As a society, we want to encourage people to be creative
and inventive and to be able to make a living off it.
This means that there must be some level of protection
available for those creations, such as works of arts or inventions.
Otherwise, every photographer would be easily plagiarized and
would never see any reward for their job.
For an invention, this protection is not automatic.
One needs to obtain a patent.
For the work of art, this
intellectual property translates automatically into copyright.
Copyright is the right to reuse and distribute the work
or its image and is usually granted for a limited time.
The Mona Lisa, for instance, is too old, so there is no copyright on it.
Say Bob has the copyright of some work.
And Alice wants to use it.
Then Alice will have to ask for permission and Bob has two options.
Of course he can refuse or he can accept and possibly charge Alice for it.
In the US there are exceptions to this, generally called fair use.
This can apply in different context.
For instance the news, parody, or non-profit education.
This becomes very tricky in the context of moves, as some of the companies
distributing them, such as Coursera, are for
profit, in ways that are not exactly clear.
For instance, I do not intend to make
money off this course but Coursera somehow does.
So I have to be very careful with what I use.
The scale on movies is so large that using images can interfere with the original use
of the image, and this means exceptions that
apply to classroom use do not apply anymore.
It can also be very tricky to determine what
kind of use one can do of the materials.
If this figurine had been a figurine of Disney's Alice in Wonderland for
instance, Disney could have tried to argue that I have violated copyright law.
It's not even entirely clear that by using
these bricks I'm not in violation of that law.
In general, this is a completely new landscape and it's still to be defined.
Fortunately others have figured out ways to
simplify the system, for instance with creative commons.
If you create content and want to encourage others
to reuse it, it would be very wise for
you to look a little bit at creative commons
and try to pick a licensing scheme that you like.
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