by Melanie Feliciano

A year ago I started making video mash-ups after I discovered a tool called Clipnabber, which allows anyone to download a YouTube video. There are tons of copyrighted videos on YouTube, so it wasn’t clear to me if I was the criminal or if the person who uploaded “Legend,” “Clueless,” “The Matrix,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” etc, etc, was the criminal. Then I Stumbled Upon the following video on YouTube by the Media Education Foundation, which explains Copyright Law.

Apparently, the original proprietors of a Copyrighted work were allotted 14 years to make money on their work, but companies like Disney have extended this timeline to…

FOREVER!

And yet, this video uses snippets of Copyrighted Disney movies to make its point. This is when we get into Fair Use, which allows an artist/editor/DJ, etc to use a certain amount of copyrighted material in a way that does not de-value the original work. But the artist/editor/DJ should understand that Fair Use is not a law, it is only a legal defensible position.

As a journalist, I found this video extremely useful. As an artist, I thought it was reassuring, because now I know the video mash-ups I hope to exhibit at an art show, which are kind of like digital collages of Copyrighted material, are not violating the law.

As a result of YouTube and the Internet, a movement that increases sharing and improves collaboration has emerged: Creative Commons founded by Eric Saltzman. In the following video, he explains more about these licenses, which provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.

According to Eric Poettschacher, founder of Shapeshifters and a partner of Biscayne Writers, and who recently dined with Mr. Saltzman, “for internal layout purposes you may use snippets of copyrighted footage. But then you can’t use it for public showing. Basically it all depends on the owner of the footage what they allow you to do in case you want to show it on the Internet. Some are easy, some not so.”

This made my heart sink because like I said – I want to exhibit my mash-ups at an art show this December.

So I decided to open my eyes and see what others are doing. At the recent Miami Thinkers fundraiser, DJ and video artist Iris Beatrix exhibited all kinds of copyrighted material in her video mash-ups. She’s mad talented by the way…check it:

So what’s the conclusion? There is protection in numbers. We are entering a new culture of creativity in that the public domain is truly accessible to the public, artists don’t have to wait for social acceptance via a publisher or a gallery owner, and distribution is just a few clicks away.

I imagine when historians look back at this moment in time, at the turn of the 21st century, at the dawn of the Internet when the collective consciousness became tangible, they will call this period the Creative Renaissance. Can I copyright that term, I wonder? LOL!