Over the past month I’ve realized something: For a organization (FIRST) that stresses professionalism, we look the other way when we violate copyright laws in our neat robot/team videos. The background music on 9/10 team videos, I have seen this year, is obviously copyrighted material.
Does anyone else find this an interesting contradiction?
I personally think that using a song in a video should be able to fall under fair use laws, especially for academic groups such as FIRST, and I think we could likely make a fairly good argument that our use of songs in our videos would fall under fair use.
Whether it would stand up in court, I’m not sure, but that is just how I feel about it.
I agree it is an interesting circumstance. That is why we, 1103, use only properly licensed or original works in our media. This is most commonly media released under Creative Commons or a similar license.
FIRST could care less about thing that they do not directly sanction.
If they aren’t judging it for an award they aren’t going to bother chasing teams around over such things because they have enough to do than worry about it.
I’m sorry, when I said “FIRST” I meant “FIRST teams.” As Mentors and Coaches it is our job to guide our students in the proper use of tools and information, is it not? We teach our students how to use power tools, programing languages, and other ‘tools’ properly. Most teams also have great business plans and are run in the model as a small corporation. I just find it troubling that we are not teaching our kids the appropriate use of the internet. We work and play under the banner of “gracious professionalism” in ‘real life,’ but I think we are dropping the ball when it comes to preparing our students to be good virtual citizens. Could you imagine what would happen to a small company that does what most FIRST teams do?
PS: even in education you cannot use anything anyway you want. There are specific rules for using copyrighted materials. For example: you may only use 10% or 30 seconds (whichever is smaller) of a single piece of music. Using an entire AC/DC song is not fair use even for educational purposes.
Intellectual Property laws are very misunderstood by the public and being a graphic artist (unofficially) it is a big deal to me and I spend alot of time on DA where it is a HUGE deal as I have alot of friends whos art is repeatedly stolen and posted by teens who’s only crime is overzealous appreciation of the work without realizing that they needed to ask permission to post it in the first place.
Even I’m guilty of it. One of my most recent works I posted has a background from a photo i found online and re filtered via Photoshop but there’s no way I can ever sell it since I used someone else’s work to enhance it.
I don’t believe there is any set amount for what is fair use. Theoretically a whole album could be used fair use, as could a whole book, a whole movie, and so on. It just becomes harder to justify. There aren’t really any numbers involved in fair use, it’s all a matter of how the judge interprets it and how he rules on it.
The numbers I threw out there are generally accepted as “rules of thumb” for fair use in an educational environment.