Television and copyright Laws

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Over winter break I interned at Lou Reda productions (located in Easton) they’re the mind behind cable documentaries focusing on Vietnam and WWII. The part of the job that pertains to this class was their film archive, they have an archive of thousands of hours of footage most of which is copyrighted. A large portion of their business comes from selling the rights to fair use footage they own. what I gained from this job was what could and could not be sold to other production companies for them to use. Anything shot by the US government was fair game to be sold, this meant any footage shot of USO shows, combat footage and propaganda films could be sold off to other companies. the majority of my job was going through their large archive fulfilling film requests so I  quickly learned how to tell what was shot by the Government and what had already been edited by someone else (say the History channel) and therefore couldn’t be sold.

what struck me in particular was that they seemed to have a large amount of footage that couldn’t be used due to copyright laws. When I asked one of my coworkers about this he explained that they saved the footage for when the copyrights ran out it would then be usable and therefore worth it to hold on to.

So I just thought I would share with you my hands on experience with copyright laws and hopefully it will help someone with their paper.

When studying historic, rare books

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A quick note: when I write “text” in this post, imagine simultaneously a book, a painting, or a sculpture.

With today’s technology, we can easily admire a beautiful painting through a computer screen, and even analyze it to a great degree; however, it still does not compare to looking at it in person. There is, first, a sense of distance from the subject. When looking online we know of course what we are looking at is no where near us; it could be anywhere in the world. Though this physical distance may afford the critical distance so important in textual analysis, it nonetheless provokes an emotional sense of detachment. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, when one views a text through the internet or computer, the text itself is not there. What we see is an image of the text; a visual copy. Rationally, how can you say you’ve seen something if the actual thing, the original, is not in front of you? Think of a Polaroid.  No one goes around saying “Yes, I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower” after looking at a photograph of it in their hand. However, this causes more serious consequences: without the whole text in front of you, it is impossible to truly analyze it. Though you can see it, and use all the historic and theoretical  context you can, you cannot engage the text with all senses. This information is relegated to a caption: The book is printed on animal skin, it feels like soft paper, it smells rotten. These senses, when actually experienced, enhance learning.

Writing and writing styles

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I am heavily leaning towards using our fountain pens as the basis for how our writing utensils affects writing styles. I know it made a huge difference in my own writing style. Hopefully i can distinguish between the fountain pen and the ball point. Maybe even going into the use of brushes versus pens and how that effects the type of writing styles used by different societies.

Zero Draft of Essay

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I am not hundred percent sure what I want to do yet for my portfolio. However, I want to focus more on how our society has turned more towards electronic version of books and how this effects the writers and writing. Also, I want to look into why certain authors will only publish their work one way either electronic or in a hard copy. Also, I would be interested to learn if either version of writing is more economically successful to authors. Since some electronic books are less expensive than hard copies, I want to look into whether or not that effects the authors income from the book.

Copyright and Fan Works

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Copyright is both a safety measure and a restriction. It prevents work from being stolen or used without consent. But it also prevents fans from drawing too much inspiration from a work. In the various media communities, fan fiction plays a big role in maintaining and strengthening a community. However, copyright prevents these fan works from being easily distributed without gaining legal attention.

Once again, as a fan of anime and manga, I have seen things function differently in Japan. It not only seems like the copyright law is more loose, but fan works are even encouraged. Many places are known to hold conventions for the distribution and selling of fan made parody works. And these don’t just include books, but games, and even animation. Despite working on preexisting and copyrighted works, artists and writers are discovered and make themselves known.

Tuesday’s class

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I really enjoyed being able to view all of the pieces on Tuesday and see just how much books have changed from long ago. It really felt like I entered a museum when I walked into the room and saw all of the different ancient artifacts set up before me. One of the things that really left an impression on me was when I was told that the piece of paper I was holding was not really paper at all, but instead dead animal skin. I had been holding it in my hands for at least five minutes before being told this, but had yet to notice the tiny pores scattered throughout it. I think the fact that I had so quickly assumed it was paper I was holding shows how prominent paper is in today’s society.

In the Future

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I was thinking about the discussion regarding books becoming digitalized in the future when I began to wonder if this would truly be possible. After all, an era were to come where all books are digitalized, power outages would pose a much larger problem than they do today. Power outages are fairly common, as I imagine they will be for a long time to come. If books were only to be digitalized, then something as simple as the power going out for several days would pose a much larger problem than it does today. For this reason, I feel that books will never truly disappear from the public. Not only are they readable even in during times of technology crisis, but I feel they are really the only way to ensure that our knowledge will be passed down to future generations even in a post-apocalyptic world, where digital books would likely be impossible to access.

Course Topics

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I am interested in how copyright plays a role in music and how the laws have changed and continue to change. I find it interesting that technology is causing to reevaluate copyright laws, so what does that mean for the future of copyright in our country? Is it possible to completely overhaul copyright law or should it be left the way people know it?

What are they worth?

Our class on Tuesday raised a lot of questions for me about ancient text. The one question I really thought about was how much are all of these pieces of work worth? When I ask the question in class, I was surprised when the librarian said she did not know what many of the pieces were worth and if she did she would not tell us the answer. Since these works are such treasured pieces in our library, I would think that there would have to be some type of numerical value on them especially since they are from such a long time ago and represent such an important part of our history.

As I was extremely interested in how much some of these books were worth, I looked online and found an article about The Top Ten Rarest Books. Although I was surprised by some of the books on the list, the most surprising thing I learned was about what makes a book rare and valuable. I always thought it had to do with the content of the book which is not necessarily true. Collectors actually look for books “that are associated with a particular author or a major historical event or era, or simply because they’re incredibly old.” This information taught me that really the worth of books is just like an other supply and demand product it all depends on the buyers and the market not necessarily the actual worth of the good. Also, I was extremely surprised with how valuable The Gutenberg Bible actually is in today’s market. I would have never guessed just one leaf went on sale for $74,000. It just shows how important Johannes Gutenberg was for our history.

 

Reaction to Tuesday’s Class

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The presentation of the ancient texts we viewed on Tuesday was interesting and also enlightening.  It was amazing how texts that were so ancient were preserved, allowing for us to take a peek into the past.  This made me wonder, how will our generations ideas be seen in the future.  Now that all texts are inevitably going to be digital there will no longer be hard copies.  This means that there will most likely be limited or no hard copies for people thousands of the years in the future to view.  I am curious if going digital will preserve our ideas like the papyrus or scrolls we viewed.  On the other hand, our documents can be erased in a single click so it is possible that some or any of them may not be saved to seen by civilizations in the future.