I Fought the Youtube and the Youtube....Has Yet To Get Back to Me

A few weeks ago I finished editing a short video made in the name of my deep, deep comedy nerd tendencies. It's not much of an editing feat, and looking back it was more of a test of my determination than a test of my ability to compose in video. Still, I learned a ton about how to grind through detail oriented work in premiere like a boss, and what's more, I came away from the experience with a deeper understanding of the 3D capabilities in photoshop and the beautiful power of after effects. My next project will surely be directed at learning to use after effects to continue to expand my skills in video composition.

However, after uploading the final cut to YouTube I was disappointed to find that YouTube had blocked my video in 229 countries due to an automatic check for audio and video copyrighted material. But all hope was not lost! My video was still available for viewing in the following countries:

• Aland Islands
• American Samoa
• Aruba
• Bouvet Island
• Christmas Island
• Cocos Islands
• Guernsey
• Heard Island and Mcdonald Islands
• The Isle of Man
• Jersey
• Norfolk Island
• St. Barthelemy
• St. Martin
• South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
• South Sudan
• Svalbrd and Jan Mayen
• United States Minor Outlying Islands
• United States Virgin Islands

And I imagine that once South Sudan has time to form some copyright laws, I'll be blocked there as well. (Side note: Mcdonalds has a set of Islands? Wonder what kinds of food they serve there.)

I immediately looked through Youtube's policy to find out exactly how my video had been blocked, who was responsible for the copyright, and to figure out my options in challenging the block. In my search for answers I've learned a ton about how copyright policy operates, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share my thought process behind my actions. In the end I've chosen to challenge YouTube's block on the basis of fair use, but not before editing my video in order to meet the four factors of fair use policy. This is a risky decision, as it could get my video unblocked, but it could also give me a strike against my YouTube account (which continues to be a spot that I use for socializing and publishing content). However, if I'm going to teach my students about plagiarism, and if I am to continue remixing audio and visual material to feed my comedy fandom, I have to fight for my right to fair use.

The Case Against 

The case against me is clear. I used the full video of Taylor Dayne's "Tell It to My Heart," only adjusting it by switching out the heads of the backup dancers. Even worse, I used the entire audio, meaning that my video would compete with the original video for views and for publicity. While I don't foresee anyone coming to my page just to listen to the song, by posting the audio in its entirety I clearly am overstepping my right to fair use by using more content than necessary, after all, the joke only needs about a minute or two of the original song. Even after I make my proposed changes, it's going to take some convincing to keep me from falling into the category where I used a disproportionate amount of the copyrighted content for my purposes.

I could have been flagged for using copyrighted video, audio, or both, but I believe it was the audio that raised the red flag, since around seventy percent of the frames of video were edited in some shape or form. Again, this doesn't mean that I wasn't flagged for the copyrighted video content, as only the faces of the backup dancers were changed, but the audio is clearly far beyond the limits and was easily picked up.

The Case For


I've read a ton of legal information and stories from fellow YouTubers about challenging a blocked video, and from their stories, they are unblocked 99% of the time when arguing for fair use. However, I don't think it's as simple as  copy/pasting the law into a textbox, and I don't want it to be that simple. Furthermore, as I have already outlined, my video does infringe on two of the four factors of fair use. These factors are:

 1. The Transformative Factor
2. The Original Work (Fiction vs. Non-Fiction, Pub'd vs. Unpub'd)
3. The Amount of Content Used
4. The Effect on the Potential Market

These factors were found here, but were substantiated by several other sources. Basically these factors create a flexible law in order to handle the complexities of copyright policy. After seriously considering these factors, I admit that my original video does not pass the test, which is why before I challenge the copyright I'm going to make the following edits:

1. Cut the video into clips    

I believe this change substantially increases the chances that I'll be able to post my video on United States digi-space. Instead of using the full three minutes and forty seconds of the music video, I'm going to cut to the best video clips where the backup dancers are featured. This cuts down on the total content used, lessens the effect of my video on the audio or video market, and makes my video more transformative. This change also improves my product, as the lengthy music video can get boring after a while without edited content. This makes for a win/win in terms of my video.

2. Add another disclaimer at the start of the video

I made such a pretty 3D disclaimer at the end of the video, and I want to build a similar shot for the start of the video. Originally I wanted to start straight into the video, since it takes a good twenty seconds before the first hit of the joke, so instead of an opening slide I built a MTV-style opening credits, which was not only fun to do, but also informative. But alas, this move may have been too clever for it's own good, as this style of credits might lead a less savvy viewer to believe that I produced the original video instead of the joke version, which leads right back into the questions on the marketability of the song and putting the fair in fair use.

Disclaimers are little more than a show of good faith. Even a bold disclaimer does not fall directly under the four factors, making my efforts to include one rather trivial. But I believe an opening disclaimer demonstrates an increased transformative quality, as it demonstrates my work in the opening frames of the video instead of twenty-some seconds into the video.    

***

The craziest part of this whole thing has been learning about the connection between copyright policy and (wait for it....) comedy, as it seems like copyright policy has been especially lax when applied to comedic works. While in practice this refers less to the breadth and depth of comedic practice than to satire/parody specifically, it's always interesting to see where comedy has any kind of sturdy legal defense. These ideas also intersect nicely with the history of copyright as it refers to stand-up jokes, and the comedians that have been labeled as "joke-thieves."

In the end, looking to comedic practice not only informs the way I look at ethics and public discourse, but also the way I look at textual ownership. Easily, these two themes work together on a broad level, as one of the key redemptive elements of humor is that laughter divests the laugh(ter)er of ownership of his/her body. 

***

Now all I need is two hours of access to Premiere/Photoshop to finish off this movie. Here's to hoping Purdue has a computer lab I'll be able to use. Wish me luck.

Cheers. Clink.

Punching Pic found @

http://yesheis.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Why-all-the-hate-600.jpg

Image of Taylor Dayne found @

http://taylordayne3.homestead.com/files/SatisfiedCover.jpg 

Scientology, Pedagogy, and Critical Thinking via Auditing

I just finished reading a terribly long piece in The New Yorker on, of all things, Scientology. On the whole, the culture of TNY is one that I find attractive for it's obscure sense of humor, but on the whole not worth the lavish appeal to art for art's sake (dear god the story did not require 26 pages!). Ironically, this mirrors my view of Scientology, an organization with an interesting blend of empathy, methodology, and mistique, but on the whole too cloistered in it's own perspective to arrive anywhere truly interesting.

But I have no qualms with the believers of Scientology, in fact my point here is not to set them up as saviors or crazies, but instead to connect their language to a common principle found nestled in the warm embrace of pedagogy hope: the concept of auditing.

In the grand scheme of teaching, one goal that is increasingly brought to the defense of the humanities is the concept of critical thinking, and the way that we locate how this term works politically comes with a number of interesting consequences. Let us say, for example, that critical thinking can be defined as thinking that questions assumptions. Such a model can be (and is) used to defend the importance of an education in the humanities, or even education in general. However,

If education is power, is that power merely an adjustment to a specific set of social practices that enable our easier integration into the system? Or is does that power allow for the questioning and resistance of that very system? 

We could argue that a turn to critical thinking in many ways leads to the former, but in my opinion, the overall turn toward critical thinking is a turn to the latter, a turn to resistance. Indeed, the Texas GOP recognized this connection between critical thinking and resistance, and in their recent platform they argued that they opposed critical thinking as they believe it tends to focus on "behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

I'll write it again in case you missed it on the first pass:

THE TEXAS GOP 

OPPOSES

 CRITICAL THINKING  

And oh how the jokes came! Everyone, including the linked-to Forbes article discussing the platform, progressed through a predictable set of reactions. Some assessed the idea seriously to bolster the need for critical thinking, others made fun of the idea that, of all things, the beloved idea of critical thinking could ever come under attack. This incident demonstrated the important connection between the value of critical thinking and the value of education, not only as a guide for pedagogy, but in the public idea of what education is meant to imbue. 

This concept of critical thinking also gains and loses value because of it's role in eliding the idea of the standardized test. Critical thinking, some might say, is not a multiple choice question, it is not an definitive, measurable property given a rigorously structured stimuli. And so in this incongruity we arrive at both the idea that standardized tests are poor measures of education, and reciprocally, that critical thinking needs to be more thoroughly defined so that it might be made more easily measurable (or, some might argue, more efficiently bestowed on different students in different situations).

To this end, to define writing more thoroughly, Anne Berthoff came up with the concept of an audit of meaning, which has deep roots in the underlying logics of critical thinking. Berthoff writes:

Just as a bookkeeper has to account for income and expenditures in order to balance credits and debits, an audit of meanings would have to balance what one sentence has to say against what others seem to say…of course, audit also has to do with listening. In composing, you have to be an auditor in both senses: you have to listen on the inner dialogue, which is thinking, and you have to be able to balance the account of what you’ve been hearing against what is set down on paper. (47)

In this comparison, then, I'm aligning critical thinking with a constant audit of meaning, which is by no means the only way to conceive of critical thinking, but one which I believe is especially prevalent today.

Always be thinking!
Always be questioning!
Always be vigilant that your truth is not THE truth!

This language of auditing also plays out in Scientology, but to a different effect. The goal is to audit for emotional disturbance, and for memories that keep a person from being deemed "clear." The difference is that in Scientology there are two people, one playing the role of the auditor and the other playing the role of the audited, but in the ideal state of imbued critical thinking, these roles are both assigned to the individual. Despite this important distinction, the metaphor of the audit lies at the center of these two practices, and both, in some ways, play off the metaphor to a similar effect.

A pedagogical mode which seeks to provide critical thinking skills seeks to enable individuals to separate the false thought from those that are true, by measuring different accounts against one another for a varying set of qualities. Likewise, a Scientology-based audit might seek to free the audited subject from some polluting inner force.

The question is, why doe the auditing metaphor feel cromulent when used in the service of critical thinking but not in service of Scientology? It's because in Scientology we are audited and pedagogy we are presumed to audit ourselves. This model overlooks the ways

THE SELF IS OTHER

by which I mean that our minds and bodies act independently of our direct control. What happens when our students play out the dialogue of the auditor and audited in their mind and come to find that it doesn't add up? The same thing that a Scientology auditor would issue: a guess.

And not only a guess at that (!) but one that seeks to explain the gap, to explain the unknowable difference between knowledge and reality. In that cover-up, that extension that seeks to order, we lose the entire principle of critical thinking in the first place, which is to enable the resistance out the audited subject. The very discomfort we feel towards the idea of the audit of Scientology, I argue, is the very same discomfort we should take toward critical thinking, as both are undercut by the overwhelming desire to define and oppress the other.

And it is to this end I suggest, (quite facetiously) that perhaps the Texas GOP was right all along, that maybe there is something problematic about this thing we like to call critical thinking.

Cheers. Clink.

Back on the Blogging Wagon

On the Return to Blogging

I've had blogs, oh I've had blogs. One in particular was the top anti-panda blog 5 years running. But among all of the rants-blogs, thought-blogs, and single-class-blogs, I've never had a space that I could use responsibly to work through my ideas. This blog is yet another attempt at that idealistic balance between a work-space and a presentation space. Let us dream of a space where product meets production.


A Quick Statement to the New Blog

And so, new blog, you stare back at me with your empty lack of posts and clean white design with a look that says "Is it me? Am I to be the one blog that survives the others?" But you and I need to face the facts. Right now you are little more than the eleventh hamster in a lineage of ten dead hamsters. You are the trial-pet, the experimental goldfish. You are the fur burdened gerbil that, history tells us, will not survive 5 months under my ever-distracted gaze. That means you need to make it past October. Please let us make it past October.

On the Name/Design


On the one hand it fits me well. Potent Potables. It's a quirky way of going about the whole "rhetoric as a drug" thing without being too sure of itself. After all, it's rooted in a rarely appreciated joke from the depths of celebrity jeopardy. What's more, it builds nicely in line with one of my favorite Berthoff quotes, one that took a late night study session with my orals team to figure out.

But I can also see the inherent risk and cowardice in this move. Risk because naming one's blog in the name of a drinking metaphor based on a light joke doesn't exactly speak of professionalism. Cowardice because the title is not my invention, nor the tagline, meaning that I have worked to cordon myself off from criticism on both accounts. These conflicts come in addition to the problems of it's humorous appeal, which, as I have written about previously, has the dangerous tendency to bring on a level of assuredness of the worst degree: our irrational savior.

Design-wise, I like simple color palettes, so the white-on-black gets me there. I also like the narrow central column and picture of myself in such a surprised pose. I hate these bevels everywhere though, especially down that right sidebar. But even through all my attempts to mess with it in the design interface, there seems to be nothing I can do.

At the beginning I want this thing clean, like one of those giant paper tablecloths they use in mid-tier Italian restaurants, fully prepped for a horde of children to mar it's canvas with their four crayon toolkit.  

(Edit: I then added the background of scotch barrels. I'm not married to it as a theme, and it comes out a little too overtly, but in the end I think it makes it feel warmer. I'll keep it for now.)


Cheers. Clink.