Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Copyright Confusion

Over at Slate.com, Tim Wu has written one of the best articles on copyright that I've ever read, showing how it's not working for even the major media conglomerates whose lobbyists influence the writing of the law.

3 comments:

Miguel said...

I find that much more instructive, Mike:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Anonymous said...

I enjoy the work you do with the mosaics, Mark. How is the situation there for you as far as copyright is concerned?
Is it OK to use the images for non-commercial art history purposes or did you get permission possibly, or do you fly under the radar in a way?

Mark Mayerson said...

I would argue that what I'm doing falls under fair use. The purpose of the mosaics is to educate as opposed to entertain. There are over 100,000 frames of film in Pinocchio and I'm using a tiny fraction. The Disney company isn't being deprived of any revenue by what I'm doing (and if they'd re-release the Pinocchio DVD, they might actually make some money from whatever interest I generate).

However, I'm not a lawyer and have no interest in establishing the mosaics as fair use in a court of law, so I'll keep doing them until somebody tells me to stop. I do hope that I'm flying below radar as I really don't need the headaches of dealing with Disney's legal department.