Friday, February 18, 2011

Funny or Die

I did not know much about Funny or Die before attending the three sessions with Mike and Chris Farah. One thing I did wonder though, is how the company, being comparatively small and internet based, was able to get the support and participation of so many celebrities. I thought it was interesting when Mike said that Funny or Die tends to be a publicity source or image changing outlet for many stars. Celebrities are willing to participate in the videos, just because they have the Funny or Die logo on them. This seems analogous to the way Hollywood works as a whole, where products are marketable to the degree they have the right name behind them. It also highlights the importance of online advertising. Today, as apparent from the many celebrities and politicians who have relied on the internet to do large portions of advertising, it seems that if you are not utilizing digital media to promote yourself or your product, you are falling behind.

Since the advent of digital media, there has been much debate over how to apply existing copyright law to new media technologies and/or how copyright law should evolve to address these issues. Copyright law, already impractical in its applications and problematic as it is, is even tougher to apply to digital entertainment. Policy that has tried to address this, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, has been, in my opinion, severely inadequate. The broad and highly interpretive language of policy, along with the difficulty of categorizing or containing digital media, makes the law often unhelpful and even inapplicable to cases of online infringement; which is especially precarious considering the abundance of infringement lawsuits taking place since the mid 1990s. These problems were illustrated by the confusion, seemingly of both the audience and Farah himself, during the discussion of copyright, parody, and what qualifies as fair use in Funny or Die videos. This type of confusion is one of the reasons for the abundance, complication, and duration of recent lawsuits between YouTube and Viacom, as well as NBC, and Google and Viacom. The rulings on these lawsuits promise to be essential to the relationship between producers and consumers of art and to creativity and media in general. Yet, although these lawsuits promise to be landmark, in my opinion, they are not likely to bring clarity to the relationship between property rights and online content because of the possibly inherently contradictory relationship between the two.

-Jennifer Hessler

No comments:

Post a Comment