During todays class we talked about Copyright, which is a big issue for Remix. A very interesting question our teacher Jill raised in her blog before class, is the problem of our internationality. What is for example with me? I’m from Germany, living at the moment in Norway, where I make a little video about my research topic, post it on a US- homepage and than will go back to Germany again. Which copyright law do I have to stick to? I have never really thought about that question before, but now it strikes me as quite interesting. And at the moment I have no idea how to answer that question. Neither did anybody else in our class. I don’t even really know much about German copyright. I only know you can be sent to prison for five years if you download movies illegally and sell them again. But that’s pretty much all I know. I don’t know whether there is something like fair use, something that exists in US copyright law or what kind of restrictions there are.
Most of the time of our course was spent preparing and then actually going through a mock trial. To the background of our mock trial: In the USA children get taught about copyright in school. There is this video from Eric Faden (a university professor) which explains fair use by putting together all those little parts from Disney movies. The actual video is over 10 minutes long, but the longest sequence is not longer than about 10 seconds. We pretended that Disney (Disney is actually really aggressive about copyright…) saw copyright violated and wanted Mr. Faden sued for it. Each of us got a slip of paper on which was our role, I was Mr. Faden himself, so I had to defend myself in order not to go to prison or having to pay heaps of money to Disney. After everybody had gotten a role, each side sat together to talk about how they would defend their side of the case and try to win the case. After that the actual trial was held. There were heaps of good arguments and at times I actually felt a bit intimidated by Disney and their representatives, but me and my group kind of managed to get our heads out of the slip, as I was sentenced: Not Guilty! After that we only had a few minutes to talk about what we really think about that video. I think that the general opinion is, that this video is not violating copyright.
