Copy Wrong
Seas of copyright issues were staring me in the face.
While the composition of
the film on corral reef destruction was sound,
the problems the video raised were troubling. The content of the film
relied on other films checked out from the public library. In order to
capture the video, the student used her own digital recorder and
recorded from her television screen, essentially pirating the
professionally produced documentaries for her own amateur use. Although
she cited her sources at the end of her edited piece, the question of
copyright infringement loomed heavily on my mind. Daniel Anderson
addresses this issue in the Meeks/Illyasova article:
Paying
attention to fair
use guidelines is a consequence of entering a different discourse, and
students will learn the rules of imposing another's intellectual
property into their own multimedia compositions in the same was that
they learned to incorporate quotations with attribution, citation, and
elaboration. By calling attention to the similarities between composing
texts and videos, Anderson hopes that students gain a better
understanding of the strategies available to them in any composing
process and a more critical framework for evaluating compositions. (11)
Anderson recognizes how
digital video can provide an opportunity for
instruction on the fair use of media in composition.
To address this problem
in more recent semesters, I have incorporated a
class lecture on fair use, copyright laws and the creative commons
license.
The strength of the
"Corral Reef" film, from a compositionist's
standpoint, was that the student had written a script for the piece
(essentially a traditional proposal argument, detailing the dangers of
coral reef destruction, which offered viable solutions that the general
viewer could implement to make a difference such as not touching the
reefs when vacationing, and proper waste disposal).
The script was edited in
as a voiceover read by a member of her family
because she "does not like the sound of her voice on video."
Rhetorically the piece accomplished the goals of the assignment, but I
worried about the method of acquisitioning copyrighted digital video,
and whether or not it could be legitimately considered fair use in
constructing a student documentary.
The second documentary
produced in this learning community demonstrated
the potential for student excellence in the realm of student-produced
multimedia texts. >>
Image by PugnoM