Sunday, October 31, 2010

Thing #16 - YouTube

I, like lots of people, have been watching things from YouTube for years.  I've never uploaded a video to it, but I keep a long list of favorites under my account so I can easily re-find anything that I thought was interesting or funny.  I've seen the old Conan the Librarian video before, as well as the Introducing the Book one.  Here's one more bookish/librariany video that came up during one of my classes last year:




The whole point of using Disney for this is that they're one of the most rabid supporters of copyright law; in fact, the Disney company is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the ridiculous copyright laws we have today.  Every time Mickey Mouse comes close to losing his copyright protection, Disney starts lobbying like mad to get copyright extended another few decades; so far, they've already succeeded.  I mean, seriously: how many years has Walt Disney been dead, and nothing he ever made is in the public domain yet?  I can see protecting works and ideas during the creator's lifetime, and perhaps even for a short length of time after their death, but it's gotten to the point where it's the people who inherit the copyright from the deceased creator that are just capitalizing off of it for all it's worth, and it's a highly destructive cycle.  Anyway, long story short, this is a clever video that uses such short and varied snippets that they still fall under fair use. 

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