An Experiment In Deconstructing Copyright – Part 10 – Professional Creative Reuse
We have seen recently that large companies (“The Man”) are just as likely to infringe copyright as the individual consumers being sued by large companies (sometimes the same large companies who are copyright infringers themselves). But unlike an individual, these companies have much more money in their coffers to have the problem swept under the rug.
In most public discussions of professional use of creators’ works, the focus has almost entirely been on the creator-creator relationship, not the creator-corporation relationship. This becomes extremely problematic because, obviously, the discussion becomes focused on only one side of the issue.
It may be useful to think of professional use of works in the following contexts:
- Incorporation of work into similar creative works. This differentiates between uses such as a work of visual art being used in another work of visual art and a work of visual art used to supplement a musical work (or even a computer program).
Interdisciplinary works become problematic in this context, particularly for media such as film. At that level, we would need to delve into the analysis of how much of the original work is used in the new work, and how much of the new work is composed of the original work. - Incorporation of work into dissimilar creative works. This is where something like the inclusion of a song in a video game should not be considered fair use. The line between similar and dissimilar creative works may be a fine one which gets us into trouble later on. We’ll see how well this holds up to scrutiny when I explore this in more detail later.
- Use of creative works for non-creative ends. Again, this may allow for many grey areas, but I’m thinking mainly of circumstances where creative works are used in businesses, such as art, music and software in offices.
- Use of creative works for the promotion of that work. More grey areas, but mostly the distinction that would allow a gallery to use images of a work to sell it.
What makes me uncomfortable with the categories I’ve listed above is they leave much room for abuse. I suspect I’ll need to revisit these concepts later, and that I’m not looking at it the right way.
Tags: copyright, creative reuse
