The movie Copyright Criminals made me think a lot about last semester when I watched the movie RiP: A Remix Manifesto. I loved this movie I thought the ideas in it were good arguments to challenge the copyright laws and bend the rules for art. The best part of the topic is listening to people like Girl Talk talk about his passion for making art. Copyright laws on music (as we learned in class) is different than other copyright laws. Movies like this make me want to join the side of the remix artists and challenge the copyright laws. But I also feel conflicted because as an artist myself I also do not want other people using my art and calling their own. I did not realize this till I was in my graphic design class and I was creating digital pieces of work that could easily be altered and changed to remix them. Also as an artist I want to be able to use other peoples art and make my own because remixing can fuel creativity.
This creativity and wanting to keep my work as mine can be conflicting. To help solve this problem Creative Commons was created. Creative Commons was created to allow people to get copyright license for free. You also get to choose how people use it and how people republish it. The author can choose if they can use it for commercial purposes or not. As a creator myself the ability to allow people to use my art and alter it just as long as they give me credit. Publishing your art via Creative Commons helps some artist get their work out there and also use other peoples works to create new things.
I find your idea of "remixing art" an interesting one. Indeed, the creation of the Creative Commons license has definitely helped for people to collaboratively create awesome art. Makes me wonder though, if there will ever be anything like a compulsory license in art -- where I could take someone else's work, create my own version of the same piece, but pay the original artist a set price for the right of use (whether they want me to use it or not), and then be allowed to use "my" artwork as I pleased.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that's close for art (and other mediums?) that I can think of is our strange laws regarding parody, the loophole of artistic copyright. Though the difference is, if I'm correct, you don't have to pay for, or even ask to use, the material you're poking fun at.