[cc-community] Cropping and derivation

Matthew J. Agnello matt.agnello at gmail.com
Thu Feb 21 12:56:27 EST 2008


Fred Benson wrote:
> This would present a significant challenge people making highly  
> conceptual work whose semantic meaning is sometimes purposely  
> obscured (or disconnected) from the accompanying image. While I see  
> the initial attraction, I do not think this is a good idea.

While I agree that it probably isn't a good idea to make re- 
contextualizing an image a hard and fast derivative work, there is a  
lot of theory to back up the fact that it creates new meaning. In  
film, for instance, there's a theory of editing that when two images  
are put side by side, whatever they might be, a third meaning is  
created in the "collision" of those images. This was first used in an  
interesting way in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin where he  
put violent images unconnected with the film's action next to citizens  
screaming to show the psychological state of the citizens as soldiers  
of the monarchy fired on them. You can put two images together to  
imply a lot of things neither image by itself would mean. You see this  
sort of a thing a lot in artsy films.

Now, to say that kind of re-use is not a derivative work is certainly  
crazy. There are plenty of modern day examples of this: editing Back  
to the Future into a trailer that makes Dr. Brown and Marty look  
gay[1], editing Mary Poppins into a horror movie trailer[2] -- each of  
these contains more than just recontextualizing images, but that's a  
big part of it. ROFLCats[3] is a good example of still images + text  
recontextualizing a work, and the captions completely remake the  
meaning.

The law currently considers ANY change to a moving image a derivative  
work but is less clear on still images. So there are a couple  
questions to answer: 1) Is still image + text different than moving  
image + moving image, or moving image + text? and 2) Should the law  
also treat them differently?

// Matt

[1] Brokeback to the Future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY
[2] Scary Mary Poppins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic
[3] ROFLCats: http://www.roflcats.com/


----------
Matt Agnello
http://www.hungryfilmmaker.com
< matt.agnello at gmail.com >



On Feb 21, 2008, at 9:21 AM, Fred Benenson wrote:

> This would present a significant challenge people making highly  
> conceptual work whose semantic meaning is sometimes purposely  
> obscured (or disconnected) from the accompanying image. While I see  
> the initial attraction, I do not think this is a good idea.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/attachments/20080221/96af793b/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/attachments/20080221/96af793b/attachment.bin 


More information about the cc-community mailing list