COPYRAGE
My Digital Storytelling class is covering copyright this week, and while my classmates have definitely offered some articulate and cogent points on the topic in their blog posts, I'm deeply discouraged by the apparent emotional effect of reading a couple hours of information on copyright. The prevalent emotions that people describe after this week's reading are fear, discouragement, and sadness.
I'd like to offer an alternative: Rage. Anger and indignation. I know, we're supposed to be educators, academics. Dispassionate. Objective. We're supposed to keep our heads low, to save our politics and our opinions for obscure monographs that nobody reads. Educators may be "liberal" or "progressive," but certainly not radical. We're the theory folks-- leave the praxis to someone else.
I think it's time we all channel our inner Howard Beale and say:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; educators are having to make due with even less, and at the same time we're told that digital instruction is the future. We're expected to be high-tech and given little institutional support and no legal guidance.
We know this is an untenable situation. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we have had another 20,000 copyright suits and 30,000 more on the way-- as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my Youtube mashups and let me use a copyrighted picture in my PowerPoints now and again, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and No Child Left Behind and the state budget cuts and the infringements on our right to Fair Use.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value! I have a right to free expression!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
Teaching, researching, and scholarship are all spelled out in our copyright law as protected activities that entitle one to protection under fair use. We shouldn't let ourselves be cowered.
And while that passage was written before there was a need to take into account issues like digital pedagogy, I'd argue that it provides for "multiple copies for classroom use" provides a spirit-of-the-law coverage. And don't even get me started on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, and its implications for the current state of copyright.
But the fact is, copyright law in America is broken, it grows more and more restrictive, and monied corporate copyright holders have the means to bury individuals, even when those individuals work within the letter of the law with regard to copyright.
And in reaction to this, as we saw in Bound by Law?, documentarians-- even those who operate in accordance with fair use laws-- are forced to take an array of CYA measures, including paying for clearances that shouldn't be necessary, editing out key scenes that they can't afford to clear, and paying exorbitantly for Errors and Omissions Insurance.
So where does that leave us as academics, educators, and students? If we need to be developing these digital skills, to be come digital storytellers ourselves... and if the internet allows us to engage students in a truly multimedia way that is deeply compelling-- it's no wonder that we look at the hoops that filmmakers jump through with fear. 'Cause teachers have even fewer financial and other resources than even low-budget filmmakers. But we can't let that push us away from the inevitable direction of education, and we can't just keep everything we do behind the walled garden of BlackBoard. At least I couldn't. Not in good conscience.
Instead, we have to take the opposite approach. We have to assert, and assert loudly, that just because we use digital technology doesn't change the fact that we are academics, teachers, and students. This may mean coming into conflict, at times, with administrators and University Copyright Offices. It may mean getting a few takedown notices and cease and desist letters... That just means you're doing something right, if it lands in the hands of higher-ups and people outside the school.
Thinking about it, I realized that the provisions protected by fair use and free speech-- teaching, research, scholarship, criticism, and parody-- that represents something like 99% of everything I do, when it comes to re-purposing other people's copyrighted material. That could change some day, and I am fine with that, but until it does, I'm just going to go ahead under the assumption that if I'm doing it, then it's fair use. I refuse to distract myself from the more important issues of scholarship, social and political commentary, communication with students, etc. by the thought of the possibility of copyright lawyers swooping in like Dementors and hitting me with a lawsuit.
So I leave you with a little image I created. Yeah, it's got a couple copyrighted figures in it, from some big companies: McDonalds, Disney, Warner Brothers, and Windows. But I just don't care. It's satire. And the purpose of this blog is academic. That's protected. And plus-- I'm doing it, it must be fair use.
This Just In: Warner Music Group Lacks Sense of Irony, Common Sense
Ever since Warner Music Group pitched a hissy fit over copyright infringement on Youtube, finally reaching "a new and expanded agreement" with Youtube's parent company, Google, it has been by far the most aggressive about protecting copyright claims on that sight-- often flagrantly disregarding fair use.
I have to say that personally, I don't see how a sixteen year old kid playing a Prince song on his ukulele and sharing it with friends over YouTube in any way threatens either Mr. Nelson's or WMG's intellectual property or record sales. Most of these claims are against the SPIRIT of copyright law-- as it is outlined in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution-- if not the letter of the law. But the letter of the law is on their side, at least in those cases. Less so with other claims that fall very solidly under fair use protection.
And then there's the claims that show not just that WMG is tone-deaf when it comes to the Constitution, but to basic principles of irony, like when a copyright claim on a small clip of music was used to silence a video of fair-use advocate and lawyer Larry Lessig. These are the transgressions that really point to the cluelessness of large groups of people following bureaucratic dictate with no larger guiding principle than profit.
I've gone on this little rant because I've finally gotten my first copyright complaint on YouTube.
Almost four years ago, I created the below video for a class project. I was trying to familiarize myself with basic editing programs, and to create a little video about US Labor History, with a slightly IWW sympathy.
I chose Billy Bragg's rendition of The Internationale for several reasons. The song itself was a natural choice for a video on Labor History and looking at radicalism within the producing classes. Bragg's version was in English, sung more like a folk song than an opera, and his revised lyrics emphasize a humanistic syndicalism that I feel represents some of the best aspects of American Labor in the periods between the Civil War and WWII.
The song is very much in the public domain here in the US-- though apparently not in France. I found Billy Bragg's version on a website of public domain music, and I'll admit, I didn't do my full due diligence, but as this was just a class project, I felt it was sufficient to do a bit. Finding it on that site, and then tracking down that the original version was recorded by Bragg on his Utility Records label, I felt safe. Even if the strictly educational purpose of the video-- created for a class as a primative attempt at digital pedagogy-- didn't qualify my use as fair use, and even if it wasn't viewed-- as I feel it could be-- as protected political speech... I just figured that, as the copyright holder, Billy Bragg wasn't going to go after me for making a rather lefty student project about labor history.
But it turns out that Electra re-issued the album that this appeared on, and since Warner bought Electra in 1970, yes, WMG may indeed have some sort of claim on the music. I don't have the particulars, and it depends on the nature of the reissue contracts, etc., but yes, they may have some claim.
And yes, nearly four years and nearly four thousand YouTube views later, they may well be within their rights to give me a copyright warning. Although given their scattershot approach, I'd really love the right to ask them to show me the paperwork before I believe it.
And I'm lucky, I guess. My video hasn't been silenced or taken down. I just got off with a warning. As the little automated copyright imp inside of Youtube tells me, "No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video."
But that's when the second shoe falls, irony-wise. Yes, WMG is challenging my right to use a piece of music that is really the property of a body of people who don't believe in corporate personhood or private property. Yes, they are saying that they are the corporate owners and protectors of a song that features the lyrics:
When we fight, provoked by their aggression,
Let us be inspired by life and love.
For though they offer us concessions,
Change will not come from above!
...But I expect this sort of tone-deafness to irony. What shocks and delights me, however, is the idea of ads appearing next to my little video about the resistance and dignity of exploited workers. I wonder what products they might use to subsidize my use and pay off WMG for my use of the song. Because no matter what it is, there's a good chance that it'll be a product that is producing an unsafe product, or outsourcing American jobs to countries with fewer worker protections, or using sweatshop labor to keep prices low.
And I think, yeah-- I wouldn't mind having these images, this music, used next to such an ad. At all. Maybe it'll make people think about where their Nikes or their Chinese-built electronics come from. Maybe this ad placement will actually, despite the intentions of the corporations involved, raise consciousness a little tiny bit about the machine of production in an international economy.
Or maybe they'll eventually silence it, and I'll just have to upload it again with a crappy MIDI file of the song.
ETA: Apparently, YouTube has silenced yet another Lessig video.
Good to know you're not alone.