Copyright and Remix Culture.

This week we are doing presentations about Remix culture, the class was divided up into three groups and we were each given a different subject to research and write a presentation about.

My group was group 2: We had to study remix culture and consider arguments about what would happen to remix culture if copyright laws were to change.

Personally, I did some research on mash up bands, such as girl talk --





I found out about this band because of the 'rip 2.0' article found on this website;

http://www.opensourcecinema.org/project/rip2.0

  After doing this, I started a little research about copyright infringement in general and I found out that agencies in the United States believe that over 30 percent of all software is illegally obtained with in the U.S.


I then went on to talk about how there is copyright free media on the web, but it's not as good as the things you can 'steal' from the professional artists that do it for a living. But while saying that, the royalty free media is also useful for flash projects.


With that being said, free media isn't all that bad. You can also get hold of copyright free sound effects, for use in small films or flash movies for example.

Film remixes such as; http://www.angryalien.com/

These are 30 second flash movies summarising blockbuster movies with the characters altered into the form of rabbits. This is the same as the mash up remixes. while this is a new movie, it's essentially copying the movie while adding a new twist on to it. No real new content, except for them being condensed into a very short version and into a vector based animation.


But then you have to think, as long as all of this content is being publish in a totally public forum, such as the internet and more specifically, youtube and similar mediums, where the creators of the media are not profiting from the remixes, but just doing it because they can, is that really a problem?


The Itallics above are an extract from my notes on the subject.