Commons Culture, Copyright, and Creativity

Ridolfo and Rife seem to be primarily concerned with the legality of using a picture of someone without their permission when it is not that person's picture. If the picture is an "orphan work," meaning no  one knows who created it, it is usually considered part of the commons and is able to be appropriated by whoever wants to appropriate it. Some would consider the picture of Maggie to be an orphan work since no one knows who took the photograph, but that line is blurred since the photo is of Maggie and she did not give permission for the school to use her picture. Maggie, however, does not actually have control over how the picture is used because she was not the one who took it and thus, it is not her picture despite being a picture of her.

A commons culture could be useful in ensuring creativity is not stifled by copyright law. It prevents major corporations from owning creative works that could potentially benefit society at large. Essentially, commons culture would help smaller artists to have their work distributed and to be able to use ideas that might otherwise have been copyrighted by major corporations. However, commons culture could harm people like Maggie whose pictures are take and appropriated/distributed without their permission.

If the average person cannot expect privacy while out in public, anyone can take a picture of them and appropriate it in any way they like, which could be damaging to someone's reputation and could be considered an invasion of privacy. Maggie was in a public area (a commons) and therefore could not expect privacy when her picture was taken (231). It is a reasonable statement that if you are out in public, you have to expect that someone taking your picture is a possibility. However, one might not expect a photo of them to be taken out of context and used by a major university for advertisement purposes. This could be damaging to one's ethos.

Maggie lost agency over her own image (233). It could be considered an orphan work because it is unknown who really took the picture, so the picture had a life of its own in a way. It was remixed and re-distributed on the university's website and in pamphlets without Maggie getting any sort of warning or credit. However, the school wasn't actually making money off the distribution of Maggie's picture, so it was not illegal.

Creative Commons was designed for people to control how they want their works to be appropriated by others (236). Creative Commons is meant to fight the creativity stifling nature of modern copyright law. The example is used of Disney taking public domain stories and turning them into copyrighted material so that no one else can appropriate them legally (237). This is a perfect example of how major corporations abuse copyright law and how commons culture could serve to reverse this abuse. With commons culture,  public domain works could not be made into any one or any corporation's copyrighted property.

The film Good Copy Bad Copy mentioned the idea of Creative Commons briefly. The site was described as a tool for artists to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intend it to carry. So basically people can put their creative works on Creative Commons and decide how they want other people to appropriate and distribute their work and in which ways they do not want their work appropriated. This is a great concept, but it falls a little flat when it comes to orphan works where no one is actually quite sure who created them.

"Creative commons licensing composes a commons with clearly marked boundaries defined by those who implement these licenses in their creations, and, subsequently, this defined commons offers artifacts that can be appropriated infinitely by others," but it is difficult to discern boundaries for commons outside of the creative commons licensing (239). Whether Maggie's picture was actually a part of the commons and was free to be appropriated by the university is a difficult decision to make, a decision I'm not sure was ever actually made. Ridolfo and Rife argue that copyright can function as a vehicle for strategic rhetorical use, and not simply as a pejorative protection against public use (241). They tend to argue for a commons culture, even though it could lead to people like Maggie losing autonomy over images of their selves.

As Good Copy Bad Copy mentioned, Creative commons is not necessarily against copyright. Copyright law has just become so expansive that it inhibits creativity. When someone writes a text book, for example, students do all sorts of things with their words. This is what the creators of textbooks expect to happen to their creative work. Copyright law protects text books from being completely copied and resold for profit, but the texts can be used, reused, and shared in all kinds of ways. The idea of creative commons is to apply the same idea to films, music, graphics, etc. using the idea of creative commons, artists can be making money that they would not have even made under traditional copyright law. However, it is a double edged sword because images taken of people without their permission could end up in the commons and be appropriated in ways they do not necessarily agree with. 

-Kayla Goldstein