A very important video for artists. These ideas are the kinds of things that artists need to understand in order to stay relevant in the digital world.
Margaret Stewart, from Youtube, points out that digital rights holders that allow their work to be embedded, shared, and remixed experience tremendous growth in recognition and sales. The wedding video that she mentions resurrected Chris Brown’s career. People making derivative work off of your art is one of the best things that could happen to you.
If I were you, I would stop being so protective of copyright, and instead start encouraging people to download and share your images.
What do you think?
Great video and examples of how letting others ‘play’ with your video content can be a good thing. I personally, am all for video sharing – of course most of my videos are promotional. 🙂
I love the process that YouTube has put in place to allow choice and options on this – for Sony to be able to allow video spoofs of their music, but place ads and links to make it beneficial for them is truly a win-win. How this can work for the individual visual artist I’m not sure – but worth contemplating! Any ideas?
Tara
How it can work for individual artists? The same way it works for Sony. Allow people to share, embed, and otherwise create derivative works based on your work, and you can only benefit. Do you know Val’s Art Diary? She makes tons of videos and people make tons of videos in response to what she does. She’s created a community around her work, as has Natasha Wescoat.
The caveat, of course, is that there’s no guarantees that it will help you. It will only help if your work inspires people to play with it, to remix it, or to respond to it in some way. The band OK Go became a huge act because their first video (Here It Goes Again) went viral. They had a funny idea for their video and people responded to it.
I’m not aware of any painters who have gone viral in the sense that Chris Brown or OK Go did, but I think that’s more because artists aren’t really trying than because of any lack of opportunity. Matt Inman, a comic illustrator and pubilsher of TheOatmeal.com, has gone hugely viral, but his work isn’t really traditional.
The good thing is that there’s not really any down side to sharing your work and encouraging others to do the same.
obviously, as a found footage artist, i agree with you! i would recommend a creative commons rating rather than a copyright, always.
i also recommend the documentary “RIP: a remix manifesto”, for more on why fair use is so important.
This is a perfect example of how the Interweb, and our new technological eco system, thrives on inclusion and expansion, rather than exclusion and fear.
And isn’t TED amazing!
I am a ‘Struggling Artist’ who found a video on You Tube where the user had taken one of my pieces and used it in the video. I wasn’t that bothered, but the creator of derivative work had no credit at all, so I asked him if he would put a link or credit to me, the creator of the work. I did post a comment, accrediting myself, but that got deleted, twice and flagged as Spam. Then the user posted a series of very abusive messages to me, saying I was a POS.So what am I supposed to do?It seems too many people out there just think they can lift stuff off of Google and claim it as their own.I reported it as a Copyright Violation, and reported the abuse, but am not that hopeful of much happening.This is the reality: people will steal your stuff, then call you names if you ask for a credit.Why should I just take it?
And no, it’s not free advertising if you don’t get accreditation, nor would I want my art to be associated with this extremely abusive character.So all those You Tubers who think they can do what they like, imagine if you actually created something that makes you a little money, then someone just steals it and practically calls it their own. Would you be annoyed?
Exactly. I want to sell prints of my paintings but worry about people lifting the images off the web and using them to make $. Also a watermark is not that hard to change.
@MineField Great question. I wonder what every one else thinks about Youtube’s copyright rules?
Unfortunately, the video is private and I can’t play it.
Hi Shalev, I’ve updated the post with the public video. Thanks for the heads up!