[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.
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