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
movies, 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 in a movie is so large that using
images can interfere

with the original use of the image, 
and this means exceptions

that applied to classroom's 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.

[CC BY-SA
Paul-Olivier Dehaye]