Uren Blog 8

I was surprised by the finding in Roy Export Co. Estab. of Vaduz v. Columbia Broadcasting Sys., Inc. in the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use case summaries. Apparently, a news program used less than 2% of a Chaplin film to accompany a story about Chaplin’s death and a court determined that it was not fair use. Contrast that with a news program using a full 12.5% of a video for a news story (also not fair use). In the CBS case, the judgment was qualitative: the court decided that the portion of film used was "substantial and part of the ‘heart’ of the film.” That kind of assessment muddies the waters. It’s much easier to work with hardline percentages rather than ad hoc arguments about the “heart” of a work.

As a researcher, I may run into problems with copyrighted material. At a conference, I used portions of a copyrighted comedy performance, maybe a full tenth of it. I didn’t worry about infringing on rights then, and I’d rather not worry about it now or later.

A tenant of my religion is active disbelief in intellectual property, because we hold that human psyches themselves are not the sole possessions of individuals, but are constituted by and indebted to a community. Therefore, we believe that works come to being through the activation by a socially constructed self of communally created art or knowledge. So, as a writer committed to my faith as well as my craft, I intend to openly antagonize the neoliberal project that seeks to attach privatized ownership and quantified value to all human works, including those which could advance human understanding and empathy.