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Pam is a Board Member of the Open Source Initiative and the principal of Chestek Legal in Raleigh, North Carolina. She works with creative communities, giving practical legal advice on branding, marketing, and protecting and sharing content. Pam has authored several scholarly articles, has a legal blog at Property, Intangible, and was formerly an adjunct professor at Western New England College School of Law.
Authored Comments
I don't think the copyright issues are any different from those that come up in ordinary remixing - the artist has the responsibility to make sure he or she has either permission to use the underlying material (like the appropriate CC license on Flickr) or use the content under fair use principles. You'll find some great materials on fair use in a lot of contexts here: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/. I don't see anything on the site itself, though, that says what kind of the license th contributors are giving when they post content on the opensourcecinema.org site.
I'm infuriated by the IIPA's position. What the IIPA is saying is that any creative endeavor not directly revenue-bearing has no value. We all incorporate creative endeavor into our daily lives - we write blogs, we sing in church choirs, we paint murals to brighten a neighborhood, our children are in school plays. Is the IIPA seriously telling me that we as a society don't value intellectual creation because we do it for free? It's just the opposite, we value it SO MUCH we often do it without any expectation of compensation (and even absorb the cost of creation ourselves) simply to improve the quality of our lives. Just imagine a world where you had to pay for all creative works that you enjoy daily.