An interesting post at Balkinization poses some questions I’ve been wondering myself:
So what should you do in real life if you and your friends, inspired by Glee, want to make a mash-up, or a new music video for a popular song? Should you just leave this creativity to the professionals, or should you become dirty, rotten copyright violators?
Glee is a fun show that is doing a great job of encouraging kids to be creative and be themselves. Unfortunately, this poster is right in questioning what kind of message the show sends about acceptable boundaries of copyright. While the show is (I would assume) getting permission or paying royalties to mash songs up, this fact is invisible to the uninitiated viewer. I would not call it a bad thing — perhaps these are the types of creative copyright norms we want to create in our culture. It’s OK to quote (even extensively)!