"The Educational Remix- At Odds With Copyright?"

Allow me to be frank- as busy as my world is right now, the requirement to read "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi was a very frustrating thing. With a stack of ten or twelve books with immediate professional impact to juggle -just waiting on my desk- this read seemed frivolous.

Not only did I have to read the book (one of nine in six weeks) but I have to crank out a formal paper and an "author presentation." Before you pull out the tiny fiddle, rest assured that this is a positive post. Like any of the other requirements of my little grad program that don't seem to professionally apply right at the moment, I usually choose to steer the task toward a place where my learning can benefit someone else in our school's learning network. For this presentation I decided to try a different technique for integrating text into an Animoto video:

And what do you think? Is this song repurposed to a reasonable degree? Does this use infringe upon the artist's right to generate income from the song? Does this use in any way cast a negative light on the work? Is this kind of edu-marketing for students a reasonable educational use of the content? Please share your thoughts on these and any other questions you see fit.

For much more in-depth discussion, CLICK HERE for the full post.

Sean

Tags: Animoto, Persepolis, YouTube, book, copyright, education, ethics, marketing, nashworld, slideshows, More…study, video, web2.0

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Permalink Reply by Kev on February 8, 2009 at 10:02pm

I would say what you are doing is wonderful.

The copyright holders, depending who they are, might not.

I have had educational videos taken off of YouTube for no other reason than the songs I have chosen as background. I have had them taken off for a 3 second, I kid you not, clip of the simpsons that had the audio stripped out. There was a very interesting article I read recently about a movie critic who had his work taken down for showing clips of the movie.

The studio's answer was "Well, the automatic filters don't remove videos where the audio track has been changed with commentary." Which implied that the guy was lying. It would also imply I too am a liar.

My current favorite quote on the subject is "Fair use is about what you can do, not about what you can't." So, I'll keep posting my videos and I'd encourage others to do the same. If they get taken down so be it.

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Permalink Reply by Sean Nash on February 9, 2009 at 6:57am

Hey Kev- you make some really excellent points here.
I am a bit surprised about 3 seconds of a clip taking something down. Wow.
I say that especially due to the decision made and outlined in this article.

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Permalink Reply by Kev on February 9, 2009 at 8:30am

The problem is the bots Youtube uses to label improper content. They just look for bit strings, they don't look for Fair Use of those streams. I could, of course, challenge the removal but if you fail the challenge it costs you your account. At some point I'll take the time to set up a dummy account and mirror all my files so I can lose one and not have it matter but for now I need my videos up.

I do have to say I have had my content "flagged" by some companies and ignored (Disney surprisingly didn't burn me alive for using 12 seconds of Aladdin with no sound) and others who kill for nothing (Fox, whoever owns the rights to Transiberian Orchestra).

Honestly it is old world thinking and I'm quite glad today's generation is growing up in a mashup world. I think copyright will look vastly different in 10-15 years when today's kids are running the place.

In regards to the article, I was given that choice (leaving the video up but with ads) by only one company (Lionsgate) and I refused to do so given that I used less than 10 seconds of Lawrence of Arabia with no sound and nothing that even made it clear that it was LoA at all (it was a generic desert shot). If they would have allowed me to embed the file to my website I would have been ok with them making money off of my work (ya, see how I turned that around?) but since I only host in on Youtube and not embed I simply removed the 10 seconds, reposted it and happily removed the movie from the credits and my recommended list.

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Permalink Reply by Sean Nash on February 16, 2009 at 3:46pm

Again... all good points. Can you explain more about not choosing to embed elsewhere?

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Permalink Reply by Kev on February 16, 2009 at 6:40pm

I left a word out of my post.. it should read "but since I COULD only host it on..." When the companies decide to put ads up on the pages with your videos you lose the ability to embed that video onto other pages.

I'd be fine if the ads were embedded in the video itself so I could still embed it but nope.

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Permalink Reply by Sean Nash on February 17, 2009 at 11:19pm

Here is a link to the original video in question. Looks like embed code would work just fine here.
??

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Permalink Reply by Kev on February 18, 2009 at 7:49am

It must be based on which company flagged the content. Like I said, some like Disney have let me go on no problem. Lionsgate forced the ads and would not allow the embedding.

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Permalink Reply by Sean Nash on February 18, 2009 at 8:00am

That's really interesting.

Do you have any of the original e-mails from YouTube on these issues?

I found mine. I would love a screenshot if possible. Those are good artifacts when presenting nearly anything regarding the issue of evolution of copyright.