Controversy over rights

JD Lasica introduced his Digital Media Revolution presentation on Saturday morning. It was broadly a protest about how the big players in the media world controlled the use of their content. He made a case for a simple process for home users and small educational projects to be able to obtain permission to use media. His attempts to obtain clearance to use clips of TV programmes, blockbuster movies and popular music in home movie projects had either fallen on deaf ears or been rejected. JD met with some informed questioning about copyright - particularly from those who felt the restrictions protected small artists as well as large corporations. He suggested that the big corporations would have to accept that in the digital world they would lose control of digitally available media.
A strong point was made by one of the delegates asking why anyone would want to use commercially produced material in a digital story when it was an opportunity to be creative and to produce original work.