September 8, 2008, 12:32 am by Ian

The Farkas and Boynton reading resurfaced some latent fears I’ve had about copyright. I constantly create things. I write silly stories, think of crazy characters, and draw an abhorrent number of pictures and cartoons (mostly involving afro’d characters), and somewhere in the back of my mind as I write, draw, and create my little world full of a unique cast of characters, I worry whether or not I’m infringing on some obscure or—as oblivious as I am, sometimes—blatant copyright.

Copyright law’s many gray areas are very disquieting. What perturbs me most about copyright laws is that they usually fall under a “whoever got it first, has it” scenario. Take for instance a story idea I had using the Chekov’s Gun literary device as a basis. I wrote about two people finding a random gun on their coffee table. Seeing the gun, knowing about the literary device, I had the characters doing everything to avoid the inevitable in a self-referential comedy of errors. Now, I was proud of the story and the idea behind it, and as such was my hubris, I decided to Google “Chekov’s Gun” just to see what would not decidedly pop up. Well turns out, a year before I came up with the idea, someone had already made a short film titled “Chekov’s Gun” about a self-referential comedy of errors. According to copyright laws, the two entities would be viewed on the basis of the extent of originality of the idea, execution, and similarity. Meaning, since the overarching presence of Chekov’s Gun and self-referential comedy of errors was present and crucial in both ideas, and that the other person’s version came to fruition first, then that means that my version would violate copyright. And having that happen and knowing full well it could happen again is a frightening prospect which can in part stifle creativity.

The overbearing nature of copyrights sometimes stops me from going through with an idea or story because I’m afraid that it’ll violate the law in someway. Silly questions like “is this satire enough?” “do I have the right amount of parody and educational value to be safe?” arises from time to time. I wanted to do a faux-biopic about David Prowse (the man in the Darth Vader costume who for a time thought that his high-pitched Scottish accent would be menacing enough as Lord Vader’s voice), but I’m not entirely sure if my story would be conceived as something of satire and parody but rather trying to bank off the Star Wars brand.

Here is a  fun video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo) explaining fair use and copyright using movie clips from Disney movies. It’s ten minutes long, understandably choppy and disjointed, and you’ll probably get tired of Buzz Lightyear declaring “COPY!” every two seconds, but it’s a good video poking fun at chief copyright protection hooligan Disney.