nomaded's little corner

Fair Use as demostrated by Disney characters

Wired has a blog post about a 10 minute short film that explains copyright law as it exists right now in the United States of America, and what is fair use. And of course, the only proper way of doing this is to use clips from various [Disney] films to define it all. The film came out of Stanford's Fair Use Project.

The film starts by defining copyright, and then goes onto describing what can and cannot be copyrighted. Next, it describes the original duration of a copyright, what that duration is as of today, and what the public domain is. Then, it talks about fair use, and finally the creators motivations for using Disney clips and characters in this short film.

As I said above, it's a short film, about 10 minutes long. It's quite educational on the subjects of copyright and fair use. Everyone should watch it and let their friends and family know about it.