Copyright Laws: Fair Use

In class on Tuesday, Jason Hardin presented the class with information about Copyright Laws and Infringement, a lot of which I had only vague ideas about. To begin with, I didn't know it dated all the way back to 1790 or that Fair Use was the only means of defense a citizen had against Copyright Laws. We learned that Fair Use consisted of four factors of a situation that are considered in cases of Copyright Infringment; these are the amount of work copied, the motive for copying, the effect the copying has on the Rights holder, and the nature of the work being copied.

While there was a great deal of interesting information, presented to us in the form questions we'd each answer with our own clicker so it was anonymous, I found that the more interesting portion of the presentation involved the following opinion question: Are the RIAA (Music), MPAA (Motion Pictures), and ESA (Entertainment Software) disproportionately interested in file-sharing?

The answer for the most part was that they were disproportionately interested in file-sharing and Hardin mentioned that though this was an opinion question, for the most part it was a correct assumption. What we didn't pry further into because he had much more to show us was why we thought there was a disproportionate interest among these three companies.

Though the entertainment industry is a bit different from the tattoo industry, the same copyright laws affect both of them. I found an article written by a lawyer from New York named Marisa Kakoulas titled, 'The Tattoo Copyright Controversy'.

http://www.bmezine.com/news/guest/20031208.html

The article describes Kakoulas as she ventures to answer the question, 'Should Tattoos be Copyrighted?' She asks different people about their opinions and what they feel should be done. Not surprisingly, artists such as Pat Fish believe that a lawyer's work shouldn't get involved in anyway with a tattoo artist's work. However, another artist by the name of Elayne Angel got a pair of angel wings she did for a lawyer copyrighted because he insisted and she liked the idea.

The way that this ties back to the laws that we learned about in class is that these laws are beginning to affect more industries than ever. Fair Use, in my opinion, shouldn't still be the only means of defense against copyright infringement, especially when there are industries such as the tattoo industry where everything is such a free-for-all when it comes to whose work is whose.

That's all I have for now but I'll be writing more later.
- Adan