Copyright & Creativity

To this end, we approached leading copyright experts with a short questionnaire about the relationship between copyright, creativity and technology. Their responses revealed common themes: since the invention of the printing press, the development of new technologies has made copying more and more accurate, requiring copyright law to adapt to this evolution; in recent years, media has become more interactive, audiences are becoming users and creators at the same time; the main challenge for copyright law is to adjust to these rapid changes without losing its original function: to encourage learning and the spread of knowledge while preserving economic and moral rights of authors and creators. In other words, one of the most delicate goals of copyright is to strike a balance between protecting creative works and enabling their public use.
We felt the quotation "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" -- meaning that every new creation is based on something that has been created in the past -- was an effective way to illustrate these concepts. This metaphor is commonly credited to Newton, but it was apparently first attributed to Bernard of Chartres. Even though copyright does not attach to Newton's work as a theoretical physicist, it does attach to Newton's Principia as literary work. The first edition of Principia was published in 1687, when copyright did not yet exist, and the second edition in 1713, only a few years after the introduction of the first-ever Copyright Act, the Statute of Anne. In our view, these facts make a nice story to illustrate the mechanisms of copyright law to the public.
This video is part of the project copyrightuser.org/
Twitter: twitter.com/copyrightuser/
YouTube: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz6xWTmHa01b1C2i6kx82C0sJTtKQQiw7
CREDITS
Produced by Bartolomeo Meletti
Creative Direction: Marco Bagni
Script: Bartolomeo Meletti, Marco Bagni
Storyboard / Design / Animation: Marco Bagni
Illustrations: Davide Bonazzi
Voice-Over: Nathan Revill
Music / SFX: Sarc:o
Academic Contributors: Maurizio Borghi, Ronan Deazley, Kris Erickson, Martin Kretschmer, Dinusha Mendis, Ruth Towse