Steve Anderson

With fear, uncertainty and misinformation dominating the discourse of copyright and intellectual property, Fair Use has become one of the most vexing issues in today’s academic landscape. This day-long event at USC’s Annenberg Research Park addresses these issues head-on with a series of presentations and discussions with key players in the advancement and redefinition of fair use, coupled with a faculty showcase and hands-on workshops at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The goal of this event is to bring clarity to questions of fair use for scholars, students and educators working with copyrighted media for research, teaching and electronic publication.

Visiting presenters include Peter Jaszi, legal architect of the Center for Social Media's Best Practices in Fair Use guides, Eric Faden, creator of the viral Disney cutup A Fair(y) Use Tale, Eric Steuer, Creative Director of Creative Commons, who brought the world the remixable Wired CD, and Francesca Coppa, co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works.

We believe this event will facilitate some much-needed discussion of the state of contemporary Fair Use and where we should be setting our sights for the future. The event is free and open to the public. See complete schedule below.

Fair Use and the Future of the Commons
Monday October 27, 2008
Annenberg Research Park and Institute for Multimedia Literacy
746 W. Adams Blvd

Schedule

8:30 - 9:00am Coffee + registration

9:00 - 10:00am Keynote presentation
Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, American University

10:00 - 11:30am roundtable discussion:
the challenges of fair use
Moderator: Jennifer Urban, Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic / USC
Participants: Phillip J. Ethington, Center for Transformative Scholarship/USC;
Peter Starr, University of Southern California; Eric Faden, Bucknell University;
Virginia Kuhn, Institute for Multimedia Literacy / USC

11:30 - 11:45am break

11:45 - 12:45pm Panel discussion:
agents for change
Moderator: Holly Willis, Institute for Multimedia Literacy / USC
Participants: Francesca Coppa, Organization for Transformative Works/Muhlenberg
College; Eric Steuer, Creative Commons; Steve Anderson, Critical Commons/USC

12:45 - 1:30pm lunch

1:30 - 3:00pm fair use showcase
Marsha Kinder, Director of Labyrinth Project + Eric Faden, Bucknell University

3:15 - 4:45pm workshop: rip, mix + learn
Hands-on strategies for ripping, downloading, and converting video for classroom use

5:00 - 6:00pm Reception

This event is sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and Critical Commons with support from the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative

Posted by at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember to show up for tonight's Pecha Kucha extravaganza at the Annenberg Research Park (746 W. Adams Blvd.) at 7:00PM. The night is hosted by Howard Rodman and features an amazing lineup of artists and designers, including Mike Mills, Rebeca Méndez, Karin Fong, Hasan Elahi, Juan Devis, Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton. Twenty slides at twenty seconds each equals interactive-media-performance at its best.

Posted by at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Garnet Hertz's infamous Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot made a surprise appearance in CTCS 505: Survey of Interactive Media last night during a presentation by Critical Studies grad student Amelia Guimarin and IMD's own Sean Bouchard. The Roachbot was Hertz's Master's thesis project in the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, using a Madagascan hissing cockroach that controls a modified trackball to maneuver a three-wheeled robot. I for one would like to see some IMD thesis projects explore the possibilities of cockroach as CPU.

Posted by at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

They are calling it an emergency preparedness drill, but this sounds to me like the largest government sponsored ARG in history. It's not the most expensive ARG in history, because that would be the U.S. stock market. Whatever we call it, USC is playing its part in The Great Southern California ShakeOut, with a call for "victims" that has just been distributed. Volunteers will be adorned with fake blood and neck collars and asked to lie on Cromwell Field until they are "rescued" during the drill on November 13. Rumor has it that students from Pasadena's Art Center College of Design (which is slated to be reduced to a pile of rubble when the Big One hits - just take a look at this USGS-produced computer simulation) were enlisted to help design promotional materials for the event. Shouldn't the IMD community be getting a piece of the action to bump up the collaborative storytelling aspects of earthquake survival? Fake blood and neck collars? That is so George Romero. Come on, people. We're making an earthquake here!

Posted by at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The IML is looking for a few great students to participate in its upcoming Visions and Voices Pecha Kucha Nights October 17 and 18. What's a pecha kucha, you ask? Simple: 20 slides, onscreen for 20 seconds, presented to a live audience where visual design and performance skill determine the winner. The event begins October 17 with a group of local artists and designers presenting their pecha kuchas. The following day, students will receive a prompt at 10:00 a.m.; they'll have until 4:00 p.m. to create a 10-slide pecha kucha in response. Then they'll perform their pecha kuchas starting at 8:00 p.m. Two winners will be chosen by the audience; the first-place winner will receive an iPhone, second place scores an iPod. Sign up here: pechakucha1018@gmail.com. Info? hwillis[at]usc[dot]edu

Posted by at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Tuesday October 8, the Annenberg Research Park Colloquium series presents Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who will discuss the electronic journal MediaCommons, and preview a new book project titled Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy. Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English/Media Studies at Pomona College and founder and co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons.

The presentation starts at 11:00 AM in the Kerckhoff Living Room (734 W. Adams, between Figueroa and Hoover), followed by a discussion from 12:30-1:30 over lunch.

Posted by at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)