Thursday, March 16, 2006

Tales from the Public Domain

Now this is neat...and about time, too! It seems like such a no-brainer... a cool comic creative commons/fair use super-hero...fighting against ownership on culture, and its effects in the documentary filmmaking world...

Brought to you by the Duke Law School, Bound By Law? is a fun, informative, and appropriatly placed piece of pop culture, that examines pop culture, and how we, as citizens, and information makers and consumers, are allowed to interact, and/or restricted to interact with our own collectively made culture.

Bound By Law uses documentary filmmaking as a concrete example of how our culture is being hijacked, by the simple fact that to create "reality" or truthfully reflective media - filmmakers (and other documentary media makers) have to constantly question what we are capturing on tape/film...a song playing in a cafe may render your footage unuseable because you cannot afford the copyright. This means that our cultural experience can only be represented by the highest bidder, not to the media maker that wants to show their point of view, or their own social experience.

And, how cool is it to have a kick ass chick fighting for fair use media? I don't think it can get much better than that...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This comic is AWESOME! Such an innovative way to explain something that is quite difficult to grasp in all it's complexities and unusual exceptions.

Here are some short films that talk about participatory culture that I find inspirational:

http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/
movingimages/Mix_Tape.mov

http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/
movingimages/Building_On_The_Past.mov

http://www.archive.org/stream/
what_is_free_culture/
what_is_free_culture_320-medium-mpeg4.mp4

Anonymous said...

I had no idea how copywrite is being used as a wepn of control by big busines -- strange how things that are developed in one era as a form of equity become the tools for oppression.
Fi