For this week’s lectorial, we had a guest speaker talk to us about copyright.

This was quite fitting as we are currently working on our fourth project brief where we are allowed to use copyrighted material for educational purposes. However, it would have also been nice to have a received a lecture on this prior to our third project brief where we were required to incorporate found footage. Though all the footage and music I used were all CC licensed, I did find some that were just ‘royalty free’. And I guess there is a bit of a blur as to what entitlements are attached to ‘royalty free’ materials.

I did find the duration of copyright to be interesting. It was said that duration is dependent of the author’s life (70+ years); different countries having differing terms; and other factors that influence duration such as un/published or made public, published anonymously/pseudonym, and films made before 1st May 1969.

It reminded me of some of the found footage I used for my third project brief where it was under Public Domain. For classic cartoons such as Betty Boop, I wondered how the episodes which I took snippets from were under Public Domain and be used by all without being protected by copyright.