Now that I have your attention–I don’t mean the rules of different blogs. I mean the rules being set down and enforced by big businesses trying to shut down the posting of clips from their movies or TV shows on free access sites.
I posted a clip from the movie Idiocracy in a comment here about a week ago. This was a part of the intro to the movie–a really funny part that includes the setup for the movie. A few days later I went to utube to find the clip again and it was blocked. I also, at one time, wanted to link to utubes of The Daily Show only to find out that Viacom frowns on that sort of thing.
I do think there need to be some kind of laws to protect creative people. If I ever do write that book I’ve been thinking about for 10 years I don’t want someone to steal my work. When a movie is copied and hundreds of copies are illegally sold, that should not be allowed.
But, the rules now being promoted are Stupid! for two (at least) reasons.
1) The Fair Use doctrine: By only posting clips–as opposed to the full movie–copyright was not infringed.
2) It’s free advertising: Some of the people who watched the clip from Idiocracy and liked what they saw will rent the movie, and tell their friends to do the same. Look at the example of Keith Olbermann. He had a moderately successful cable show–until people started posting and sharing his views on utube and blogs–now his ratings are better than ever and he’s even had a prime time network special. Because of the exposure that allowing fair use has brought to him KO is more popular than ever.
So, I guess I just had to get this out of my system. I think the dumbasses are shooting themselves in the foot (feet?).
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I think your point about Keith Olberaman is a good one. We need to have free flow of information–with attribution, of course.