up the metadata and backtracked (maybe automatically) to Lane's image and replaced it with a freely licensed image.

I also think it's worth noting that even with attribution, you don't include large chunks of referenced papers in your own paper, and where you do it's to make a point about that paper, not use the conclusions directly in your own paper.

I think the real issue is further education on lifting materials at random from other sources to "remix" them. I know that I had some tooth grinding at a local charity silent auction where the organizers grabbed random images off the web to illustrate services that were being offered at auction, ie: images of someone painting a house, or some random landscaping, for painting services and gardening services.

Especially in the latter case, some of those gardening pictures were out there specifically to advertise the design aesthetic of a landscaper, and presenting them to sell some other person's work seemed way beyond the pale.

What it has done me is convince me that I need to take more illustrative photographs (and better organize the ones I've got) so that when I see a similar situation I can say "Here, you can use these without stealing".

On this situation specifically, as I think about it I'm not even sure that "fair use" and "parody" terms apply to the original We Didn't Start The Fire

, because they're not parodying the Billy Joel

song, they're using it as a framework to present satire on the business situation in and around Silicon Valley.

I hadn't thought about the parody vs. satire. You're right - they are using Billy Joel's melody in an unrelated satire. Weird Al generally parodies the song or the performer in his versions of songs. Songs he writes that are more satirical tend to have original scores.

I think the "lifting and mixing" phenomenon is somewhat related to design issues surrounding publications like newsletters. There's this whole new genre of amateur design that started occuring in the 80s with the Mac and Imagewriter. It used to be an issue of design aesthetics (just because your computer has 27 fonts doesn't mean you have to use them ALL in the newsletter) but now it's becoming an issue of design ethics.

Professional designers are generally aware of the ethics of IP. It's why stock image galleries proliferate. Just as the RIAA is taking a big stick to online song-swappers, maybe the big image galleries should ban together to promote education about IP.