tishaturk just posted the text of her talk from the recent IP/Gender Symposium on "Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property" (see additional links at her post). The whole event sounded really interesting, with a lot of great talks and discussion.

Tisha's presentation explored how narrative theory could contribute to understanding vidding as fair use in the context of copyright law. She argues that:


I like this insight, though perversely I can't help but wonder if there are counter-examples. Are all vids automatically transformative? ( cut for -- wait for it -- tl;dr as usual )

I certainly wouldn't argue that the latter genre of vids don't warrant protetction as fair use viz. the song, yet the case here for transformation seems significantly weaker. To assert de facto transformation of the song by sheer virtue of a novel juxtaposition with video clips feels a bit torturous if not disingenuous. And making the concept of "transformative" so elastic and all-encompassing for the purposes of legal advocacy surely dilutes its critical value: if virutally everything is transformative, then tranformativity itself becomes banal and uninteresting.

So basically I wonder if the strategic embrace of transformativeness and fair use has some pitfalls or potential unintended consequences. Not that I have any better suggestions! Just -- reservations which I'm still trying to tease out.

[In the meantime, my first ever poll is currently open on my Dreamwidth journal. I'm still proud that I restrained myself from making a poll about what kind of poll to make. Though I do kind of want to use the poll feature for a Garden of Forking Paths "vote on what happens next!" story.]