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Stefan,
Thank you for the copyright question. I was waiting for it to come up so
that I can answer this question.
Despite what any RIAA official or record industry executive will tell you,
it is not illegal to copy a copyrighted work. Let me type that again for
those that will not read the statement twice. It is NOT illegal to copy a
copyrighted work. Any statement contrary to that is incorrect.
It is illegal to DISTRIBUTE the copyrighted work. If you make a copy of a
copyrighted work for your own purposes, then it is NOT ILLEGAL. It is,
however, illegal for you to distribute that copyrighted work without the
permission of the copyright holder or the author (In the case of music this
would be the musician).
For this Animation Competition, I encourage all animators to find some means
of using original music. You can convert that favorite song to "elevator"
style music, re-record it using a keyboard, alter the song with software, or
use only a small protion of the original song. This is called "sampling" and
it's legal precedence for being considered a derivative work is well
documented in the music industry.
Also you might want to use a song that was recorded over 25 years ago. These
songs have acheived a "public domain" status and are available for you to
use in a "artistic" creation. One caveat is that the Sonny Bono Act may have
extended this to 35 or 50 years, but there is a legal challenge on this and
may not hold up to a constitutional question.
But having said all of that, your use of a copyrighted work in the music
video for this competition will not be "distributed." The work will be
viewed, at no reimbursement to the animators or the animation organizers,
during a private showing of privately held art work. The audio from a
copyright music selection will be adapted into an original work, a
animation, for the purposes of creating a derivative work and a creative
artistic impression in LEGO Bricks.
We will not be selling DVD's or video tapes and we will not be charging
admission. The popcorn might cost a few cents.
And yes the cell animation and computer-generated animation must be LEGO
related. Any inference otherwise is mistaken. The intent there was that some
animators might want to draw pictures of LEGO themes and products and
animate that. For example, several comic books and hand drawn mini-figs are
available from the LEGO Group. It might stike some animators fancy to
generate an animation based on that. Also is is quite popular now to video
tape a scene and process the video into a cartoon like look. There might be
some animators interested in this process and the purpose of this inclusion
was to encourage this in this competition.
So to return to the copyright question, I think we are covered somewhat
legally if the issue should arise.
If there are a large number of competition submissions that are copyright
free or have resolved individual copyright issues, then there might be a DVD
produced of the entries to this competition.
Todd
In lugnet.events.brickfest, Stefan van Zwam writes:
> Lugnet wouldn't let me quote all text in the message, so for the
> lugnet.animation people I will just post a link:
> http://www.brickfilms.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=473
>
> I'll echo the comments I posted at http://www.brickfilms.com/
>
> I kind of miss the way you're going to deal with copyrighted music. Are you
> going to pay the royalties for the showing?
>
> And it looks like the cell animation and computer animation don't have to be
> Lego-related. Is that what you intended?
>
> Otherwise, great competition!
>
> Yours wondering where to find time for a film,
>
> Stefan.
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