Question of the Month

Dear CMSI,

I’ve been playing with some new remix platforms, and I have a really funny video that does a mashup of similar scenes in three recent popular comedies, plus some old stuff from an educational film. I got the comedy stuff by breaking encryption on the DVDs. Am I in trouble? I can hardly wait to upload it to YouTube, but I don’t want to get busted.   Read more...

Dear CMSI,

I work as a documentary filmmaker and for my next shoot, we are filming a lot of scenes in a mall and inside a school. I am worried about all the copyrighted content that might be incidentally shown in the background. Read more...

Dear CMSI,

I teach media literacy in my 8th grade English class, and one of my assignments is to find examples of different media saying the same thing or carrying the same message. The students produce a multi-media work, and some of them are quite impressive. We’d like to showcase them at the school fair and on the school website, but the principal says that we’d be infringing copyright, since it’s outside the classroom. Read more...

Dear CMSI,

I am a librarian at a liberal arts college. Last week a young man who was hearing-disabled asked if we had a film he wanted to use for his chemistry project in captioned audiovisual format. Not only was it not captioned, I couldn’t find anywhere to buy a captioned version of it--it’s an older work.

Can I legally make a captioned copy for him? And can I keep a copy so someone else who’s hearing-disabled could use it too? Read more...

Dear CMSI,

I work for an online agricultural newsletter and we’re doing ongoing analysis and coverage of the aftermath of a tragic natural disaster that recently hit the Midwest. Our expertise is really in agricultural science, and we depend on other sites to do the breaking-news stuff. What we want to do is put that breaking news into context and explain its implications for the farming operations in the region and the national services they link up to. Read more...