Fair Use & Transformative Use & "Girl Talk"

Fair use, in my own words, allows others to use a limited amount of someone else’s work that is copyrighted without having to be granted the permission to do so. Most of fair use, especially while we are in college, seems to revolve around citing our work in papers, quoting correctly, giving credit in presentations when needed, etc. Most of the time, fair use is a player when someone is making an argument using research, in reports, and when teaching or presenting material. For something to be considered fair use, it will all depend on the purpose, character, nature, effect of use, and sample of the work.

This definition has many fine lines and can be confusing to determine if something is truly considered fair use or not. Transformative use, to me, is a quotation where you have changed the context and have altered the original enough to make it something brand new. The work must be raw, have a different meaning, contain a different insight, and use different information that the original to have changed substantially enough.

When looking at the artist “Girl Talk,” it is very questionable as to if their music falls into the fair use category. I personally think that in general copyright has gotten a little too strict and over regulated. If the purpose of the copyright laws were originally to encourage creativity, then to me they have been over regulated. I also disagree with the fact that the money if someone is sued does not even go to the artist, as they mentioned in the documentary. If the point is to protect the artist then that is where the money should go. I just think it is slightly over the top according to the documentary. This does not mean I don’t believe their shouldn’t be any kind of laws protecting copyrighted material, I just believe is shouldn’t be quite as strict.

My personal opinion of “Girl Talk” is that it is okay in my eyes. I think that if he has been able to dodge all lawsuits up until this point, that people are allowing it to be considered as fair use. I do believe that the music is different from the original by a decent amount in most cases, though again that line is very fine and easy to cross. When we look at vine, remakes on videos, and photoshopped images, these are all facing the same questions. In class we looked at a video about copyright that used Disney characters to make an argument and it was completely different than the original work. To me, “Girl Talk” is the same composition as the Disney video. He is just taking different segments and making it into one completely new work.