Inspiration

Will you speak Creative Commons with me?

In my high school French class one of the activities for every unit was to create and perform a skit/play using the words from the unit. In addition to performing the skit live in class we also always had the option to perform our skit through video. I always opted for video, and after three years of producing videos, I eventually became very skilled.

While my films were a hit in all of the French classes. They were nevercirculated beyond the classroom, because I almost always violated copyright in some way. Or maybe the teacher did not know what the copyright policies were or she was not up to speed on educational fair use. It was as if she and the media specialist and the administration chose to ignore the problem and pretend I was not using copyrighted material in my films, or that somehow we had a blanket fair use.

Now, more than ever, the problem of fair-use and copyright protection in student productions cannot be ignored. When I was in high school from 1997-2000, I was working with two VCR's and occasionally I had access to a computer, but only to mix the sound. I had analog media on VHS or Hi-8 videotape.

Today's students have access to much more sophisticated and user friendly non-linear editing software applications. They also have an unprecedented amout of media in a digital format available at their fingertips. They can remix and mashup and use any type of media to create new works.

To the extent that we value these new forms (digital storytelling, mashups, zines and other such memes) of constructing meaning. We should be aware of fair-use, copyright and alternative versions of the strict copyright (and outdated) regime we live under. I have been overwhelmed by how difficult it is to track and follow all of these rules, and as a result I have not produced many videos since high school. I have created and collaborated on some fun stop-motion vids with my little brother in-law and I also have worked as a wedding videographer, but I have been
reatively blocked. For the purposes of this reflection, I will blame my creative wall on copyright.

Why do I think being a champion of fair-use and creative commons is important? Larry Lessig, as quoted in Lankshear and Knobel gives two crucial ponts with respect to using new media as a way to learn writing:

First, he argues that the way today’s young people in societies like our owncome to know their world is “by tinkering with the expression the world gives them in just the way that we [of earlier generations] came to know the world when we tinkered with its words’. To this Lessig adds the claim that this new writing needs the same freedoms as did the writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuryies. To do it well, he says, to understand how it works, to teach it, to develop it and to practice it require freedoms that are currently outlawed.

I can’t over turn traditional copyright, but in my media program I can advocate for creating multimedia works using resources in the creative commons, with share-alike attributes. Then those creations can be stored on my servers for future students to search and re-mix and re-appropriate and share again on a creative commons platform. This can extend beyond classroom creations and into extra-curricular activities.

I am guided by this vision:


Imagine a digital archive of free to use, share and remix band, choir and orchestra concerts from the school, or the recordings from a talent show. Essentially I want to create my own in house archive for students to create now works from the past. Not to forget all the resources available on http://archive.org

To some extent, I am afraid that my unfulfilled dreams of being a great film producer are being projected onto my media program. On the other hand, I feel like we are at a critical juncture in the policies that we as a society develop for the production/creation and distribution of creative works. In the spirit of intellectual freedom, I will champion critical consciousness and conversations about intellectual property concerns in the school. Parlez vous Creative Commons avec moi?