Teenagers require more education about IPR
Guest post by Maria Drabczyk, National Audiovisual Institute, Poland
Europeana Video Remix competition has just come to an end. It was a pilotconducted by the National Audiovisual Institute of Poland within the Europeana Awareness project. Its aim was to investigate whether teenagers, with a special focus on the Polish ones, know how to navigate through archives available online and how to re-use them. Do they see Europeana and related websites as a friendly and interesting environment? And last but not least, how much do they know about licences, Creative Commons included.
Credit: Bartosz Aziewicz, Kuba Kalcowski, Magdalena Ludwicka, CC BY-SA
Licence – what is that?
The results of the pilot competition as well as the questions asked by participants while it was running, proved that teenagers find juggling various types of licences difficult. They willingly access, search and creatively play with the content, but still are rather inattentive when it comes to taking into account legal terms of the archives’ re-use.
Lady Gaga or Coldplay tracks used as a background music – why not? It occurred quite often that authors distilled from their favourite artists’ creations without asking for their permission. The attraction of having a music hit included in one’s own work proved much stronger than maintaining legal correctness.
But the competition also threw up amazing stories that showed conscious and clever use of the archives is possible. For instance, one young artist started his remixing adventure by asking his favourite music band for permission to use their music in the background. He received a positive reply and based the whole remix on the music track. You can watch the video here.
Lessons learnt
Adolescents, very strongly linked to the online world, tend to voraciously explore its content, sometimes neglecting the general rules of use. Often, this is because they are not aware of these rules. A bigger focus on education on IPR, Creative Commons and public domain licences would be advisable when considering future actions targeted at young European adolescents. There is still a great deal of work to be done in order to build consciousness on IPR among the younger generation. Wrapping it all in engaging competitions or a workshop is the right way to go.
Results of the competition, as well as links to the winning remixes are available on the Europeana Video Remix website.
National Audiovisual Institute (NInA) is a Polish cultural institution in charge of digital preservation and dissemination of Polish audiovisual heritage. NInA acts as curator, producer and co-producer of important cultural events and a publisher of audiovisual and audio collections. The activity abroad and on the national level involves audiovisual co-productions as well as participation in networks and hosting events in the fields of new media education, digitisation, archiving, dissemination of audiovisual content and web culture.