11 - Copyright [Massive Teaching]

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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