Read, Heard, Saw

So the Creative Commons is a service of sorts. They provide the cultural, educational, and scientific communities with the ability to share their work in "the commons". This is because in the late 80s, the US law had changed from having to put the copyright symbol on anything you wanted to protect your rights on to, after creating/making anything, automatically copyrighting it with "all rights reserved". The creative commons is a free service where you answer a few questions about how you want your work to be used and they create a unique copyright counterpart so as they said, you can skip the intermediaries.

Actually, that entire description I just wrote, is new to me. I never knew that anything I made, from the point I clicked save, was automatically copyrighted with all rights reserved. I also never knew that there was a counterpart to the copyright system that put sharing on the internet in a good light. Everything we've been talking about in class has been kind of put in a bad context... like Wikipedia is bad, and internet sharing/downloading/pirating programs are bad, and who is more original, the guy who makes the mixes from others' work or the guy who mixes his own original music?

I thought it was interesting that this Creative Commons really put sharing in a good context. They were literally like people want to be able to expand their artwork, their community, their knowledge by sharing what they creatively have to offer and take others' creative works and turn them into something else. It was almost relieving to hear this. I think our conversations were starting to make me feel a little claustrophobic.

"What is fair use?"
(if you can't read it)

So on the other hand, the fair use deal-io was something I had heard a little about. In my advertising class last semester we had to talk about using pictures for our ads during class projects. We discussed fair use in that we could borrow certain images since we were not making any money and the ad would not be widely seen. Also there was always the option of buying your picture for your homework which the OWL site discusses as the safest way to use fair use in terms of the law.

What was a little weird to me was the paragraph that is on partial use.

The use is partial.

Reproducing only a small part of a copyrighted work is more acceptable than using an entire work. Try to use less than 10% of a movie, television show, music, or other media. Though image use does not conform easily to this standard, consider using only a few photos or illustrations rather than an artist’s entire collection. As a rule of thumb, using a smaller portion of a work is more likely to be protected. Furthermore, take only what is necessary for the purposes of the new use.

Just where it says try to use less than 10% of the media you are working from. To me, it sounds kind of like a medical procedure where you only need the femur bone out of the body. It's like taking a page, like above, from a typebook I made but only using this much of it

But if that's the way fair use works, then so be it!

All in all I was much more interested in the videos Creative Commons had to offer. I like their take on sharing and I like how they are providing the creative community with a new, legal way to build a network around their creativity. I also greatly enjoyed their first video, I thought it was an interesting, modern way to show what they were talking about.