RIP – The Death of the Public Domain

RIP: A Remix Manifesto talks about the fight between big companies fighting over intellectual property vs the individual remixes created by young people. Intellectual property in this documentary started with a focus on music. Whether or not remixes were infringing on the copyright by sampling the music. The film’s creator, Brett Gaylor, states that

1. Culture always builds on the past.
2. The past always tries to control the future.
3. Our future is becoming less free.
4. To build free societies you must limit the control of the past

Musicians and artists are constantly developing and building on artists before them. The problem lies in the laws of copyright. In the past, inventors could keep the rights to their materials for 14 years then their property would fall into the public domain, where anyone could copy/change the original materials and develop it into something new. Adam Ruins Everything on youtube does a great short video on this topic. Now, artists are suing and trying to keep their creative material to themselves. It is my belief that all this does is prevent culture from evolving naturally and developing new ideas.

A defence against the new copyright laws that is mentioned in RIP is Fair Use. Fair Use is a copyright law that allows small snippets to be used to make a point or fighting for the freedom of speech. New copyright laws in the US lasts for the lifetime of the original creator plus another 70 years. For corporations, the copyright lasts for roughly 90 years.

In addition to the movie, we learned a bit about open resources in education. I found a link to a resource about women suffragette’s in the US on OER, while we are not in the same country, it is still interesting to learn about.

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