Head Tale

A good article on the changing understanding of copyright in a non-commercial, remix-focused culture.

I mean, when I made my Hawaii montage video, I thought nothing of using a couple songs (a surf tune by the Ventures and a Beach Boys medley) to backdrop my video.

I don’t expect to make any money from my video and I am fine with a link popping up on the video’s page inviting viewers to buy one of these songs from iTunes.  At the same time, even though the Beach Boys and Ventures are way more well-known than anyone appearing in my family photos, I think we’re equal partners in these videos and it’s frustrating when a video can’t be uploaded at all because the music publisher has blocked any usage of their music at all (which just sends the intrepid mash-up artist away from YouTube to a site with fewer controls of this type.)

The beauty of Internet technology is that it is designed to route around any blockages.  In other words, once the bytes are out of the bottle, you can’t put them back in!