Some University of Auckland students have recently created a short documentary about copyright called © Kiwiright which has been fairly popular in NZ internet circles. The documentary includes interviews with geek-about-town Juha and CFF founder Bronwyn, but in addition to this it also features a whole lot of Disney characters and a reasonably identifying commercial music track – I think this detracts from the message of the video overall (which I otherwise support and appreciate).

The video starts with a opening title informing the viewer that is not “associated with, authorized by” Disney and shouldn’t be confused with their products. In doing so it includes the classic Walt Disney Pictures opening.

From that point onward the video intersperses interviews with Disney characters edited to form sentances to support the editorial content of the video. It’s basically this that I think is unnecessary and mainly used for gimmick value and potentially to provoke a response from Disney.

If the included material actually contained relevant quotes to which the video responded or expanded upon then the usage would clearly be more defensable, but instead the clips are really just used to replace either a narrator or a protagonist.

The video ends with a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license notification, which is then essentially entering the selected copyright clips into the public domain with a CC license.

From a completely different angle, I also have a problem with the fact that the clips that have been used aren’t corrected to fit the aspect ratio. But that’s just a video editor pet peeve thing.

There are big problems with NZ copyright law, especially with the direction it has been heading with Section 92A and more recent relevations about the ACTA. I think that educating the public (and government) to the issues and problems is vital to finding laws that work for all parties. But I think that doing so with a video that is riff with copyright infringement is potentially counter-productive.