As a cultural worker I have worked in many community media projects where issues of copyright continuously emerge.  Those who are new to the practice of community media may be questioning exactly what it refers to.  Community Media is the practice of a group of non-media experts from a specific community create a collaborative media project, be it a community radio station, a video collective, or a community blog.  Community media is always participatory in nature, and usually is centred around a certain issue.  The process of creating community media is a form of community development; strengthening partnerships and drawing on the popular knowledge of the community to centre itself on an issue and theme.  Through participating in the media making process codes are created, which can be drawn out and analyzed by the group of creators.  In particular, Community Video, also known as Participatory Video, has been used by social service organizations, community health centres, and other mainstream NGOs and charities as a form of community development across the world.

But a startling part of the process of Community Video has integrated practices such as remixing footage from other productions and mainstream music without paying for the copyrights.  This practice of remixing footage without permission is an essential part of folk culture, as popular culture is not seen as something with is private, but something that is public.  Often Community Video projects have artists in the collective who have other talents like music, or the ability to rack up some good b-roll footage.  Yet so many times clips from the news, or music from downloaded MP3s become integrated into Community Video Productions.  Personally, I think that this is perfectly fine and I don’t think that any music label or entertainment corporate conglomerate has the right to sue a grassroots group or NGO for a community not for profit production.  Unfortunately our current laws in North America make this practice illegal.

What is a Community Video production to do to avoid such liability?  There are two streams to respond to this conundrum; either take the risk of being fined and adapt a political stand on copyright issues on grounds of fair use, or embrace the world of online creative commons media and source your media from artists who are pro-sharing.  In the world of NGOs and community service organizations, “creative commons” is a term which is cloaked in mystery.  Many believe it is for radical media activists, yet it has finally become well accepted by mainstream academia.  Laurence Lessig, founder of CreativeCommons.org has just been reappointed at Harvard, after a hiatus at Standford.

Creative Commons transforms the way that we conceptualize media and sharing; allowing media makers to choose how they would like to share their media as opposed to protect it.  This allows artists to share their media for free with not-for-profit efforts, as well as allow their media to be altered and integrated into other projects as long is credit is given.  What results is an amazing media commons that can be used for a variety of Community Media projects, including Community Video production.  Really Creative Commons responds directly to this need for Community Video projects to have access to other media sources.  If Creative Commons is widely embraced by the public sector this puts pressure on the private sector to bend their media copyrights to be more open to this collective practice of video remixing.

A private media industry with Creative Commons policies means that Community Video projects could in the future borrow clips from the news, music from popular artists, and images around their issue to create more context and stronger quality to their collective videos.  Currently I am about to take on a project working with refugee youth facilitating a series of community video workshops.  I know that we will most likely be using Creative Commons licenses for the work we produce, and I will be encouraging the youth to search the internet for Creative Commons licensed media like music and stock video and photography to add depth to their videos.