Copyright & Creativity

The video “Copyright & Creativity” has been produced with the goal of making copyright accessible and compelling to creators and average Internet users, trying to demonstrate that it is not just a set of rules but an interesting world worth exploring. To inform the content of the script, we approached leading copyright experts and sent them a short questionnaire about the relationship between copyright, creativity and technology. The responses presented several common themes, which were distilled into a 483-word script.

The video was produced to accompany the launch of the platform www.copyrightuser.org

Credits

Produced by Bartolomeo Meletti
Creative Direction: Marco Bagni
Script: Bartolomeo Meletti, Marco Bagni
Storyboard / Design / Animation: Marco Bagni
Illustrations: Davide Bonazzi
Voice-Over: Nathan Revill
Music / SFX: Sarc:o
Academic Contributors: Maurizio Borghi, Ronan Deazley, Kris Erickson, Martin Kretschmer, Dinusha Mendis, Ruth Towse

Inspiration

We thought that the quotation ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’ – meaning that every new creation is based on something that has been created in the past – would have been an effective way to express these concepts. This metaphor is commonly referred to Newton, but apparently it was first attributed to Bernard of Chartres.
Even though copyright does not attach to the work of Newton as a theoretical physicist, it does apply to Newton’s Principia as a literary work. The first edition of this book was published in 1687, when copyright did not exist yet, and the second edition in 1713, only 3 years after the first-ever Copyright Act was introduced. In our view, all these elements create a nice story to introduce the mechanisms of copyright law to the public.