[Tim Wilson]

If I may summarize 🙂 Billy is a 16 year old student in France, looking for the best advice he can get about US colleges offering good programs in VFX and motion graphics. He’s also looking for schools that can connect students with strong internship programs.

He had written me about this offline, and I took my best guess in suggesting which forum he should ask this question in. You cats seem helpful and informed, so here we go.

Thanks,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Clicking on your screen name will take you to your posts and their replies, as well as any posts you’re mentioned in. Just that simple.

Moderation has nothing to do with time. It has everything to do with posts that add value to the life the forum. Moderation of new accounts is our single most important tool for keeping low-quality and spam posts to a minimum, and preserving the high signal of our communities.

Right now, your most frequent topic is about being moderated. Less of that, more of contributing questions or answers about professional creativity, and you’ll find moderation quickly lifted.

We agree that this is not how other forums operate. We are also obviously aware that other forums look and act differently. However, we look at results. Creative COW is more successful, with more traffic and more members, than the rest of industry forums combined. We even dwarf the support traffic at a number of vendors’ own sites. What we’re doing is working.

That said, we’re always open to refinement. One of our regular topics for discussion internally is the default position for “show newbie posts.”

Here’s the part that’s difficult for new members to relate to. Creative COW started in 2001. Many of our most frequent posters have been here for 10 years or more, and they found it frustrating to answer the same set of questions over and over…year after year.

I do understand your concern that your posts aren’t being seen by experienced people who can answer them, but that has not generally been our experience. The fact is that the majority of our senior members are happy to answer those questions, and many of the most active posters in our Beginner forums are also our most senior.

Again, default position for “show newbie posts” is something we continue to discuss internally as we try to optimize the experience of Creative COW for all of her hundreds of thousands of members, both new and veteran. I genuinely appreciate your perspective on this, and assure you that it will be taken into account.

I hope this helps, both for understanding WHY we do what we do, and HOW you can maximize the usefulness of the COW. Please don’t hesitate to ask any additional questions that may be able to help.

Best,

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Gol durn, not that I feel all that strongly about this, but I keep forgetting to add stuff. I was pretty sure about this, but I just looked it up — yup, the full speech in the National Archive. I can’t imagine that the rights holders don’t know about this, and I can’t imagine that the Archive is paying a licensing fee…although who knows?

Anyway, here’s the full text.

[Tim Wilson]

I meant to mention in the case of Dr. King that this is complicated by the fact that he died intestate and broke. He gave away everything along the way, and people like Harry Belafonte held fundraisers to provide for his kids.

Oversimplified in my retelling, but there are aspects to his rights management that are kinda vague.

But the general principles of Fair Use are still in full effect.

[Tim Wilson]

In general, yet another example of why people should never assume anything about Fair Use.

The headline of the article (both at HuffPo and the Washington Post where it originated) is misleading, though. The Fair Use considerations applied to this speech are EXACTLY the same as to any other work. Citations of PORTIONS are allowed in a variety of contexts, laid out in those four very simple standards, stated in plain language.

That is, there are many, many fair uses of the speech.

It’s just that there are virtually NONE in which its ENTIRETY is allowed. Not for this speech or ANY work — not the I Have A Dream speech, not for Madonna’s Like A Virgin video, not for an episode of Breaking Bad.

There are many books and recording collections that include the I Have A Dream speech, but the only legal ones are licensed. And to your point, Joe, I’m sure that the licensing terms are very different for school books than some other works.

But to your other point, I think they think that he gets the publicity he needs from excerpts, which encourage the licensing of whole works — the proceeds of which fund the ongoing efforts he began during his lifetime.

The pioneer of this approach was Einstein, who very carefully controlled the licensing of his image during his lifetime to fund the political causes he was committed to. This continues. For grins, look up “Einstein’s tongue” some time.

In the same way, there are a different set of Fair Use considerations for the visual RECORDING of the event. If YOU filmed the speech, you have some rights….but there are still rights that King’s estate has to his IMAGE. You can’t use YOUR recording any old way. An “I Have A Dream that all Dairy Queen drive throughs are open until midnight — and now it’s a dream come true!!!” commercial is probably a no-go. LOL

Our own Bevin Baddorf has written about this re Elvis Presley before. Elvis Presley Enterprises hold the rights to his IMAGE, as well as publishing rights to many of the songs…the RECORDINGS of which are held by Sony BMG…frequently seen in movies owned by MGM.

Now, it’s easy to figure that Elvis is a “branded” guy, and you’ll need to tread lightly, but there are many, many “branded” people beyond Einstein and King, including Chaplin, Marilyn, WC Fields, Mohammed Ali, and bunches of others.

Which should serve as a reminder that there are fair uses of copyrighted works, but no such thing as fair use for trademarks.

Again underscoring: there are many, many fair uses of the I Have A Dream speech, but part of fair use of any work is based on the amount of it you’re using. All of it? No.

[Tim Wilson]

The definition of Fair Use isn’t murky at all. There are only four points, laid out in layman’s terms in a few very short paragraphs of a court finding, written in layman’s terms, that you can read with a couple of clicks. Shouldn’t take you five minutes to find and read the entire thing.

The murky part is that people don’t want to pay for material that other people own. LOL

Not to pick on you personally, but you exactly accurately summarized a hundred threads on this issue in this forum: “These articles date back to the 1970s and would otherwise be collecting dust in their archives.”

The thing is: copyright is 75 years, or the life of the author plus 50 years. Since, for legal purposes, the author of the headline is the newspaper itself…and well, you can do the math.

It’s theirs. Pay for it, or don’t use it.

OR, as suggested elsewhere on the thread, make something up, using completely different words. Unless you need a picture of a specific headline in a specific newspaper, bust out your legally paid-for copy of Photoshop and get to work. I’ve done this myself. It’s harder than it sounds, but it’s not rocket science either.

Step One: WRITE A DIFFERENT HEADLINE, then mock in DIFFERENT TEXT than what was originally used, keeping in mind that you want to avoid plagiarism, which potentially causes even MORE trouble than infringement.

One of the other hard parts is that type wasn’t being set by computers in the 70s. Not like it was entirely by hand of course, but it’s so much harder than it sounds to recreate that organic feel with a computer. Again, not rocket science, but I guarantee that after you’ve done this twice, you’ll do whatever it takes to find the money to avoid doing it the third. LOL

But, as I replied to you in February,

Once you’ve asked for permission and they come back with a price, fair use is out the window. It’s a commercial transaction that you’re either going to participate in, or knowingly dodge.

The whole thread is full of really good advice, almost all of it better than mine. LOL

[Mark Raudonis] “Wait till you see the attorney’s fee. Now THAT will be unreasonable!”

The bad news is that the attorney’s fee will probably be *perfectly* reasonable. LOL The charge to defend a Fair Use case is astronomical, even for a small case. As the law states, the burden of proof is on YOU to prove that you didn’t infringe.

(The law also stipulates that you’re on the hook for THEIR court costs too.)

I really need to draw your attention to a post I made on another thread in April. I did some actual research(!!!) to find the current state of Fair Use in the courts, and I was shocked. I knew its scope had been narrowing, but outside a classroom, for all practical purposes, it barely exists anymore. There are entire books about the collapse of Fair Use, and this post includes links to some of the best of them.

Please check it out, not because I’m a genius who needs to be re-read on a regular basis…but because these authors are some of IP’s greatest experts who’ve written crisply and clearly, in language aimed at creative people, not lawyers, about how Fair Use is actually working in practice, right now.

It was completely different when we started in 2001. I’d like to think we’ve been able to do a thing or two more, but frankly, NOW, I’d be okay if the COW’s greatest legacy was to steer people clear of trying to fall back on Fair Use.

[Tim Wilson]

Sorry I missed this question at the time, Herb!

The sample is from an instrumental version of “The Last Time,” arranged and performed by The Andrew Oldham Orchestra.

Remember all those 101 Strings albums back in the 60s and early 70s? It was exactly like that…strings versions of Rolling Stones songs, in this case, done by their (then) manager and all-round music impresario/sociopath Andrew Loog Oldham — and I mean “sociopath” in the best possible way. There were certainly, uhm, “issues,” but music is the better because of him and his intensity. How intense? He took over managing the Stones when he was 19!

In general, though, The Verve’s case is certainly a lesson that even a contract won’t protect you from infringement claims if you step out of line with its terms.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] ” just remember, you better work on your social graces at the same time !”

So so so many punchlines….

[Tim Wilson]

Amith, if you mean that 1 GB of RAM is the total of what you have available, I think you are out of luck. As Alex points out, 2 GB is generally the minimum for the application itself — and your computer likely needs another 1 GB just to operate.

I just took a look at the solutions Alex recommended, and they all want at least 2, preferably 4 gigs.

Here’s the exception: if you’re working with small size files that don’t require much processing. This rules out anything HD, and probably anything MPEG, which requires lots of processing power to encode and decode.

Since Creative COW is oriented toward professional editing, where upwards of 100 GB of RAM is not uncommon, we may not be able to offer much more help than this.

Good luck!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Can you give me an example, Sebastian?