Intellectual Property in the ‘Media Mix Culture’
My kids are obsessed with Internet video…YouTube and (to a lesser extent, Google Video) has made playback of Internet video a daily occurrence… in fact, it’s even drawn me in to a degree. A year ago, I might have watched one digital video clip a week, if that… today, I’ve probably watched dozens in the past month, either on my own, or after being dragged to a computer by someone else in the family. I’ve been on the ‘net since 1990, and I haven’t seen anything come of age and getintegrated into my daily life this fast.
This is still clearly the wild west, when it comes to intellectual property and opportunity… for instance, this young woman, 20 years old, is apparently one of the top “producers” on YouTube … her most popular video has been seen by 1.5 million viewers (see the video of the tv interview she posted to myspace). Talk about democratizing media…the process of making video has been so utterly simplified, that pretty much anyone can leverage it to become “famous” overnight. Zerotechnical skills required.
This must be a shock, too, to “professional” video producers. Given that it takes near zero skills to gain worldwide attention.
At the same time, I’ve got to wonder about how the intellectual property aspects of this work… how far can “fair use” be stretched? For instance, I found this young woman via this video of hers; she was listed in the “Director Videos” section alongside an interview of Jolene Blalock of Star Trek Enterprise fame by Tom Green – an item clearly pulled off a TV show and hardly definable as fair use; but, is the item below, a lipsync to a monologue from the play Chicago, “fair use”?
It is not, in and of itself, commercial… and I doubt she made any of her videos to be commercial, but the net result has generated enough publicity to land her a gig doing this professionally… and certainly, TONS of other items on YouTube are of a similar nature: kids and younger adults lip-syncing and performing to popular tunes. Where does “parody” end? How about Gidol / GoogleIdol … are they or the performers getting copyright clearance for the music being used?
Here’s their disclaimer:
“This site, Googleidol.com, is not endorsed, affiliated nor owned by Google Inc. All videos provided have been made public by the content owner via Google Video” … and the site has Google Adwords and other advertisements splattered all over it… but clearly, it isn’t a commercial venture, in that it is done in the creator’s spare time (see the blog entries). Is the liability Google’s (given that all the video content originates directly from Google’s web site)?
On the other hand, what these folks are doing, is exactly what advocates for the public commons envision: remixing and reworking and re-envisioning our common cultural fabric. 99.9% of these items are non-commercial in intent and practice, and hardly anything which a reasonable individual could argue represents a “loss” or “damage” to the original copyright owner.
In fact, if you look at this blog entry, you’ll see that there’s a German rock band which has clued into this phenomenon, the Sundealers, and which is promoting itself by encouraging people to “perform” their music in a competition sponsored by the site.
The omnipresence of video, and its integration and inclusion of all other forms of media (but especially sound, and other elements of video), and the sudden mass adoption of it, really brings home the entire question of whether our current copyright regime is really appropriate to, not just the digital age, but the age of mass content creation…
All sorts of questions come to mind, profound and trivial at the same time….
Is it a copyright violation if a full / digital copy of a music track happens to be playing in the background during some “candid camera” video clip? This is *your* life, *your* experience, *your* memory on film… it just happens to have a perfect digital copy of someone else’s copyrighted content. Who has primacy?
How about machinima and machinmanga – if someone uses digital avatars from an online game or world to create a comic strip, because they can’t draw, and they don’t charge for it, or earn their living from it… but they solicit donations, and those donations wind up being non-trivial…
is that a commercial activity?
Lots to think about.
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