Copyright, Structure, Laws, Adrian. So I haven’t been to many lectures in my time, but this is the first one in a long time that I have genuinely been interested in. Gotta give credit where credit is due and Adrian made this lecture interesting for me. Don’t get me wrong some of it was still pretty boring but the fact that Adrian unleashes his opinion to run about the room and trample anything and EVERYTHING in its way, most notably the thoughts and examples of the other lectures who sit there like minions, only asked to talk when spoken to and even then, can be cut off at any point without warning. I got many a chuckle out of it.
I did however take away some academic information other than Kenton’s fresh chord jacket seen below.
dem chords though
Adrian started out by discussing traditional conceptions of what matters, to us as students and a the general media community, that is to say, when and where you are born determines what matters to you ethically about technology and the laws that come with the power of the internet. He went on to discuss the properties of a blog and that they do not follow the conventional story structure since they are in reverse chronological order and they are borderless. How is one to determine where my blog begins and ends especially when much of the time blogs link out to other sites.
“We are not in Kansas anymore” – Adrian, lol. The main crux of the lecture was about copyright. Where does it become stealing and when do you need permission? Well basically all the time. If you don’t have permission you run the risk of being fined. A main point was that if you are making money from somebody else’s work then that is a problem. Also if you are hurting somebody or another companies reputation that is a problem as well. When students began to ask Adrians ‘panel’ any questions at all the panel was often cut off mid sentence or we would hear things such as “O no that is just an example” or “Half the advice you have here is right, half of it is wrong”. Doesn’t get much more blunt than that.
Adrian told a story about a student who made a film and entered it into Sundance film festival. The song Rocky Mountain High was playing the film and when the owner saw the video in the audience the student was sued for something like half a million dollars and as it stands is still trying to pay it off at 7/11! That is the kind of crazy stuff that goes on in this industry.
what if it is free?
Something that came to mind for me was what about sites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud? In many instances songs are available for free download. How does this effect media students using them in videos? What about remixed songs? If you have the rights of a dj to use a remixed song, what about the person who wrote the original? These are all very important, especially for students like us who could one day be employed to make videos and films for companies.
Bottom line is when it comes to blogging, try not to piss people off and take credit for things that are not yours. If you are unsure play it safe. No one wants a million dollar fine sleuthing its way into our letterboxes.
Flash.
