<\/span><\/h3>\nOne of the key concepts students of rhetoric and writing should be aware of is remediation; that is, you should be able to use and adapt content from other sources, reinterpret the material, and change the purpose and even audience of the content. Oftentimes, students will take audio and video clips from previous sources and \u201cremix\u201d them into new, original creations.
\nIf you intend to use audio or video clips in any of your remediations, then what you need to pay attention to is the actual length of the clip being used. Generally, less than 30 seconds or 10% of the original content will allow you to fall under the fair use doctrine and protect your work\u2014but even this is a guideline, not a rule, as all fair use guidelines are.
\nIt\u2019s also worth mentioning that parody or critique is far more likely to be seen as fair use than any other kind. So if you are making some kind of critique of an original that requires the use of the original in some way, you are on safer ground. Be sure to critique or parody the source using only the source itself and not content from other sources. It is less likely to be considered fair use if you\u2019re using other content in addition to the content you are critiquing or parodying.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s an example: Jonathan McIntosh (real person) was troubled by the gender roles he saw in the first Twilight<\/em> film. He didn\u2019t like the idea that the vampire Edward was stalking Bella and that this didn\u2019t seem to be a problem. McIntosh wanted to remind people that behavior like Edward\u2019s, in real life, would be seen as despicable and hurtful. So McIntosh planned a video remix that pitted Edward against Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em>. These characters never really met on screen, but McIntosh knew he could take clips from the movie and the shows that would make it look<\/em> like they were talking to each other. And McIntosh knew that the character of Buffy would never put up with the troubling, stalker behavior shown by Edward. She would stand up as a strong woman and put a wooden stake through his vampire heart, just like he deserved. This is the video that followed:<\/p>\nNow, McIntosh probably knew he was dealing with tricky copyright ground here. Both Twilight<\/em> and Buffy<\/em> are copyrighted. But the message he wanted to send (that Buffy<\/em>\u2019s approach to gender is more positive than Twilight<\/em>\u2019s) required him to use clips from those particular sources. He could have searched from public domain vampire footage or looked for Creative Commons-licensed videos about vampires, but then he would lose his whole point about Edward, specifically, being a problem that Buffy, specifically, could solve.<\/p>\nTo show that he had \u201cgood faith\u201d about these copyright issues\u2014that is, to prove that he knew about fair use law and honestly believed he was doing the right thing\u2014he posted a page called \u201cFAQs on Buffy vs. Edward\u201d that included this point:<\/p>\n
Actually I believe that \u201cBuffy vs Edward\u201d is a great example of employing my fair use rights, and that any appropriated copyrighted material constitutes a fair-use. Fair use is the right (under U.S. law) to quote copyrighted material without permission or payment, in some circumstances. If you are using the work for a different purpose than the original and using just as much as you need for your transformed purpose, then you have the right to use it without permission or payment. In this case, the original works are clearly transformed to make my commentary and criticism. No one, for instance, will mistake my video for the movie <\/em>Twilight. You can learn more about your creative fair-use rights at the Center for Social Media, they have a great Code of Best Practices in Fair-Use for Online Video which will tell you everything you need to know.<\/em><\/p>\nAnd just in case someone wondered if McIntosh was just saying that but was really profiting from the remix, which would contribute to his video being seen as not<\/em> fair use, he followed the above language with this:<\/p>\nA: Nope, I am making no money whatsoever off the video. There are no paid ads on my site, or on the video anywhere that I originally uploaded it. If you see an ad on or before \u201cBuffy vs Edward\u201d it is a re-post by someone other than me who is trying to make a quick buck off my work. I created this remix because I feel strongly about the issues raised (and obviously because I am a huge fan of <\/em>Buffy The Vampire Slayer). As with most creative fan works I made it out of love. I believe there should be somethings in our culture that are not monetized. Also, I really hate ads on online videos \u2013 a lot!<\/em><\/p>\nBecause McIntosh was in the realm of fair use, he was free to post his video on YouTube for anyone to see without fear of being sued.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Conclusion<\/span><\/h3>\nIs copyright law difficult and complex? Yes. Is there an overwhelming amount of information to know about the topic? Yes. Does having a cursory knowledge of copyright law make you a more informed digital citizen and a more responsible and ethical user of online and even traditional content? Yes. Technology has enabled composers to draw from such a wide range of content, with the amount of textual documents, images, videos, and audio clips at their fingertips surely in the billions. But again, with great resources comes great responsibility. Knowing copyright law is one of those responsibilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":6,"template":"","tags":[677,676,670,672,188,668,500,675,673,667,551,674,671,669],"chapters":[1846,1843],"content_type":[],"class_list":["post-263","article","type-article","status-publish","hentry","tag-academic-context","tag-assignment","tag-blogging","tag-composition","tag-copyright","tag-copyright-law","tag-ethics","tag-fair-use","tag-legal","tag-multimedia","tag-new-media","tag-public-domain","tag-remediation","tag-technology","chapters-information-has-value","chapters-information-literacy"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68746,"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/263\/revisions\/68746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"chapters","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapters?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingcommons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}