In advance of tomorrow's lecture at Cogswell College by Daniel Nazer on copyright law and Fair Use, the organizers at the Bay Area college pose this copyright law scenario: "Could you put a real person--say Bill Gates--in a computer game? How about a comic book? In both cases, it would be risky to do so without permission from Gates. But what if you transformed Bill Gates into a half man/half worm creature? Strangely, you could probably do that without paying Gates a penny. This doesn't make much sense. Why should transforming Bill Gates into a worm creature make the difference? This weird rule is the result of a test from copyright law--transformation--colonizing other areas of the law." Titled "Transformation, Copyright, and the Right of Publicity in the Digital Age" the lecture promises to address issues surrounding the all important topic of fair use in this digital age where so information is freely passed around by so many. According to Dr. Alexander Sigman (Adjunct Professor of Digital Audio Technology and Digital Entrepreneurship), who is
event organizer & instructor of the course associated with the lecture series. at Cogswell , "In copyright law, something is more likely to be fair use if it somehow "transforms" the original work. Similarly, in right of publicity cases, courts are increasingly looking to whether the depiction of a celebrity is somehow "transformative."" Sigman says that in his lecture Nazer will argue that this transformation test is applied in a way that threatens free speech in the digital age.
Apollo at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco on November 16th at 7:30pm and again at 9:30pm.
